Digital Marketing

Kohl’s Black Friday

Being the second largest department store chain in America Kohl’s is expected to drive customers into their stores on Black Friday, the busiest day of the year.  Kohl’s needs to stay ahead of the game and gain the attention of shoppers, this year they are getting help from Weber Shandwick.  Together they developed a media strategy which includes a trivia contest offering prizes, and reaching out to customers by dealing with them in the act of shopping. They teamed up with Disney’s Frozen and they were the head of the Frozen conversation. Kohl’s asked the first trivia question at the American Music Awards and that created a lot of conversation and helped Kohls accomplish their goals. Kohl’s made top brand in the overall Black Friday conversation.  Most of the mentions came from Twitter, and they consistently made the Trending Top List.  These two campaigns gave Kohl’s a very nice advantage from the beginning. They achieved being a go-to-source for Black Friday.

The social strategy started with the AMA’s when they aired a commercial about the sweepstakes for Black Friday. They next day Kohl’s launched a Twitter contest (#KohlsSweeps) where people can win gift cards if they answer the trivia question correctly.  There were tweets sent out before the actual question to get more people to participate and create build up.  This helped a lot more consumers to look at the Kohl’s Twitter page. They also posted content for the contest every fifteen minutes which maintained their social presence. The other campaign that is going on is Frozen.  Kohl’s has had a partnership with them since 2014 and is considered one of the top retailers for Frozen merchandise.

Kohl’s held the title for top organic trending hashtag during the Black Friday hours. 64% of brand mentions were for Kohl’s. According to Nate Koch the Social Marketing Planner at Kohl's “Overall, Kohl's saw a 234% shift in percentage of positive sentiment during Black Friday week, gained over 11K new fans across social platforms, and generated over 370K Twitter mentions, resulting in over 255MM potential impressions. The retailer surpassed 2013 results by 400%, with 450K total engagements received on Twitter during the campaign timeframe (inclusive of paid content). On Twitter, the engagement rate grew 35% from 11/24-11/27, as excitement and awareness for the contest continued to build”.