For the 2019 Holiday season, both retailers and consumers had a common enemy: lack of time. Black Friday was on November 28th, a week later than previous years. This meant that retailers, including Sport Chek, Canada's leading sports retailer, had one less week to make their sales during the critical moment of the year.

Because Black Friday was a week later than previous years, consumers relying on Black Friday deals had to be more patient for their Holiday purchases. Consumer expectations were high, and their patience was running low. There were a lot of consumers to please!

We opened our ears to consumers' shopping experience in many different ways:

Using the custom-built Google Trend Queries tools and our own website search tool, we identified products that were surprisingly popular. A good example of that was a weighted Serenity blanket and a Theragun massage device. We did not have ads promoting these products at the beginning of the day. But when we realized how popular they were, we activated ads for them which allowed us to completely sell our inventory out!

Using TweeterDeck, a social listening tool, we realized that the Footlocker website was down and the Lululemon check out process was down. Therefore, we created an ad that invited those customers to our website, eliminating their painpoint.

Using the same TweeterDeck tool, we realized that people were complaining about Wal-Mart overselling, then cancelling orders for Apple Watches. Therefore, we created an ad promoting Apple Watches.

The strategy was simple: we zeroed in on a consumer pain point, we matched it with a Sport Chek offer and pushed that offer to market…in a real-time manner. In fact, the combination of both quantitative data based on products demand and qualitative data based on social listening allowed us to craft relevant ads that benefit both the consumers and our bottom-line - a win-win situation.

We used multiple sources of listening tools to identify what consumers were doing and saying as they shopped. Consumers send signals to the market in multiple ways, we simply listened!

We found the consumer love. Consumers tell us what the hottest products are through their search and navigation habits. We coupled this knowledge with an inventory API to ensure we had the products in-stock.

We also found the consumer hate, we tuned into the pain points that consumers were voicing through social platforms.

We opened our ears to consumers' shopping experience in many different ways:

Using the custom-built Google Trend Queries tools and our own website search tool, we identified products that were surprisingly popular. Using TweeterDeck, a social listening tool, we identified consumers pain point with our competitors.

The strategy was simple: we zeroed in on a consumer pain point, we matched it with a Sport Chek offer and pushed that offer to market…in a real-time manner. In fact, the combination of both quantitative data based on products demand and qualitative data based on social listening allowed us to craft relevant ads that benefit both the consumers and our bottom-line - a win-win situation.

By doing so, we increased our sales and solved all types of problems for consumers: oversold products by our competitors, consumers looking for hot products, competitive site crashes, checkout issues, cancelled orders, poor return policies, etc.!

This strategy yielded impressive results as it allowed Sport Chek to grow total sales by 56% year over year during the Black Friday weekend – a tremendous feat considering it had attained 54% growth the year before. Over 229 million impressions were served from more than 466 different creatives, and driving 44% increase in sessions on site.

Thanks to the thoughtful sequencing of messaging, we were able to deliver, from paid media, an increase in 34% in website visitors, +25% in product viewers, +45% to add to cart, and +54% in sessions that drove to a purchase, for an increase of 62% in revenues coming from paid media, and a 22% increase in overall return on ad spend, from Thursday to Monday of the Black Friday weekend.

Bottom line: each time we listened to consumers, we sold-out on those products!