WORK
SENSI SMART THERMOSTATS
SMART THERMOSTATS FOR THE REST OF US
How do you position a smart thermostat for sales success? In our new work for Sensi, we started by finding the most underserved consumers in the category.
CAMPAIGN LAUNCH
SOCIAL MEDIA
READING THE CONSUMER HEAT MAP
We realized early on that, in order to position Sensi for success, we needed to stop chasing the early adopters—the audience that the other smart thermostat companies were targeting.
See, early adopters already have smart thermostats. That’s why they’re called “early adopters”. But those people only make up a small slice of the market and it’s already saturated. The real opportunity is the rest of us: normal people with busy lives who want the savings of a smart thermostat but have no interest in complex installation or wading through home energy usage by daypart stats.
COLD APPROACHES
To look at Smart Thermostat marketing, you’d be forgiven for thinking that they aren’t for normal people—they’re for the kind of tech nerds who can think of nothing better to do on a sunny day than stay inside and pore over pie charts tracking their optimal energy usage by averaged day part. No offense to those folks, but most of us are happy if the techy thing just does what it’s supposed to do, keeping our homes comfy and our energy bills down.
That’s what led us to create a new positioning and campaign.
SENSI. SMART THERMOSTATS FOR THE REST OF US.
This positioning creates clear separation between Sensi and Google Nest. After all, they’re tech companies focused on the “smart” part of “smart thermostat”. Sensi, with over a hundred years in this industry, has the expertise and heritage to own the “thermostat” part.
Our creative juxtaposes the technological sophistication and expertise of Sensi, with the simplicity of using the product. Using existing photography of the products looking fantastic in environments that might just be your own home, the work celebrates ease of installation, ease of use and the simple savings you can get from adopting a Sensi.
The campaign also works hard to deliver conversion, with sales carousels, price promotion and limited time offers.
Of course, this is a holiday promotional campaign, so we did what we always do: re-introduced the brand and led our audience through the marketing funnel. However, as we tracked and optimized the campaign, a funny thing started to happen.
SMART MEDIA
As the campaign grew and spend increased, reach and click-through rates increased as expected. However, growth in those critical KPIs actually outpaced spending increases—a powerful indicator that awareness and conversion are working in tandem to boost performance.
We were able to reduce the cost per result while increasing traffic to the landing page, making the campaign more effective.
We believe that the primary reason for these increases is brand awareness and brand attribute advertising supercharging the persuasiveness of conversion advertising.
We always say that the reason to build a brand is to leave an impact even when you aren’t advertising. It turns out that positive brand awareness is just as important when you are running advertising.
RESULTS
The campaign is already beating benchmarks. In fact, it earned a “High Performance Campaign” tag from Meta, meaning that it achieves a lower cost per result compared to ad sets with the same optimization goal run by competitors. In other words, the ads are more effective than the category.
Additionally, as increases in reach and clicks outpace spend increases, we can see efficiency and efficacy actually increasing over time and with increased spend.
We also firmly believe that this brand positioning can help propel Sensi to its rightful place as a market-leading smart thermostat. We can’t wait to build on these early successes with the next round of work.
MONTH-OVER-MONTH CAMPAIGN AVERAGES:
63%
INCREASE IN REACH
38%
DECREASE IN COST PER RESULT
EXPONENTIAL
INCREASE IN LANDING PAGE TRAFFIC (DOUBLING EA. MONTH)
