As the largest national retailer of sporting goods, footwear and apparel in Canada, Sport Chek's mission is to inspire Canadians to live a healthy and active lifestyle.

Sport Chek realized its key demographic of 18- to 34-year-olds are consuming most media online. As a result, Sport Chek was faced with the question, "How do we get our Facebook audience into stores to make a purchase?"

In response, Sport Chek partnered with Facebook to develop the global-first "Social Flyer," with the goal of creating a measurable social campaign that digitized its paper flyer and increased brand awareness, lifted purchase intent and drove in-store sales. Facebook was selected for the campaign because it is a key brand channel for Sport Chek with a highly engaged audience of more than 700,000 fans and a comprehensive ability to target users based on demographics.

Following the success of its initial two-month test period in the Greater Toronto Area, Sport Chek expanded the campaign to reach its target audience across Ontario from March to June 2013.

The campaign was designed to optimize delivery of relevant flyer content to Ontarians weekly during the key Thursday to Sunday in-store shopping period and reach a consistent number of users in the target audience to facilitate testing against the paper flyer.

The program used a combination of organic posts, Facebook page post ads, sponsored stories, albums and video posts featuring inspirational lifestyle and product content to boost awareness and engage fans. With the Social Flyer, Sport Chek could target customers with the products that were relevant to them and where they lived by using both broad category News Feed ads and customized, product-specific right-hand side ads.

Sport Chek also designed creative elements that were compatible with the existing Facebook platform and appealing to the target audience, while being unique from other companies using Facebook for product marketing. Simultaneously, special attention had to be paid to ensure the success of the traditional print flyer was being replicated for the online community.

To achieve this, a comprehensive content production and deployment schedule was established as well as Facebook-specific photo shoots. To remain true to Sport Chek's "Your Better" brand positioning and resonate with its target audience, the retailer for the first time used custom photography to create inspirational, action-based product shots combined with concise, motivational copy. Both the copy and images served to build the connection between products and the healthy, active lifestyles of Sport Chek's core customers.

Confidential results were shared with the judges.