As stay-at-home orders went into effect, it was evident in early March 2020, that the next 3 months of pre-planned content would have to be discarded in light of the forthcoming pandemic. ADT's social team sprung to action immediately to redefine their strategy and create an agile stream of content, “Safe at Home”, that was relevant to current events - while most importantly staying true to their brand mission.
The Safe at Home platform's core objective was to drive high quality, retargetable, platform engagement. Giving ADT digital brand hugs to new consumers and starting conversations with the brand. With a secondary objective around increasing organic (free) reach within our engaging brand content. All platform engagement is retargetable and even though it was not the main objective for this team and campaign, we ensured our brand engagement was being retargeted by the direct response team, with offer driven advertising.
During the middle of March 2020, ADT conducted custom research amongst the general population and security intender audiences with a 72-hour turnaround time and found that users were using social media 54% more due to COVID. This gave us the insight that social was an important channel for ADT and it would be a big focus for upcoming brand efforts.
Safe at Home was born when Social Media usage was up, driving the opportunity of engagement on Facebook. We were inspired to create content to help keep people Safe at Home, which opened up new themes that ADT would never have explored before.
Our Safe at Home message umbrella allowed ADT to speak about topics within the home. Tapping into trending conversations and turning those topics into value exchange marketing, giving the consumer something from ADT that they already didn’t have or know.
It’s essential as a brand to be a part of conversations as they are happening by driving engagement that resonates and connects to your users by offering valuable content. The team shifted into a real-time brand-relevant content stream and identified three engaging content pillars within our Safe at Home social platform, Activities, Tips, and Recipes.
To complement our strategy, we also created a Facebook Group. The Safe at Home Facebook group is a community we built to provide resources for those staying at home during the COVID-19 stay home orders. As people began to shelter in place with their families, we started releasing content in the group and across platforms to help people stay safe and sane. We released recipes, activities, and safe at home alerts, keeping everyone up to date on ways to keep safe as times change.
The group began to flourish as members flowed in, sharing stories of generosity and reacting with kindness to each other's worries. The group basically now runs itself with nearly 500,000 engagements in 2020. ADT plans on keeping “Safe at Home” as an evergreen group, even post COVID, as everyone always wants to feel safe at home and it’s a great social execution of our Real Protection brand platform.
ADT is here to help you protect what matters most. Sharing activities, resources, and recipes to help keep you Safe at Home.
ADT's Safe at Home Facebook Implementation
Knowing that our audience wouldn’t see our content without paid promotion, brand paid media was used to amplify our Safe at Home content stream. We immediately saw that this content was driving a considerable increase in shares, which had a halo effect on organic (free) reach.
We quickly redefined our paid brand media strategy and execution on Facebook, knowing that the bidding algorithm would not automatically optimize to most shared, but just general engagement.
We created a custom metric within the Facebook Ad platform and manually optimized daily to the content driving the most organic reach. Not allowing the Facebook algorithm to auto-optimize for us. This was a timely daily media execution, but coupled with our real-time content strategy drove phenomenal results.
Objective #1: Drive high quality, retargetable, platform engagement.
Results: We not only increased the volume of retargetable engagement YoY by 98%, but we also improved the quality of that engagement. Our Facebook platform brand engagement was the top-performing lower-funnel retargeting audience in 2020 and was 222% higher than our lower funnel Facebook prospecting efforts.
Objective #2: Increase organic (free) reach within our engaging brand content.
Results: With our engagement content shareability increasing 18,431% YoY, it also increased our Organic Reach 2,689% YoY. Allowing ADT to garner nearly $500,000 in free reach in 2020!
Additional Successes:
Partnering with Facebook, ADT ran a brand lift study on our Safe at Home brand campaigns and saw a 89% lift in ad recall and 40% lift in action intent. This lead to Facebook writing a Resilient Success Story around ADT’s Safe at Home Campaign.
ListenFirst is a platform ADT utilizes to benchmark our brand metrics across all brands on Social Media. Safe at Home helped us breakthrough as one of the top shared brands of 2020 – moving up 131 spots from 2019 to the #7 shared 2020 brand on Facebook.
Our Facebook Group quickly grew to over 20,000 members with nearly 500,000 engagements in 2020.
We saw an influx of positive comments throughout 2020, thanking ADT directly for sharing engaging content during a hard year. These qualitative comments resulted in increasing Facebook's positive sentiment by 104% and decreasing negative by -81% year over year.
