Social Quiz Boosts Brand Awareness for Essense Designs

For many, wedding planning begins well before the question is asked. It is dreamt about from a young age, picturing walking down the aisle. Stella York, an Essense Designs brand, creates elegant, sophisticated wedding dresses that turns brides’ dreams of what they’re wearing as they take those steps down the aisle into a reality.

The Ask

Essense Designs came to DEG looking to increase brand awareness for Stella York during the peak wedding engagement period from Thanksgiving to Valentine’s Day.

The Answer

Understanding Stella York’s audience and business objectives, DEG used its digital marketing expertise to design a sharable quiz to raise awareness of the brand, and also develop a strategy to promote the quiz on Stella York’s social channels. The quiz, named “What is your bridal style?” was integrated into Essense Designs’ blog “Pretty Happy Love.” The decision to create a quiz, versus other social tactics, was due to the relevance and popularity of social quizzes – particularly among Stella York’s target audience of 18-24 year old women, who also happen to be the brand’s most engaged audience. This quiz allowed the brand to capitalize on the interaction with not only women planning their weddings, but also with women who are single or in relationships.

The campaign, through both paid and organic efforts, garnered 2.24 million impressions and a click-through-rate of 2.85 percent.

“What is your bridal style?” was an image-focused quiz allowing users to receive preference recommendations based on their results. Focusing on style recommendations makes the quiz valuable to the user, while also exhibiting the range of Stella York’s dress designs. The quiz was developed on Qzzr, a tool that helps companies create online quizzes, and DEG incorporated both email and social media strategies into the promotion. DEG created an email that was sent to stores carrying Stella York dresses when the campaign launched and was wrapping up, providing promotional materials and encouraging the stores to publicize the quiz on their own social media pages.

DEG also took charge of promoting the quiz heavily on Stella York’s social channels. The rate in which people share content on Facebook made it a natural choice for advertising the quiz. DEG created a proactive content campaign supporting the types of bridal styles included in the quiz. Paid media tactics also were used on Facebook through a series of ads showcasing the bridal themes and driving traffic to the quiz. Since 90 percent of brides’ wedding inspiration comes directly from what they’ve seen on Pinterest, DEG also developed a board dedicated to each bridal style result found in the quiz.

The Result

The quiz accomplished its goal of driving awareness through engagement season, as tens of thousands engaged with the social campaign.

“Overall, our expectations were exceeded,” said Wallace Wilson, Digital Marketing Manager for Essense Designs. “We were not sure what to expect as far as how many people would take, complete, or share the quiz, so we were amazed to see it completed almost 45K times and shared 1,700 times during the first month. Within the first two weeks of the quiz, we saw a spike in traffic from Facebook of 582 percent. We also saw 1,687 new Pinterest fans, which was nine times better than our growth the previous month when the contest was not running.”

The campaign, through both paid and organic efforts, garnered 2.24 million impressions and a click-through-rate of 2.85 percent. The paid ads alone generated a click-through-rate of 3.19 percent, and DEG was able to keep the campaign at a cost per click of less than $0.15. DEG’s creative social engagement approach received an increase of buzz for the Stella York brand during an important time of year in the bridal industry, and helped brides-to-be discover the style that would fit them best on their big day.