Mobile marketing: We Are Friday's campaign for The Royal Horticultural Society

Objectives

Test whether a published app from the RHS would reach and resonate with this audience sufficient to warrant publishing additional paid-for apps in future. Target:15,000 downloads in Year One.

Strategy and Targeting

The current RHS audience is predominantly over-50 and female. A large potential new audience exists, but has low awareness of the RHS and outdated perceptions of them as stuffy and offering flower shows for pensioners. This new audience are urban/suburban 30-somethings: nesting, concerned about the environment, highly technology- and media-literate, time-poor and enthusiastic owners and users of iPhones. They’re getting to grips with their new gardens and need help. An iPhone app was an obvious choice: penetration amongst the target audience was great, and the phone is a very intimate device, great for location-aware and time-relative services. Plus it ran in the face of prevailing perceptions of RHS as a stuffy association. The app was promoted through a short, tightly synchronised campaign: references were included over a one-week period in RHS’s traditional PR activity, on Facebook, Twitter and in email newsletters. It worked. And, on day three, Apple picked up the app and promoted it as “New and Noteworthy”, and we were off...The app’s a beautiful, simple, helpful experience. You tell it how much space and time you have and how green-fingered you are, and it recommends fruit and veg for you to plant, what to do when, and offers personalised frost and drought alerts. Simple. But very effective.

Results

200,000 downloads in 60 days. An average dwell time of 8.4 minutes, and an average of 3.33 sessions per user, making an average engagement time of over 28 minutes. Promotional activity to drive downloads cost £0. Cost to RHS for every minute of user engagement: 0.2p. 20,000 people clicked “buy now” for seeds. We hit number one in the AppStore “Lifestyle” apps chart, and ninth overall, ahead of Amazon, eBay, Yell, Next and Tesco. After the resounding success of this first trial, the app is being updated and expanded for the 2011 growing season.