Friday-Ad is a community-based platform that allows its users to advertise their second hand goods, services and businesses for free. In order to keep Friday-Ad the biggest marketplace in Brighton, it released an app to go along the current online platform.
It was important to retain the existing user base, but also bring in new ones from different segments of the demographic spectrum, specially Millenial and GenZ users. The campaign had to be creative enough to appeal to a range of audience types without diluting its core concept or feeling generic.
The campaign is an extension of the slogan "Buy, Sell, Discover" that has been used for years by the company. It's a great message for all ages and demographics. The older generations are already familiar with this message, while it conveys a sense of being in control of your life and how you spend your time and money—something that appeals strongly to younger individuals who are looking for ways to make their own path in life.
We created a multi-channel campaign to target the right people, based on their age and other demographic information. We also created a simple but engaging video that highlighted some of the features of the app.
We want people to associate Friday-Ad with fun, but also with reliability and trustworthiness. The colour palette is bright and playful, so you can feel like you're having fun while you're learning about the products and services available nearby. The copy is friendly and informative, but not too much so—the kind of voice that makes you want to get out there and explore the world around you.
We used eye-catching screens for the app stores highlighting the key features of the application. This approach helped drive downloads and establish a good user experience in the app store.
A series of fully responsive emails were sent to our existing user database as a part of the campaign to inform them of the app's release and encourage them to download it. We highlighted the easiness and speed and included free premium to those who were already engaged with our app and to convince users that hadn’t downloaded the app before that this was the time to do it.
The target audience were Millennials and GenZ, who are notoriously difficult to reach using traditional advertising strategies. A series of posts and stories offering discounts were created with the goal of attracting users through words and images in order to make them interested enough to go download the app.
Our app is easy to use and intuitive and we wanted to show this on a series of very short tutorials. These quick videos in gif format will quickly get new users a handle on how to use our product and make it more usable for our more mature audience. They can be included in FAQ pages, landing pages and welcome emails once the app is downloaded.
To increase the effectiveness of your sales campaign, we created display banners that are shown when people are browsing our website, scrolling through Facebook newsfeeds or using Google products. Through careful design, we have made sure that the banners just get noticed but don’t appear too obtrusive.
We created a double page ad in Friday-Ad magazine to introduce the new app and transition users to it. We included a QR code so that users could scan it with their phones and download immediately.
The campaign exceeded its download target by 130%. Retention was also high, with only 10% of users uninstalling the app in a two-month period. We also noticed an increase in premium ad usage after users were provided with a free one during this campaign, reinforcing this stream of income.
The use of the free premium ads provided was higher among our younger audience, so we will continue to make use of them in future campaigns. However, display banner advertising had a bigger impact on more senior audiences because ad-blocking software is not as widespread among them and young people are more likely to download it directly if they are interested rather than interact with the banner to get more information.
