Sport Chek: Social Flyer

Credits & Description:

Agency: North Strategic
Client: FGL Sports Ltd.
Brand: Sport Chek
Company: North Strategic, Toronto
Target: Canada · North America
VP Marketing and e-commerce : Frederick Lecoq, FGL Sports Ltd.
Customer Insights Manager : Nick Bond, FGL Sports Ltd.
CRM Specialist : Lara Vogel, FGL Sports Ltd.
Co-founder : Justin Creally, North Strategic
Account Manager : John Slighte, North Strategic
Client Partner : Daniel Habashi, Facebook
Features: Ads and Sponsored Stories, Pages
Language: English (US)
Objectives: Awareness, Intent, Online Traffic, Sales
Tags: Retail, North America, English (US), Ads and Sponsored Stories, Pages, Awareness, Intent, Online Traffic, Sales  
Over the last few years, Sport Chek has invested heavily in Facebook as a key brand channel and built a highly engaged audience of more than 700,000 fans. By conducting in-depth customer research, Sport Chek realized its key 18-34 demographic consumed most media online and was not reading the paper flyer.
This begged the question, “How do we get our Facebook audience into stores to make a purchase?” In response, Sport Chek worked with Facebook to develop the global-first Social Flyer program, a measurable social campaign to digitize its paper flyer and increase brand awareness, lift purchase intent and drive in-store sales.
Sport Chek aimed to stand out in a competitive retail market and appeal to its target audience by using Facebook in a concerted, tested and large-scale manner to drive in-store sales of seasonal and relevant products featured in the paper flyer. Following the success of its initial two-month test period targeted to 18-34 year-olds in the Greater Toronto Area, Sport Chek expanded the campaign to target its key audience across Ontario from March-June 2013.
The campaign was developed to optimize delivery of relevant flyer content to Ontarians weekly during the key in-store shopping period of Thursday-Sunday, as well as to reach a consistent number of users in the target audience to facilitate testing against the paper flyer. Sport Chek worked with its agency North Strategic to use a combination of organic posts, Page post ads, sponsored stories, albums and video posts featuring inspirational lifestyle and product content to boost reach and engage with its Facebook fans.
Campaign Performance
To remain true to Sport Chek’s “Your Better” brand positioning and resonate with its target audience, the retailer used custom photography to create inspirational action-based product shots combined with concise motivational copy. Both the copy and images served to build the connection between products and the healthy active lifestyles of Sport Chek’s core consumers. Simultaneously, special attention was paid to ensure the successes of the traditional print flyer were being replicated for the online community.
Sport Chek effectively engaged with its target demographic, increasing brand awareness by serving 106 million impressions to the 18-34 demographic not reading the paper flyer, and exceeding the initial objective of 50 million impressions. The retailer also saw a 1.6X positive return on ad spend from the Social Flyer campaign, while driving a 40% peak lift in awareness of weekend sales and a 32% peak lift in purchase intent.
The Social Flyer campaign proved that Sport Chek could effectively target and sell on Facebook and reach a larger audience that was not reading the weekly paper flyer.