The goal of this project was to support the launch of Sky Connect for UK SMEs, offering a simplified and transparent broadband and phone experience into a historically clustered market renowned for a below average customer experience across the board. This was following the success of a similar USA launch by their parent company Comcast, headquartered in the US. We were to identify and target small business decision makers, educating them on the benefits of Sky Connect, driving consistent engagement and facilitating direct and indirect sales.
Whilst Sky had some strength in the marketplace with their branding, the highly competitive market they’re in includes the likes of Virgin Media, BT, Vodafone & TalkTalk. Additionally, the launch took place during one of the most difficult times in recent years as the Covid-19 pandemic forced businesses to rethink their approach.
Using behavioural-led data we identified key ‘intent’ signals to segment and target against (e.g. negative social posting around Sky’s competitors, first to market for new start-ups and in-market indicators). Combined with a focus of ongoing audience engagement and a cross-digital media mix, we landed on a programme engaging with small business owners across the funnel. Deep partnerships were developed with the likes of Facebook (a key platform for SMEs often acting as the shop window and light CRM tool for their business) to build an entire user journey, from video engagement through to capturing leads within the platform.
Creativity was essential for the success of this project along with leveraging specific location based data of small business clusters. Our focus was to build up Sky Connect with a first party dataset to help facilitate new audience information.
Getting such a prominent brand into market during a global pandemic has been a success in itself, particularly with the challenge of some of the target audience having their business temporarily/permanently closed, which we used to our advantage by positioning Sky as a brand to be perceived as being there to help support small businesses in the UK.
With over 700,000 organic website visits as a result of advert engagement and over 1200 leads generated via Facebook alone, the paid media activities had an enormous impact.
From a media perspective we generated a staggering 360million impressions and over 1 million high intent users visiting the Sky Connect website; far exceeding the predicted outcome for this project.
