Simple viral communications on web helped a furniture shop achieve a whopping ROI

‘48hours’ is the exclusive furniture shop owned by Sarda Plywood Industries Ltd. (SPIL) in Kolkata.

Since its inception, quite a few years back, the shop has never created any such stir in the market with its marketing communications.

No, not that there has ever been any shortage of communications in the form of print ads and hoardings; albeit nothing really clicked. Plus, there was no such metrics in place that could prove the efficiency of the campaigns done in those mainstream print and outdoor media; thus getting a better view of ROI has always been elusive.

In this situation, ‘48hours’ approached me to do something relevant so as to yield something from communications.

Of course it was a complex problem, which needed a simple solution.

The brief was, "Online traffic should know and recall the brand name of '48hours', which is otherwise not so known, and take some actions and visit the website of 48hours."

The target group (TG) was anyone / everyone - who spends time on web. The duration of campaign was 30 days. The allotted budget was Rs. 50,000/- only.

After putting a lot of thoughts, I chose the ‘viral’ route of communications. Decided to use the logo – that actually displays the brand name of 48hours – in such a way that people shouldn't understand it as a furniture shop in the first place; however take interest 'in the offerings i.e. benefits they can avail of and enjoy… in 48hours a day'. And in the process, feel like interacting with the piece(s) of communication and visit the landing page of 48hours’ website.

To implement this, media i.e. consumer touch point was chosen as Bharatmatrimony.com - for its cost-effectiveness and huge number of online members.

Also, a matrimonial portal was taken into account because marriage and furniture are very easy to correlate with each other rather relevantly.

The total number of impressions i.e. online ads used from Feb. 01, 2011 to March 02, 2011 was 50,000.

The number of people hit the website of 48hours by clicking on those impressions was 713.

Hence, assuming that the number of people actually saw the ads i.e. impressions and came to know about the name n logo of 48hours - if even modest multiplication is done – was 713 X 5 (at least) = 3565.

So, the ROI (return on investment) came out as… cost: Rs. 50,000/-; effective value returned: cost i.e. Rs. 50K / total number of audience actually saw the impressions i.e. 3565 X total no. of audience who interacted with the impressions i.e. 713 = Rs. 10,000/-; ‘therefore communication success rate = 10K / 50K X 100 = 20%’.

With all humility intended, 20% is nothing but a whopping success rate in terms of ROI achieved by ‘48hours’ – The FRESH Furniture Hub!