While Polypipe Building Products are well-known as a brand for designing and manufacturing a wide range of plastic piping products, they needed visibility on a new product in a competitive market. SLG’s aim was to increase sales of PBP’s PolyMax fitting, predominantly through over-the-counter sales at national trade merchants, by driving end-user demand (plumbing and heating engineers).

Research commissioned by SLG found that one of the key barriers to installers changing brand was a lack of familiarity: even when people knew the Polypipe brand, they still wouldn’t risk switching without having a sense of how the product performed. This was particularly true in younger, apprentice-level plumbers, whose brand choice was still malleable. The key metric in this case was to get products in the hands of prospects through sample requests.

To effectively target professional plumbers and heating engineers, we utilised Facebook’s advanced targeting options. By creating lookalike audiences from a list of highly engaged users from Polypipe’s active customer database, and several broader-reach audiences from additional profiles developed by SLG, we were able to reach and engage the most relevant users and deliver high-quality leads at a lower cost for maximum effectiveness. Crucially, it meant that we were able to capitalise on existing demand, rather than trying to build the Polypipe (or PolyMax) brand for the long term.