The Container Store
Back to School Custom Content
Parents are the primary purchasers of back to school (BTS) sales — that’s true even among those targeted at college-age students. The Container Store knew that parents were the right audience it wanted to reach when it came to its storage and organization solutions for college dorm rooms and small apartments. The brand was ready to grow its digital media investment to position it well against competitors like Target, Crate & Barrel, and Bed Bath & Beyond.
Services
100%+
Increase in traffic
30X
Growth in audience engagement
5X
Increase in leads driven
Challenge
In the prior year, PMG executed a successful branding campaign that tested two different messaging approaches. The clear winner was around affordability. However, because of brand considerations, the client wanted to maintain elements of the other line of messaging, small spaces. PMG thus had to leverage past learnings with current needs in the new campaign. Our team also had to balance the brand-driven goals of awareness and reach with performance-driven goals of traffic and lead acquisition (by way of signing up for a coupon).
Strategy & Approach
Based on the past campaign’s results, PMG knew that custom content was an effective approach to reach parents. However, we decided to work with another publishing partner who could deliver even greater scale and impact. After an extensive vetting process, our team decided to partner with Hearst and Good Housekeeping.
In collaboration with the Good Housekeeping team, PMG created a custom article to showcase the brand’s products that spoke directly to the parents of college-age children. The article incorporated both the affordability angle as well as messaging around solutions for tight spaces. To supplement that piece, our team put together a broad media plan to support via banner media on Hearst properties as well as social promotion via the publishers’ channels. The plan included 100% SOV on select pre-existing articles related to college. And while it’s not typical for publishers to guarantee impressions on custom content, PMG’s team was able to negotiate a robust minimum in our contract.
PMG also developed a custom carousel banner that featured four of The Container Store’s top college items. The dynamic, high-impact unit helped the brand to better grab the attention of visitors.
Results
The campaign was a top-level effort for The Container Store. The custom article published on Good Housekeeping surpassed CTR benchmarks by more than 50%. Furthermore, through an analysis of the campaign landing page, we confirmed that the demographics targeted were spot on. On average, users spent nearly two minutes with the article, exceeding expectations by nearly 20%, and outperforming the prior year’s custom article by as much as 3X. On the Hearst properties, the campaign’s takeovers on college-related articles delivered high engagement, with some nearly tripling the amount of time spent as the Good Housekeeping custom article.
Compared to previous efforts, PMG was able to more than double the traffic while delivering lower CPCs, reflecting the impact of PMG’s application of past learnings to optimize the new campaign. And while sales was a secondary goal, the campaign also increased the number of leads by 5X Y/Y, while spend increased by only 25%. Ultimately, this campaign was a contributor to the success of our omnichannel efforts in surpassing target ROAS by 50%.
