Goal/Insight/Strategy

Sonnet Insurance is the first fully online home and auto insurance provider in Canada. In a highly regulated industry with a lack of financial service innovation, Canadians have an apathetic attitude towards their providers and often feel like a number. Sonnet, a new brand, sought to change the narrative away from pessimistic undertones, to connect with Canadians on an emotional level. Agency OMD Canada’s “Bride” initiative harnessed the power of social media with an innovative strategy using uplifting creative to deliver brand awareness and engagements.

Sonnet stands for the central human truth of optimism, brought to life by optimistic and unique stories like “Bride,” an inspiring 60-second story of how this bride will not let a little rain ruin her big day or diminish her optimism.The primary goal was to increase engagement of the Sonnet brand to drive brand awareness, but the end result was a four time higher conversion rate than non-“Bride” related media.

The campaign ran for 35 days, and much like the agency’s innovative and industry transcending creative, its media strategy had to be just as prolific.

Target

Broad (English-speaking Canadians aged 18-34), but the approach of how the team reached them was highly targeted and relevant.

The Plan

The team designed a two-phased approach:

Phase 1 was an accelerated buy on Facebook, delivering a timely, targeted social video in tandem with a selectively chosen TV spot on entertainment’s biggest night of the year, the Oscars. The Oscars represent artistry and cultural commentary at its finest, the perfect space to debut “Bride.” Contextual/interest targeting surrounding the Oscars was used to ensure “Bride” was highly visible throughout its time in market, leveraging real-time marketing tactics that included popular themes of the night (awards, fashion, celebrities, etc.) delivering at scale mere minutes prior to the 60-second spot airing during peak AMA program time.

Phase 2 helped sustain momentum by pairing strategic audience segmentation across social media and programmatically delivered digital video in conjunction with strategic TV spot buys in contextually relevant programming. The research insights helped segment the audience into three main categories: life events, broad and conquest. This ensured users going through various life stages, those with buying intent and larger more scalable audiences were exposed to “Bride’s” story, while travelling down the purchase funnel across channels.

Data played a key role in the innovative strategy and ongoing optimizations. By leveraging both third-party purchase intent data and first party CRM data, the agency was able to build the life event audiences – based on key life moments, including intention to move and recently engaged (and similar). The team optimized against potential customers who received a quote, but had yet to purchase. As users were driven from social media to sonnet.ca, their progress down the path to purchase was tracked and modeled for execution across other media channels. This fully integrated, innovative strategy allowed the team to refine its audiences ensuring maximum relevancy, seamless targeting and new customers for Sonnet.

The Results

Not only did the agency over-deliver on driving social media engagements to build brand awareness, but it also drove site visitations and a significant number of new customers for Sonnet – with a four times higher quote to purchase conversion rate than any of its other media activity during that period.

-41 million impressions
-3 million video views
-2.85 million engagements
-128,000 clicks
-30,000 website visits
-20.41% social engagement rate (four times higher than the KPI benchmark)
-$0.04 social cost per engagement (100% decrease from the KPI benchmark)