How IKEA Measures and Optimizes Campaigns
Social analytics is critical to campaign optimization and measurement. Smart brands are always looking for opportunities to improve on previous efforts by understanding what works well and what can be improved.
Many brands and agencies struggle with this because they perform these analyses on a per-campaign basis when instead campaigns should be compared to historical campaigns. Social analytics tools allow deep benchmarking and analysis that enable deep historical comparisons.
Retailer Spotlight: IKEA
As one of the top-10 most valuable brands globally1, IKEA is well-recognized and has built a clear brand position. Part of that success is in always improving campaign content and seeking creative ways to engage with customers making the company a good example for a focus on campaign measurement. Over the last year, IKEA has had a particular focus on one core element of the brand—simple, every day, and boring. The brand has used humor and self-effacing creative to elevate the “every day” around the home.
In the case of IKEA, we can measure campaign effectiveness from a few different angles: content performance, brand attribute penetration, and messaging impact. For content performance, we can start by looking at engagements on owned posts broken out by channel (in this case across many of IKEA’s pages globally including US, UK, Sweden and Canada). We often see that YouTube drives the most engagement but the difference for IKEA is stark reflecting the success of their advertising. Beyond the engagements, we can also look at the conversation within each community. For YouTube and Instagram, the conversation is more aligned with decorating, ideas and IKEA’s “everyday” campaign. However, the Facebook conversation is more price and convenience focused. As IKEA is focused on every day affordability rather than promotions, the company is shifting to Facebook strategies to mirror other channels for better engagement.
Beyond their own channels, we can also judge effectiveness of the “everyday” message by measuring the penetration of that brand attribute in the overall brand conversation (owned and earned). The trendline tells an impressive story—not only are consumers talking about the “simple” and “everyday” story frequently, they are consistently engaging with IKEA and other organic content related to the brand’s messaging.
Finally, we can take a different angle at messaging impact to see if consumers are reflecting IKEA’s message in the overall earned conversation. Said another way, are consumers using similar language as the brand when discussing amongst themselves? Or are they focused on other attributes outside of the brand’s campaign and messaging? One way to measure messaging impact is by looking at hashtags—on owned content and earned content. This helps to analyze whether those same themes are being used organically. For IKEA, we can see that several of their priority hashtags are also being used unprompted from consumers (e.g. #interiordesign, #homedecor). In terms of areas for improvement, the company could further promote the branded hashtags that seem to be breaking through less (e.g. #ikeaideas, #ikeafamily). Consumers are organically trading secrets in regards to IKEA set-up, an idea that could be incorporated into the brand’s marketing.
Summary
IKEA’s campaign strategy relies on clever creative, but also on staying on top of consumers’ pulse. The brand learns from each successive campaign, innovating messaging and experiences. Other brands can replicate some of that success by:
- Continually track engagement metrics broken out by content, by channel, and by campaign metric. Benchmarking across those three will identify outliers or areas for improvement.
- Measure macro-campaign effects on the brand by evaluating whether core brand attributes are increasing as a share of brand conversation.
- Identify if your message is breaking through by comparing owned content versus organic conversation.
Download a PDF(A4) of the IKEA Spotlight
Download a PDF(Letter) of the IKEA Spotlight
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Joe Russell is the Chief Financial Officer of NetBase Quid