The Digital Impact category of the Good Retail Awards set out to find retailers that are using the digital space to create engaging and innovative marketing campaigns.
Last year’s winners, CuparNow, set the bar high with the creation of the UK’s first Digital Improvement District, creating strategic collaborations, improving digital participation and demonstrating best practice for digital deployment in towns.
Following on from the success of last year’s awards, this year saw retailers enter from far and wide, sharing their fantastic digital campaigns and inspirational stories, despite the challenges brought about by COVID-19. Those that were shortlisted were able to demonstrate the success of their digital campaigns to effectively inspire their target market.
The Good Retail Awards’ panel of judges went through the shortlist for the Digital Impact category, looking for new and creative digital marketing campaigns that utilise available assets and have a significant impact on business performance. After a challenging judging process, the winner of the Good Retail Awards 2021’s Digital Impact Award was decided.
The Digital Impact Award winner – Furniture Village
With over 50 stores throughout the UK, it became clear that Furniture Village had to pivot their strategy to place a greater focus on their ecommerce offering. Having partnered with NHS doctor and sleep ambassador, Dr Ranj, for ‘Sleep Well Live Well’, the campaign focused on helping customers find their perfect night’s sleep.
As the COVID-19 pandemic meant that anxiety impacted many people’s sleep quality, offering smart sleep tips and practical advice worked to inform people throughout the UK, creating a conversation around the best ways to achieve optimum sleep health and boost wellbeing. Combining PR, content, social media, search and paid media, they created a consistent story around sleep in the times of the pandemic. Furniture Village monitored search trends around sleep problems to offer relevant advice, as well as surveying 2,000 adults via One Poll and streaming messaging across video, DAX and Spotify. This information was then turned into a range of content including a microsite, social content and even a press release to raise awareness of the findings and offer suitable advice.
Using data to shape their digital campaign and reach their target market in effective ways, this approach worked to grow the ecommerce side of the business while showcasing their range of products.
This wide-ranging digital campaign resulted in major sales, informing customers and reinforcing Furniture Village’s positioning as a trusted UK furniture retailer.
Commenting on their success in the Good Retail Awards, Charlie Harrison, Commercial Director at Furniture Village, said: “Winning this Digital Impact Award means a lot to us. With 43% of UK adults struggling to sleep, we’ve created genuinely relevant Sleep Well Live Well content that’s reached many millions. Headlined by our sleep ambassador Dr Ranj, this campaign means more than selling beds (although that was a happy side effect!) It means improving lives, never more important than in a pandemic.”
The Good Retail Awards judges praised Furniture Village for their approach to digital marketing. Catherine Erdly, Founder of the Resilient Retail Club, explained: “At the heart of this success story is a focus on the customer. I was particularly interested in how they mined data on changing customer searches to understand how to reach their customers at a difficult time. The numbers themselves are impressive.”
Julie Driscoll, UK Regional Director of Hyve Group plc (Spring Fair), added: “There is no doubt this campaign drove important customer traffic, and revenue into a major retailer during a difficult retail period.”
Rob Gamage, Managing Director, Modern Retail commented: “An excellent combination of content and influencer marketing that enabled Furniture Village to benefit from a significant rise in exposure – leading to impressive sales results.”
The shortlist
The Good Retail Awards 2021 shortlist highlighted retail businesses that are leading the way in the digital field. The calibre of entries was incredibly high this year, with the campaigns and creativity displayed making the judging process a real challenge.
The shortlist for the Digital Impact Award award included:
Fuzzballs
The creator of Fuzzballs turned his animations and comics into social media stickers that are available for free, resulting in more than 200 million Fuzzballs stickers being sent and growing brand awareness enormously.
EatSleepDoodle
EatSleepDoodle worked with a professional animation company to create engaging and informative video content, using this across their platforms as well as YouTube ads to grow exposure.
Hoogaly
Hoogaly combined engaging and visual social media content with SEO-optimised blogs and regular, topical content to grow reach, sales and interaction.
CJ Wildlife
CJ Wildlife re-thought their marketing strategy, making marketing emails content-led to drive engagement as well as creating valuable content such as top tips, infographics and much more.
The Shirt Society
The Shirt Society launched a custom-built web platform to perfect their user experience, basing their campaign around ease and convenience, with stand-out marketing messaging, targeted advertising, PR work and organic social media content.
We’d like to thank everybody that entered the Good Retail Awards 2021. It’s been a pleasure to learn more about each and every entrant and we look forward to continuing to celebrate their successes in the coming months.
To read more about the Digital Impact shortlist, click here.
Stay tuned
Thanks again to all who have made the Good Retail Awards 2021 such a success. We’re proud to be part of a community that showcases the most inspirational and exciting initiatives in the industry. Congratulations again to Furniture Village and we look forward to continuing to share the most innovative campaigns in the world of retail.
To find out more about the Good Retail Awards, and to keep up to date with the latest news, click here.
Holly brings a wealth of experience in both print and digital publishing. As Modern Retail’s Content Editor, Holly is passionate about helping independent retailers to thrive in today’s ever-changing market.
