July 21, 2015

Sainsbury's

Sainsbury’s have run their Active Kids campaign each year since 2005. The idea is that shoppers can earn vouchers which can be exchanged for items like sports equipment and cooking utensils, all part of promoting a healthy lifestyle for children. Yard Digital helped the supermarket extend the campaign’s reach by engaging influential family bloggers. Yard Digital discuss the project

The brief was relatively simple: to engage with parents, children and organisations to increase awareness of the Active Kids campaign.

Strategy

Yard Digital proposed reaching out to the UK’s most influential and prominent family bloggers—the perfect audience to advocate the campaign.

We had very specific criteria for selecting these bloggers:

• Whether the campaign was relevant to the current content on their blog
• Whether their kids were of the correct age for the Active Kids campaign
• Whether they had a strong social media presence
• Several other brand-specific metrics that were agreed with Sainsbury’s

These specific criteria ensured we only engaged with relevant, high quality bloggers who were delighted to get involved.

Once initial contact was made to discuss the campaign and gauge their interest in working together, the bloggers were encouraged to discuss the benefits of an active and healthy lifestyle with their readers. As they were already advocates of being active, they naturally agreed. We also offered them the opportunity to host a giveaway on their blog as part of the campaign.

Execution

Yard has developed scalable, effective outreach processes and strategies over several years, delivering hugely successful campaigns in the finance, retail and insurance industries. We create bespoke campaigns and processes for each new client to meet their specific requirements. To ensure that all our communications adhere to strict standards, all sites contacted are checked and double checked for suitability and, most importantly, all communications are completely transparent to our client.

The client owns all elements of the campaign: the contacts, the complete communication history and, most important of all, the relationships that have been built with influencers during our campaign. This is incredibly important for organisations like Sainsbury’s who regularly wish to reach out to individuals between campaigns.

All of our proposals and campaigns are created and delivered to protect the clients’ brand identity and message.

Result

The results for this campaign exceeded our expectations. Twenty of the UK’s most influential family blogs hosted the competition (with links) and wrote their own stories about why kids should be active. Add to this 31,508 entries—5,501 comments on blogs, 24,748 Tweets and 298 picture shares—and you have a hugely cost-effective outreach campaign. Sainsbury’s were incredibly happy with the result.