A5 Cash and Carry is a value supermarket selling a variety of products to customers in and around Durban and Pietermaritzburg. They specialise in fantastically priced stationary and other merchandise.

Goals:

A5 wanted to grow their follower base and inform them of the sales and specials happening in store each week to help drive more traffic into their brick and mortar stores. In 2021 A5 launched their online offering and a new goal of driving online sales has been added to the social media mandate.

How?

Storyteller worked with the A5 marketing team to understand their goals and how we could help them grow their business, reach more customers and increase their sales.

We then used our tried and tested pillars to develop her social media plan and make sure her content was always driven by the social media strategy for her goals.

Research:

From our research we defined who their target audience was and created a look-a-like audience based in Kwazulu Natal and South Africa which we could target the Facebook and Instagram posts to in order to drive more feet into the stores and grow the online following so more people could learn about their amazing specials.

The Power of Look-alike Audiences:

Look-a-like audiences are one of the most powerful targeting strategies on Facebook. They allow you to use an audience you already have like a email database, phone list, customer list or instagram following and target other people who have similar traits to people who already love and use your services.

We used look-a-like audiences to almost double A5’s following on Facebook from just over 7000 followers in August to over 13 000 by the end of December 2020. Whats more these followers are highly targeted and love the offerings A5 has.

2021 Launch of the A5 Online Store:

2020 taught everyone that they need to be online and have commerce offerings to succeed and flourish in a post COVID world. In early 2021 A5 launched their online store with their back to school and stationary offerings which are a strong vertical for A5.

We used the following we had grown over the last 5 months to drive traffic to the new commerce store instead of just the brick and mortar stores. This offered A5’s customers a COVID safe way to still get the amazing deals A5 had on offer.

Going Forward:

Moving forward we will be using retargeting strategies to boost A5’s online sales conversion rate and bring website visitors back tot he website in order to make purchases.

Video Formats:

After extensive A-B testing we confirmed that video performed better for driving sales and interactions on the social platforms and generating traffic to the website.

We also learned that certain video styles showcasing specials in an easy to engage with format greatly improved the posts and ads reach, interactions and click through rate.

The Results

@a5_cahs_and_carry’s following almost double in 5 months from just over 7000 followers to over 13 000 followers by the end of 2020. These were highly targeted followers exactly matched to A5’s target audience through look-a-like audiences.

The social media campaign was such a success A5 were given the confidence to launch their online store as they trusted the fantastic engagement shown on social media could be used to drive traffic to their new commerce website and inform followers of the deals that were now available online.