Fender: How Found delivered 10 times the average CTR for Fender's digital campaign

Fender, founded in 1946, is a brand that’s been synonymous with music for decades. Their guitars have transformed music worldwide, across all ages, in nearly every genre. Influencing famous musicians to aspiring artists, Fender guitars have always been a status symbol in the music industry.

This year, Fender launched the American Professional Range, which involved five of their most recognisable guitars being re-envisioned and aimed at a brand new audience. The brand focused on appealing to a new generation of seasoned guitarists, and those just starting out on their musical journeys.

CHALLENGE: AMPLIFIED AWARENESS

We needed to start making some serious noise for Fender. Some. Serious. Noise.

Our mission was simple: use the exciting launch of the American Professional Range to drive awareness.

The real challenge was to make sure we were being as effective as possible - how could we guarantee that Fender would resonate with its target audience, whilst not wasting spend on the people it wouldn’t move?

We needed to get the campaign in front of as many musicians as possible on a limited budget. This meant that we needed put a lot of emphasis on the WHO and the HOW to engage with the target audience.

STRATEGY: A FINELY TUNED CAMPAIGN

In preparation for our Video and Display campaigns, we augmented Fender’s own research with a multitude of audience data from Google Analytics. By combining it with demographics and affinity interest category data we were able to define very specific audiences and fine tune our messaging.

Our research team also interrogated the online behaviour of the identified audience segments by leveraging GWI - a cutting edge digital consumer insights tool, to build up an incredibly detailed landscape of our target audience, mapping out their online behaviour.

With the blueprints of our target audiences in hand, we set about building multiple hyper-granular campaigns across YouTube, Facebook and Google Display Network.

In addition, through careful analysis of the video campaign, we assembled an even broader list of refined custom audiences. This allowed us to implement an even smarter retargeting campaign.

Highly engaged users were identified and then retargeted with more detailed video content.

The results? A list of people we could say with complete confidence were interested in the Fender AP range, and even which guitar model they preferred.

Finally, remarketing was taken even further by using these lists of people across multiple channels - from YouTube, to Display to Facebook. Interactive carousel and canvas content was used on Facebook, driving potential buyers to personalised pages on the Fender site.

Success? We think so.

RESULTS.

Our diligent approach to audience targeting helped it exceed all industry and sector benchmarks for engagement, showing Fender the real value of their digital marketing budget. The average CTR for ‘Music & Audio’ Google display banners in the UK is 0.06%. This campaign delivered a CTR over 10 times that at 0.62% highlighting the accuracy of the targeting.

8.9M IMPRESSIONS ON YOUTUBE

2.4m video views - resulting in 2.2 years of Fender video content being watch

37% OF ALL VIDEO VIEWS UNSKIPPED

Which drove over 12,000 highly qualified and engaged users, working out at at a cost of just £0.01 per view!

OVER 48,000 EARNED VIEWS

The impact wasn’t just limited to paid! Earned Subscribers, Playlist additions, extra Likes and Shares a-plenty!