SEKONDA
Leading SEKONDA’s biggest re-positioning across social.
Overview.
Sekonda is the no-nonsense watch brand you’ve probably seen on TV, social media, or even own one of the watches yourself. At the end of 2021, Cite was commissioned to bring the biggest rebrand and re-positioning in Sekonda’s 100-year history, ‘No Time For Nonsense’, to life.
I became Social Lead, planning their quarterly strategy, writing content and training their social team.
Role: Account Lead
Sector: Retail
Agency: Cite
Brief.
SEKONDA has been selling watches for over 100 years, several times being crowned the UK’s bestselling watch brand. They faced two challenges - an ageing audience and an e-commerce-first world. To combat this, they launched a huge rebranding and repositioning.
It was our task to now roll this out onto social media, increasing followers and developing a community within the C1-D demographic, all while converting new leads on their newly released e-commerce store.
Response.
We defined 6 content types which would steer our strategy and content.
TIME - Clocks going back, etc
CULTURAL - Christmas, Mother’s Day, etc
PRODUCT - National Fitness Day (Smart Watch), etc
NTFN - Tell a Lie Day, April Fools, etc
BRAND PILLAR/IRREVERENCE - National Tongue Twister Day, etc
PERSONAS - Football, Sports, TV shows, etc
Then, mapped these to x4 measurable KPI’s:
Engagement 📈
Tapping into cultural moments/trends, outstanding community management, conducting fun competitions, and getting engaged with influencers and fans.
Conversions 💰
Setting up Social Commerce on Facebook/Instagram so fans can shop while browsing content, running paid ads and posting a variety of lifestyle and aspirational content.
Reach 🌎
Collaborating with large and small influencers, continually testing new audiences through new product launches and running our content alongside TV placements.
Followers ❤️
Introducing the ‘Win It Wednesday’ concept, sharing a mix of UGC to encourage fan participation on social and just creating simply great content (like their watches).
Standout product launches.
Every product launch for Sekonda was a big deal, as it should be. The brand was in the process of streamlining its product range, and every time new collections were released via eCommerce, it was down to us to work collaboratively with their in-house team to give it a huge splash.
Combining assets pre-created by Sekonda with our ideas, we would hype up their existing audience with engaging social content like ‘This or That’, polls or tying the watches to cultural moments in the world.
Nurturing a community.
One of the key ways we planned to nurture and develop our community of followers was through user-generated content.
Millions of people wear a Sekonda watch every day, and a large percentage of those same people share it on social. We ran ‘As Seen On You’ every other week, where we’d share our favourite watch/outfit photos when we’d been tagged.
Not only did this encourage others to get involved, but it also gave us new avenues of brand awareness and inadvertently made thousands of people advocates for the brand. By audience members sharing photos with their watch on their feed, it allowed us to reach their followers indirectly.
Introducing competitions.
In addition to our paid-ad plans, we saw the value in hosting organic competitions across social media to start reaching new audiences. Early on, we began a recurring community-led competition called ‘Win It Wednesday’, which was aimed at generating new followers, engaging our existing fans and creating a buzz on a weekly basis in the community.
In the longer term, we dedicated a small amount of our budget towards this campaign and targeted a younger demographic to the current Sekonda audience, running social ads on Facebook and Instagram and encouraging page likes/followers to get involved.
Once a customer had liked/followed, the user would stop receiving the ads and would be in the prize draw for a watch. Each week, we would announce a new winner into the ‘Winners Circle’, where we shared their profile on our story to re-generate the excitement and encourage further sharing - it also allowed us to get more UGC (user-generated content) for our feed. Win-win!
Working with influencers.
Influencers are an extremely effective way to tap into relevant audiences and convert them to your brand. Over the years, working with Sekonda, we collaborated with several influencers (big and small) during key product launches or seasonal trading moments. While this was a smaller segment of our wider strategy, the buzz around influencers helped reach the younger audiences we desired. It also allowed us to tap into a much more interactive audience and build connections during seasonal peaks.
New audiences via paid.
With the assigned budget available, we ran paid ads on Instagram and/or Facebook, pushing various creative routes to new audiences, A/B testing and carefully adjusting the spending to maximise potential.
When targeting was successful (and the audiences were now aware of Sekonda) we handed these segments over to the paid team so they could target them with a different ad format which was more conversion-focused - and then we (the brand team) could focus our budget on testing for new people and getting the brand in front of new younger audiences.
This exercise was much more than just reaching new audiences; it helped us identify new growth areas for the brand, drove new traffic to the website that may not have visited (or been interested) beforehand and either provided conversions or useful insight.
Crafting relevant content.
The final part of our strategy was around being seen in moments of cultural significance. Whether it be a trend or something world-renowned, we wanted to be there.
From Spotify Wrapped to the likes of WORDLE and Top Gun, there was always something we tied to watches. It was always fun being commissioned to be this fun and creative for a brand; often cropping watches onto dogs, thinking how we can be cheeky on Valentine’s and take the mick at Christmas. This ‘fun’ approach was all to target a younger demographic and change perceptions on the brand.
-
Nonsense Pit
ROLE: Social Media Support
ABOUT: The Nonsense Pit is a direct response to support Sekonda’s campaign messaging of ‘No Time For Nonsense’ at the end of 2021. It was a micro-site, that can be reused in future, created for users to drop what they felt was nonsense into a digital black hole, and then vote on other people’s nonsense. It was quite therapeutic!
CAMPAIGN: We ran paid ads across social to promote the ‘pit’, got people engaged via Instagram Stories and incentivised people with a watch if they signed in using Facebook. It was found, pretty fast, that the User Flow was causing barriers to entry - which were fixed and tested as the campaign was ongoing. We wanted to make it as easy as possible to enter & vote on other nonsense.
-
Watch Match
ROLE: Project Lead, Social Media Content
ABOUT: Panicking about what to get your Dad on Father’s Day? You can’t go wrong with a Sekonda. To get our audience engaged, we built a fun and interactive quiz which determines what type of Dad you have (and which watch they’d best suit). Not only was this a great way to encourage conversions, it also gave us further insight into the audience of Sekonda (by their results) and was generally a fun/shareable tool to people.
CAMPAIGN: We ran x4 different paid campaigns around Father’s Day, x2 were focused on conversions (a separate objective) and x2 around our game. Our team tested x5 audiences; new parents, Etsy, Boots, MoonPig and LastMinute. The aim was to offer people an alternative to the usual Father’s Day gifts.
Results.
We supported SEKONDA in their long-term plan of re-positioning as a brand, made their new smartwatch range contribute to 80% of their overall sales consecutively and set in motion the tone of voice for the future.
