The Objective

Implementing a full funnel approach to increase sales

Established in 1980, McSport is Ireland’s leading independent supplier of sports and fitness equipment. A 100% Irish-owned family business they’ve evolved from a small local sports shop to one of Ireland's largest, most trusted online retailers of sports and fitness equipment. They’re devoted to knowing the best products, matching customers with the right equipment and providing sports inspiration. Their longevity in the business is down to one reason — the customer. McSport is there for its customers before, during, and after the sale. And for over 40 years, customers have put their trust in McSport. 

Active on TikTok since 2021 under the handle @mcsportireland, they use their account for general sports and fitness content, home gym hacks, behind-the-scenes footage, tapping into trends and storytelling. 

Due to the Covid pandemic and the shift in purchasing patterns they’d ordered way too much equipment. So, they had an idea about how to approach this differently. Holding their hands up high they wanted to highlight that they’d bought up far too much stock that they needed rid of at discounted prices, so they turned to TikTok for their latest campaign around their “We messed up” sale. 

The Solution

Using a test-and-learn approach for effective audience targeting

Refreshingly honest and creative in approach. Shifting and selling masses of gym equipment via a serious sale in a short space of time was the goal. Success would be measured in clicks, CPC, conversions, and return on advertising spend.

The campaign for the “We messed up” sale, would run for six weeks over the course of summer, targeting women and men in Ireland. The targeting strategy was very much a test-and-learn approach. This saw the team trialling Broad Targeting, Retargeting, Lookalikes, Interest Targeting, and Auto-Targeting. 

The team were running the campaign in-house (with no input from creators or agencies). They used a variety of TikTok products to meet their campaign objectives. Value Based Optimisation (VBO) for optimising ad delivery for high-value customers and Collection Ads and Product Catalog for showcasing the products on sale. Interactive Add-ons and Countdown Sticker Ads were also trialled — ideal for creating a sense of urgency for the last few days of the campaign and sale.

The team also created engaging content by tapping into trends and focusing on platform-based best practices. Not only highly effective, but this approach also allowed the McSport team to see the instant impact of humorous, authentic, and entertaining content on sales, traffic, and engagement rates. It highlighted the importance of not just going for the hard sale but of creating content people would organically find on their feed.

The Results

Creating success with innovation and Value Based Optimisation

Using a full-funnel approach for this campaign McSport started with traffic, and then moved to conversion after first optimising for add-to-cart. Paying close attention to the data, when they started to see the right pattern they moved their approach to complete payment optimisation using value-based optimisation. This served to supercharge their ROAS to 8.75 for this campaign. Reach was over 1 million and the campaign clocked up 130k Video Views.

The campaign surpassed all benchmarks set. Not only was the campaign an interesting eCommerce case study, but it also goes to show that honesty really is the best policy.