We built a solution to make the shopping experience easier for consumers, by tuning into the signals that they were sending us in real time! We used multiple sources of listening tools to identify what consumers were doing and saying as they shopped.

Then we became the brand that solved consumer’s pain points by providing a better shopping experience. We continuously provided consumers with solutions where our competitors fell short and we helped improve their shopping experience. As such, the message combinations were almost limitless – for each consumer’s online shopping issue can be matched with a category and product.

For the 2019 Holiday season, both retailers and consumers had a common enemy: lack of time. Black Friday was on November 28th, a week later than previous years. This meant that retailers, including Sport Chek, Canada's leading sports retailer, had one less week to make their sales during the critical moment of the year.

Because Black Friday was a week later than previous years, consumers relying on Black Friday deals had to be more patient for their Holiday purchases. Consumer expectations were high, and their patience was running low. There were a lot of consumers to please!

Although consumers love the deep discounts that Black Friday has to offer, the actual shopping moment is in fact annoying. Among others, there are big crowds of people, parking nightmares, limited inventory problems, long line-ups at the cash, the list goes on! A study found that 86% of consumers rank their unpleasant holiday shopping experience at the same level as “having a root canal”.

This is also true for online: desired products can quickly go out of stock, retailers’ website crashes during key shopping moments and various shipping as well as returning issues are very common.

In today’s digital age, consumers are more and more vocal about these frustrations and they do not hesitate to voice their negative experiences on various social media platforms. On key shopping days such as Black Friday weekend, consumers are even more present online and call out retailers whenever they are experiencing shopping difficulties.

We became the brand that solved consumer’s pain points by providing a better shopping experience during this hectic sales moment. A little like Santa’s helpers for consumers.

We found the consumer love. Consumers tell us what the hottest products are through their search and navigation habits. Using real-time search queries from Google and our own website search bar, we identified the most sought out products through real-time analytics. We coupled this knowledge with an inventory API to ensure we had the products in-stock. Finally, we shifted media focus to these hot products through the ads we pushed to market. This entire process took less than 2 hours!

We also found the consumer hate, we tuned into the pain points that consumers were voicing through social platforms. When consumers had a poor experience with our competitors, we provided them with an opportunistic solution to fix their dissatisfaction.

We opened our ears to consumers' shopping experience in many different ways:

Using the custom-built Google Trend Queries tools and our own website search tool, we identified products that were surprisingly popular. Using TweeterDeck, a social listening tool, we identified consumers pain point with our competitors.

The strategy was simple: we zeroed in on a consumer pain point, we matched it with a Sport Chek offer and pushed that offer to market…in a real-time manner. In fact, the combination of both quantitative data based on products demand and qualitative data based on social listening allowed us to craft relevant ads that benefit both the consumers and our bottom-line - a win-win situation.

By doing so, we increased our sales and solved all types of problems for consumers: oversold products by our competitors, consumers looking for hot products, competitive site crashes, checkout issues, cancelled orders, poor return policies, etc.!

This strategy yielded impressive results as it allowed Sport Chek to grow total sales by 56% year over year during the Black Friday weekend – a tremendous feat considering it had attained 54% growth the year before. Over 229 million impressions were served from more than 466 different creatives, and driving 44% increase in sessions on site.

Thanks to the thoughtful sequencing of messaging, we were able to deliver, from paid media, an increase in 34% in website visitors, +25% in product viewers, +45% to add to cart, and +54% in sessions that drove to a purchase, for an increase of 62% in revenues coming from paid media, and a 22% increase in overall return on ad spend, from Thursday to Monday of the Black Friday weekend.

Bottom line: each time we listened to consumers, we sold-out on those products!