CASE STUDY: Our signature marketing program pairs the best of the DIY design world with Home Depot merchandise - and solves a massive challenge for the brand.

One blogger. One patio set. 30 days.

PROFILE: THE HOME DEPOT

The Home Depot is the world’s largest home improvement retailer with over 400,000 associates and 2,200 stores in the U.S., Canada and Mexico. The typical store averages 105,000 square feet, interconnected with an e-commerce business with +1M products.

Founded in 1979, today The Home Depot is one of the top 10 retailers in the U.S. and Number #23 on Fortune 500 List with annual revenues of $100.9 Billion.

INTERNAL CLIENT & GOALS

Selling Patio Sets Customers Haven’t Seen

The D28 Patio Merchant team had significantly expanded their offerings; securing partnerships with new vendors as well as manufacturing new Mix-and-Match patio offerings via our house brands. We knew we had the lowest prices on the market, but THD was facing a major Consumer Awareness challenge.

CHALLENGES

• Although THD often is the best value for patio furniture, people don’t associate the brand strongly with the category

• Majority of inventory is online-only.

• Photography challenges abound re: product availability & production lead times. Available images are underwhelming.
  

SOLUTION

A flexible, scalable, evergreen campaign

We created the ‘Home Depot Style Challenge’ in response to this challenge! Our influencer content program pairs top DIY bloggers with new merchandise - such as a new patio set. Our blogger participants each get 30 days to renovate a space in their home, documenting the process along the way. Each DIY project publishes on The Home Depot blog. We feature the blogger’s gorgeous projects in social ads and in promotions online, in print and via email.

CREATIVE APPROACH

When it came time to ‘pivot to video’  for The Patio Style Challenge, we looked to blogger partners who lived in Southern states. One of our top blog contributors fit the bill with a completely empty gravel backyard that she was dying to make over. Her desert domicile  in Tucson, AZ provided a perfect blank slate allowing us to film several small narratives over the course of a week.

In addition to the Before/After videos, we created tons of How-To content around trending DIY projects. Each How-To project publishes on the Home Depot blog, with step-by-step instructional photography. This approach blended near-term seasonal campaign production with long-term content creation around SEO content gaps on our blog.

Read more about Caitlin Ketcham's backyard makeover on the Home Depot Blog. Our creative agency 22squared led the project, alongside production company Flynnside Out.

TARGETING

How we Got the Right Content to the Right People For 2 cents a Click

Our creative is deployed to customers via custom audience tools using cookie and pixel based tracking programs. Data partnerships enable us to create customer look-a-likes, expanding the size of the initial dataset.

CHANNELS & AD SPEND

Awareness to Conversion

Our multimodal episodic storytelling approach enabled our paid team to create a long-term targeting campaign that began with sharing a blogger’s renovation story via Facebook and Instagram targeting, sharing DIY projects with Promoted Pins, and finally driving conversion with product specific ad units.

These “awareness to conversion” campaigns were designed by working with our Partner teams at Facebook/Instagram, Twitter and Pinterest, and often featured some of the first uses of new-to-market ad units. Revenue was measured in partnership with the merchandising team’s analysts.

RESULTS

To our delight, the Style Challenge program enjoys a position as the flagship influencer marketing program at The Home Depot. The success of the initial Patio program led to an expansion - the program runs each quarter with new participants, and new Challenges.

The chart illustrates the cumulative ‘SnowBall’ effect of the campaign, which has been running continuously since Q4 2011.

Yes, Seven Years!

HOW THIS CAMPAIGN IS DIFFERENT

Flexible

• The flexible template of the campaign (Blogger + Product = Campaign) made it easier to create variants to support merchant teams from Bath to Lumber. Bloggers understood the ask, having seen their DIY peers participate in past seasons.

Scalable

• Each campaign is designed to generate impressions year round - which can easily be boosted to reach quarterly goals by adjusting spend.

Evergreen

• This is great content, ya’ll! Our bloggers’ DIY projects and renovations are evergreen stories that continue to inspire our customers.