Calgary home and garden shop reaps robust awareness with RainBarrel

The Challenge

Golden Acre, a Calgary-based home and garden shop has been serving local aspiring gardeners with quality professional services since 1967. Providing everything from home and outdoor plants, to seeds, pest control and yard decor, Golden Acre wanted to sow interest around Calgary about their assortment of offerings. In hopes of finding, and better understanding the needs of their target plant-preneurs, Golden Acre came to us with a request to help manage their marketing efforts, with in-market audience research and targeted ads to help boost Christmas sales on their seasonal products. On a mission to make the joys of gardening accessible for all, Golden Acre needed to familiarize themselves with their target customers in Calgary.

With LoKnow’s know-how, we ran an awareness digital advertising campaign for Golden Acre, tracking the effects of their ad impressions, Search reach and overall site views. While their previous strategy relied solely on Search with limited tracking and insights, LoKnow was able to demonstrate deep-rooted insights with our Live Reporting Dashboards, which kept them up to date on the campaign progress, and brought our attention to aspects we could tweak. With the help of custom RainBarrel audiences and the Hyper Display channel, we set out to learn more about Golden Acre’s ideal audience so we could strategize how to serve relevant ads in locations where compatible viewers would be more likely to convert.

The Strategy

In order to achieve Golden Acre’s primary objective to increase awareness amongst Calgarians, we first needed to weed out any unqualified audiences, and find out who demonstrated the most interest and intent around planting and gardening. By using RainBarrel, we were able to draw a geofence around the Calgary area and profile devices according to their intrigue and involvement with gardening. By pinpointing where to find Golden Acre’s target audience in Calgary, we could start formulating how to take advantage of these areas to reach viewers in a more competitive way, and promote traffic to Golden Acre’s website and storefront.

Once we knew where to tap into Golden Acres’ ideal customers, we introduced the next layer of our strategy – our Hyper Display channel. After using Point of Interest (POI) targeting, we used the data collected from RainBarrel to target the correct audience with compelling promotional messaging and creative for Golden Acre’s Christmas Campaign. By incorporating Hyper Display and serving display ads to these devices, we were able to plant awareness among the best qualified audiences. We added an additional channel, Search, which allowed us to monitor related home and garden Search inquiries, adding another layer of precise targeting. By generating attention around their seasonal offerings, we were able to graft together the awareness stage of Golden Acre’s sales funnel with the conversion stage, which had previously seen a disconnect. This helped tighten Golden Acre’s marketing efforts, by increasing their potential audience base and targeting potential customers who were likely to have a need for their products, priming them for the consideration stage.

After the holiday campaign concluded, we continued to run our Search channel in order to maintain a share of voice in-market. We were able to continue collecting data on the type of visitors that landed on Golden Acre’s site, identify the seasonal product demand and help build up their brand advocate audiences to utilize for future conversion campaigns.

The Conclusion

Our approach with POI targeting proved to be even more successful than our website retargeting method, highlighting the benefits of using the proprietary capabilities of RainBarrel to locate the most qualified audience locations in the city. Golden Acre was thrilled to discover and understand where their evergreen markets resided, and how to reach them. By using an intuitive mix in our strategy, we were able to reap results that proved to Golden Acre how effectively their marketing dollars had been utilized. By propagating our newfound insights, we effectively helped boost awareness of Golden Acre in Calgary, which resulted in a successful Christmas campaign. As we keep working with Golden Acre, we’re looking forward to finding a new customized strategy for their next need, and mixing our tech and channels for an approach individual to them.