Swire Properties CNY Omnichannel Campaign 2021 - Pacific Place & Cityplaza

Campaign: Swire Properties CNY Omnichannel Campaign 2021 - Pacific Place & Cityplaza

Company: Cosmose AI

Client: Swire Properties Limited

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Summary:

Shopping mall marketers have a love-hate relationship with digital marketing campaigns at times. Although digital campaigns are usually cost-effective and able to boost online awareness, it is not easy to measure the impact on actual mall visitation and footfall, which is the main KPI of every shopping mall marketer. Without such insights, optimizing marketing dollars towards footfall was almost impossible.

Leveraging the Christmas and Chinese New Year promotion windows, Swire Properties partnered with Cosmose, a leading offline data retail technology firm, to launch a media campaign in Facebook and programmatic platforms to attract visitors to the shopping malls events. Swire Properties wish to understand the shopper behavior from Cosmose intelligence, and develop the best strategy to reach out to relevant audience segments, and the most important of all, is to measure and optimize the uplift of actual footfall by the media campaign.

Challenge:

As mall owners and retailers grappled with the repercussions of the COVID-19 pandemic, many were thinking out of the box and accelerating their plans to keep themselves relevant in the new normal. Swire Properties set out to redefine their digital campaign to drive Hong Kong shoppers to visit their mall for festive decorations and events once the pandemic situation eased up.

Swire Properties’ goal was simple, to maximize their online campaign effectiveness for visitation to their malls during the Christmas and CNY period. However, this objective was challenged three-fold:

1. Decrease in mall visitation due to the pandemic situation
2. Attract high-intent consumers to visit the malls during this time given limited visibility to customers’ offline behavior, interest and location preferences
3. Measuring the real impact of online campaigns and attributing actual footfall, amidst various promotions going on in different channels at the same time

Solution:

1. Reaching high value customers

The target audience for Swire Properties’ malls were identified using Cosmose’s advanced artificial intelligence technology. High potential segments were identified based on offline behaviour in the past 3 months, including shoppers to key competitor malls, and residents in the catchment areas.

Behavioral data coupled with precise location targeting accurate to the nearest 1.6 meters* were extrapolated to result in offline lookalike segments for Swire Properties.

*compared to a 50 meter accuracy for location-based systems using GPS targeting. Passersby and pedestrians in the identified locations were excluded.

2. Personalized creatives, relevant ad formats

The online campaigns for Swire Properties were launched through multiple media platforms including Facebook, Instagram and other programmatic channels. Different formats/dimensions of creatives were utilized to engage various high potential audiences, such as driving awareness with videos, and consideration with display and native banners. Additional insights and recommendations from Cosmose allowed Swire Properties to personalize creatives for different segments.

3. Measuring and optimizing what works

Cosmose’s proprietary data identification technology allowed footfall conversion to be tracked. This was done by mapping the target segments for Swire Properties who saw the online ads, against the visitor’s mobile signal that made physical visits to the malls.

Ads were scheduled in tandem with shoppers’ consumption of online ad content; weekdays for optimal ad exposure and weekends for mall visits. Once performing ad sets were identified, the budget was re-allocated to further optimize this campaign.

Results:

Through this partnership with Cosmose, Swire Properties acquired a better understanding to their online audience via location intelligence on:

1. Audience - Top categories and stores which generated the most traffic, types of shoppers and their profiles
2. Competitors - Shopping alternatives for malls outside of their portfolio
3. Market - Industry trends and shifts on store visitation throughout different seasons

Leveraging location-based insights to understand and connect with their audience, Swire Properties obtained on average for each property

• 49% increase in click-through rates
• 40% more effective on cost per footfall acquisition, in comparison to other location solutions 
• Justification to the digital campaign with measurable shoppers to the malls

By acting on data-driven insights on consumer demand, market trends and opportunities, Swire Properties elevated their marketing strategy and allowed the business to stay ahead of the curve.

Testimonial:

“I have reviewed a number of location-based solutions in the past 2 years, and found that Cosmose is the best at providing precise and in-depth learning about Hong Kong shoppers. This empowers my digital campaigns, enabling me to keep in touch with the right audience and to make the digital campaign results tangible.”

Angus Hui, Digital Lead, Swire Properties Limited