The iconic Australian plumbing and bathroom brand’s chief marketer reveals how collaborating with social content platform 20FOUR boosted customer engagement
Research shows Australians are a little too lax and uninformed when it comes to hot water and plumbing. So plumbing and bathroom product supplier, Reece, decided it was time to get creative and boost customer awareness and engagement in a fresh and dynamic way.
As one of Australia’s most established brands, Reece wanted to drive traffic to its FAQ and information website, YourHotWater.com.au, in order to boost awareness of sustainable water solutions around the home for consumers.
While the website contained informative and practical tips about sustainability and hot water systems, Reece’s research showed people were largely uninformed and only acted when there is a breakdown and it’s usually too late.
“The website was a new concept for us. The aim was to be the authority for everything hot water for Australians, as well as help connect people who are having issues with their hot water to plumbers in their area who can help them,” Reece Group CMO, Adrian Palumbo, told CMO. “While we were using AdWords and our customers also were aware of the site, we wanted to find a new way to reach more customers and raise awareness.”
At the same time, while the cost and power savings of using an energy-efficient hot water system are considerable, consumers had a general lack of understanding around the fact that even cutting a few minutes off shower times could mean substantial savings per year for a family.
In order to build strong brand awareness of the site, Reece collaborated with sports social content platform, 20FOUR, to launch the ‘Shower Thoughts’ marketing campaign.
“We thought if we could use football season and engage with that audience in a creative and different way, it would be great for Reece, even though it was a bit of a risk to try new things as we were just establishing the website which was different to our brand,” Palumbo explained. “Social media engagement had already been performing very well for our business, so we were also confident this new campaign would continue to be part of that great engagement for us, while reaching new customers.”
Featuring athletes such as Billy Slater, Alex Rance and Dyson Heppell, the ‘Shower Thoughts’ video series and social media campaign combined the premise that life’s biggest questions are often pondered in the shower, with the logic that these thoughts should also focus on the hot water we are enjoying at the time. The athletes created a total of 15, 40-second videos published on YourHotWater.com.au and Reece posted two videos per athlete on Facebook and Instagram.
20FOUR also posted two videos per athlete on Facebook and the athletes also leveraged their following by each sharing one video post natively and two shared posts from the Reece and 20FOUR accounts. Slater and Heppell posted on Facebook while Rance posted on Instagram.
Towards the end of each content piece, a thought or question was presented that directly related to the FAQ section of YourHotWater.com.au, keeping with the overall irreverent and quirky nature of the content. Each piece then finished with a branded end-board encouraging users to check out the website for more.
According to Palumbo, for Reece, the partnership took athletes out of the locker room and into a forum that households could relate to, especially when it comes to making decisions about renovating and repairing their bathrooms.
“We also put a lot of trust back with 20FOUR in the concept creation create something really engaging and positive, and pleased with the talent they offered,” he said. “20FOUR did a lot of heavy lifting, and provided great feedback mechanism and the ability to measure things which was really positive.
“We were also pretty lucky that all of the players featured in the campaign were involved heavily in the football season, with two actually being part of the Premiership winning team.”
Since its launch only a few months ago, the campaign has generated more than 800,000 views, 15,654 total interactions and over 12,000 website visits.
The breakdown of engagement by athlete also showed a positive influence and the power of their individual fan bases. Billy Slater topped engagement with 77,143 video views and 1,782 likes, comments, shares, followed by Alex Rance with 45,331 video views and 754 likes, comments, shares.
“The social media engagement was higher than expected, in fact, it was the highest we’ve experience in the history of our social media marketing,” Palumbo said. “We felt it also gave us great brand equity, particularly for our plumbing customers as the football campaign really resonated well with them and the target market was a good fit. We also felt the campaign fit the criteria in bringing the right people to the website and engaging with the site’s information offerings.”
Reece is now looking at future creative collaborations to raise awareness about ‘smart toilets’ in order to present the product in a fun and engaging way and take the stigma away from it. It has already been featured on The Block, another sponsorship partner.
“We’re now selling this new product and it is going better than we expected,” Palumbo added. “We also think we can use a social content platform to further boost engagement of this new product in the similar way we did with the hot water campaign.”
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