Tune in and ‘Make Something Amazing!’

Our high-performing customer acquisition campaign for The Craft Store.

The challenge

The Craft Store is the UK’s No. 1 TV shopping channel for arts, hobbies and crafts. The channel broadcasts live programmes for fourteen hours of every day from its own TV studio, with a team of established and entertaining personality presenters. Viewers watch the shows, which span everyone’s favourite crafting categories, from crochet and knitting, to painting and paper-craft - and then order the products they need to get crafting at home. It makes for a compelling proposition. However the brand had relied heavily on existing customers and word-of-mouth rather than new customer acquisition, and so despite a huge and growing audience of younger crafters in the UK, the majority had never heard of them.

The pitch

A range of external digital and creative agencies were invited to pitch for The Craft Store’s global business. To succeed in attracting new crafters, we needed to inspire their imaginations at a time when Covid and lockdowns were wreaking havoc on everyday life. Our pitch-winning work acknowledged that there are significant mental health and mindfulness benefits in creative self-expression. Producing something tangible and of personal value helps people to feel more energised and happy.

Developing the first social campaign

Focusing on a highly targeted Facebook campaign, which we knew would provide a cost-effective platform to generate new leads, our starting point was to analyse The Craft Store’s web analytics to identify the top-performing product themes. This provided data-driven inspiration for our creative idea.

‘Make Something Amazing’ is a PPC awareness campaign, featuring a series of Facebook & Instagram In Feed Video posts & stories, each showing different creatures being crafted from scratch. A high value prize draw to win one of the creature kits provides the inspiration to click through and sign up. Designed as little bursts of quirky, delightful, entertainment, these ads – together with the eCRM campaign designed to support them – have together performed beautifully.

Campaign performance

Important KPIs were ensuring a healthy CPA and strong engagement with the ad creatives - people liking, commenting and sharing the ads to achieve 'free' awareness beyond paid. A retargeting campaign featuring static images and carousel ads, segmented by content viewed was also developed to re-engage with brand-aware audiences and drive sign

The campaigns achieved strong performance across the board, with all metrics significantly exceeding industry benchmarks. In just 3.5 weeks our campaigns reached +160,000 crafters and generated +2000 targeted leads. Double the figure that The Craft Store had tasked us with hitting. And despite our focus being awareness and ‘new names’, the campaigns also generated £1000s in directly attributable sales.

Key Learnings

This was our first campaign for a new client and we were keen to identify ways to tweak both our ad strategy and our creative to improve performance even further for next time. Armed with these key learnings, we’re planning a roadmap of profile-raising lead-gen campaigns that will build upon The Craft Store’s brand position as a catalyst for inspiring creativity, supported by a powerful and engaged crafting community. Watch this space for more info!