The Background

Spotlight is a family-owned and operated Australian business, plus a household name and market leader in fabric, craft and homewares.

From humble beginnings as a stall at Melbourne’s Queen Victoria Market in the early 1970s, Spotlight now has a global footprint, operating online and in-store across four countries. Plus, their VIP loyalty program is one of Australia’s biggest, boasting over five million members.‍

Anaconda, one of the brands under the Spotlight Retail Group (SRG), was founded in 2004. Their vision has always been to become Australia’s largest camping and adventure superstore. 

To date, they have the largest outdoor gear range available with a loyalty program membership of over two million.‍We’ve been working with Spotlight and Anaconda since 2013 and 2015 respectively, and we’re currently the social media agency of choice for both brands.

The Problem

Spotlight and Anaconda entered the market before digital was even an option for businesses. That meant the majority of their marketing budgets were funnelled towards traditional channels, such as TVC and catalogue advertising.‍

And once digital came along, the marketing landscape became even more challenging for these brands to navigate. The idea of shifting budgets away from tried-and-tested marketing efforts seemed risky, and the SRG needed an expert pair-of-hands to prove that digital would be key to their ongoing success.

That’s where we came in.

The Solution

TP joined forces with the SRG to help these brands step into the digital age with confidence. Over the past seven years, we’ve transformed the social strategy across both brands to stay ahead of the pack and capitalise on emerging digital trends.‍

Along the way, we’ve run countless tests comparing social against traditional channels to show that digital has made a meaningful impact on both brand’s bottom line (and complemented offline activity, too). Take this example: to support a TVC running in the Sydney Metro Area, we ran a social campaign that generated a 150x more cost-effective CPM.‍

Our biggest contribution has been offering new opportunities to segment both brand’s engaged loyalty members in ways only possible through digital. Instead of segmenting loyalty members of Spotlight (5 million) and Anaconda (2 million) by tiered groups (such as Gold, Silver and Bronze members), we’ve opened the door to more granular sub-segments based on purchasing habits.‍

As a result, we’ve used digital to harness the value of SRG’s loyalty program members and deliver a level of targeting far superior to traditional advertising. Using our TP.Local proprietary tech, we’ve run hyper-local, targeted ads at scale for both brands. Plus, we’ve been able to attribute conversions to digital campaigns, meaning SRG can clearly measure and see their return-on-investment.‍

And as we move towards the ‘post-cookies’ age of 2023, using this first-party data to create personalised targeted campaigns (as we’ve done with SRG) is going to be a necessity for more brands who want to succeed.

The Results

We’ve helped SRG to boost their uptake of digital, hold their marketing budgets accountable for performance, plus improved directly attributed revenue.‍

By showing the potential of digital to boost SRG’s bottom line during our partnership, we’ve enabled a shift in budgets from traditional to social channels. Now, both Spotlight and Anaconda are spending 100x more on social advertising compared to seven years ago.‍

We’ve equipped both brands with best-in-class technical social foundations to bolster their social advertising, including:

– Pixel Tracking and Event Set Up

– Product Catalogue Set Up and Optimisation (with Digital catalogue ads achieving an average return-on-ad spend of 71X)

– Custom Audience Integrations (driving, on average, a 99X return-on-investment)

– Manual Offline Conversions Integration (boosting measurable return by 1033% in the first month of tracking alone)

Best of all, we’ve transformed the role of social from a community building platform to a competitive sales channel (now delivering a 41:1* return on every dollar spent).

Let’s look at some results from both brands in more detail:

Spotlight’s Make It Month Results‍

Using our TP.Local proprietary tech, we delivered a series of hyper-local social ads as part of Spotlight’s Make it Month campaign.‍

TP created Custom Audiences based on Spotlight’s VIP loyalty members, using A/B creative testing and auto-optimisation to boost results across 24 of their best and 24 of their lowest performing stores.‍

The result? This campaign boosted total offline ROAS of 24.60x, with some of the strongest results seen from Spotlight’s lowest performing stores.

Now, Spotlight are leveraging our tech to drive consumers in-store (particularly supporting some of their lower performing locations).

Anaconda x Facebook Success Story‍

To cut through the noise in the busy winter sales season, we partnered with Facebook to deliver dynamic social ads that boosted online and offline sales for Anaconda.‍

TP created Custom Audiences based on Anaconda’s Adventure Club members to attribute offline sales to online activity using the Facebook pixel.‍

The result? During the sale period, we generated an uplift of 16.8x in incremental offline sales plus a 17.9x return on ad spend for Anaconda.

*Spotlight, Q4 2020‍