Thalia

Goal

Books make the world comprehensible.

That's why Thalia (@thalia_buchhandlungen) wants everyone to be able to find the right read at any time - either in one of more than 300 bookstores or in its online offering. The company ensures this with a unique mix of personal advice, inspiring ranges and innovative digital solutions.

With great success: founded over 100 years ago, Thalia has been Germany's top-selling retail bookseller for years and employs a good 6,000 people.

For its first TikTok campaign, the company had three clear goals:

• Additional brand awareness - reading pleasure was to be linked even more directly with the Thalia name.

• Community building - the company wanted to inspire literature fans on TikTok in the long term with exciting content.

• Conversion increase - supported by the presentation of interesting titles as book of the month.

Solution

The perfect basis for this was the TikTok BookClub, which had celebrated its premiere at the Frankfurt Book Fair the previous year. It presents a book of the month to TikTok users and also offers an interactive community platform for exchanging information about literature in general. As BookClub sponsor for the months of March and April, Thalia kicked off its campaign. The company opted for a comprehensive full-funnel media plan right from the start.

In addition to the brand's own content, videos in native TikTok style were created via the Creative Exchange in collaboration with five creators. This also featured a considerable range of content - from book recommendations and title quizzes, to interaction-promoting questions for the community and reports from book fairs, to fun-focused reader perspectives.

To rapidly develop its TikTok presence, Thalia relied on the reach factor for additional impressions. Retargeting could be efficiently targeted via the "View Content" event, and "Complete Payment" was used to stimulate purchases on the Thalia website. Initially delivered as in-feed Ads in the "For You" feed, the best performing content was later given an additional boost as Spark Ads.

This power strategy was rounded off by two absolute highlights at the beginning and end of the month: TopView Ads, the first ads that TikTok users see when opening the app, made Thalia the talk of the town. LIVEs from Thalia stores combined with paid media developed an even more personal connection with the community.

Results

With this fantastic build-up of its TikTok reach and presence, Thalia had created enormous potential for a long-term platform success story - which it exploited to the full only a short time later.

After a one-month break, Thalia really took off in June with three main campaign goals: For the "complete payment" event, an incredible conversion rate of 52% was achieved (this at 80% lower cost per action compared to benchmarks); for landing page calls, the conversion was a brilliant 48%. In terms of community interaction via follows, 26,000 events were recorded - and the brand was No. 1 in Germany in the book segment.

The TopView Ads also paid off handsomely, with results exceeding all benchmark expectations with a 10% lower cost per mille and 17% higher interaction.

Thanks to the full-funnel strategy, in addition to conversions with awareness and community building, Thalia's other two long-term goals were also consistently achieved: the book brand gained 63,000 new followers over 76 million impressions - a 3.7-fold increase. A brand lift study also showed a 10.9% increase in ad recall.