Driving Retail Engagement Across Europe Through a Targeted Paid Media Strategy for KEF

KEF is a premium British audio company known for its high-end loudspeakers, subwoofers, and audio systems. They combine science and innovation with a luxury aesthetic to give audiences a stylish product with great sound.

They were the first loudspeaker manufacturer to implement the use of computers in their loudspeaker designs and have designed speakers for multiple uses, including car interiors and home cinema surround sound.

KEF has a network of retailers across Europe, and knows that when consumers are looking to spend their money on a luxury speaker, they should be able to hear what it sounds like first.

To support their retail partners, KEF wanted us to deliver a paid media campaign that was focused on building awareness of their retailer demos across the UK, France, Germany, the Netherlands, and Spain. The aim was to improve the number of demos booked while keeping paid media spend targeted towards those most likely to engage with the brand.

As a completely new initiative, there was no previous activity to benchmark against, meaning success would depend on building an effective strategy from the ground up. 

This campaign had a short time-frame, and launching a campaign spanning multiple European markets comes with its challenges. The campaign relied on accurate retailer location targeting across these regions, which meant we needed to work closely with the KEF team, providing guidance on location setup and creating individual retailer locations to make sure they were correctly configured before launch. 

The campaign needed to balance KEF’s premium brand identity with platform best practices. While maintaining consistency across creative was important, we also needed to ensure the campaign assets were designed to maximise performance within Meta’s advertising environment. 

During planning, we looked at several platform options before identifying Meta as the strongest opportunity to deliver retailer-focused activity using the available budget.

To make the campaign as efficient as possible, we consolidated campaign structures to increase audience reach, making the media spend work harder. Instead of targeting broad awareness audiences, our strategy was more about reaching users who had already demonstrated interest in KEF.

We built campaigns specifically for previous website visitors, existing followers, and users who had engaged with KEF’s digital activity. These audiences were then combined with geo-targeting around participating retailer locations to encourage demo bookings. 

Alongside campaign delivery, we worked closely with KEF to refine creative assets, ensuring they aligned with Meta’s recommendations, without compromising the premium brand identity.

By combining highly-targeted audiences with location-based messaging, the campaign created a scalable framework that could support retailer activity across multiple European markets.

Between 24th February and 31st March, the campaign outperformed benchmarks across the board for the consumer electronics/premium audio sector. This signified that the creative content resonated with the intended audiences and aligned well with the campaign’s target demographics.

While these benchmarks provide a useful reference point for this initial campaign, our focus going forward will shift towards conversion-based metrics. As we build on the learnings from this activity and optimise towards lower-funnel objectives, success will be measured by metrics such as cost per acquisition and return on ad spend, rather than awareness benchmarks alone.

KEF also reported an increase in retailer demos across participating locations during the campaign period. While several factors contribute to this performance, the campaign demonstrated the value of using Paid Media to support retailer engagement through highly targeted, location-based activity.