Career case study: Superdrug

During my time as Group Account Director for Superdrug at the River Group, we increased the account from an annual retainer of £500K to £1.5m in 18 months by meeting the growing demand of consumers for digital content in addition to the existing print magazine ‘Dare’, and below the line campaigns.

There were two main objectives; create engaging channel specific content that grew followers and engagement and increase customer basket spend through the awareness of more products.

Over 80% of Superdrug’s revenue at that time was generated through footfall in their retail stores, but as consumers were increasingly able to consume digital content on the move through the growth of social media. It was therefore important that Superdrug was a visible on these channels as it was on the High Street.

We ran a range of qualitative focus groups and a quant survey to 5000 customers to gain insight into what formats and channels different age groups engaged with. We overlapped the results with Superdrug’s customer segmentation to look for gaps and opportunities.

Winning Superdrug Agency of the Year in 2017

Reviewing the digital channels, it became apparent that whilst the content showed what you could buy at Superdrug, it didn’t inspire or engage its audience to say why they should buy it at Superdrug. So, we changed the focus from direct marketing to dynamic, reactive franchises for each social media channel that focused on their biggest 18-25 year-old customer segment. We used influencers, increased the range of diversity and created fast turn-around, reactive content, that couldn’t be replicated in magazine our in-store campaigns and made the channels a go-to destination for beauty trends.

The results became apparent quickly, with their Instagram surpassing 1 million followers, YouTube subscribers rising from 5k followers to 25k followers in less than a year and our Mother’s Day campaign being listed in Marketing Week’s top 10 best YouTube campaigns March 2018. Social listening also highlighted an increase in purchases from the increased engagement, reflecting that the activity was satisfying both business objectives.

This positioned us to pitch in multi touch point content campaigns for big retail events including Halloween, Pride and enter new areas of the business, including Healthcare and the launch of their mobile phone network offering.

To help successfully deliver all the additional work, we created an ‘Agency Council’ with Superdrug’s nine other agencies to create a new process for briefing in work with enough lead time for all stakeholders. Enabling this process meant our content got the exposure and placement it required to successfully engage and convert the wider Superdrug audience.