Over the last three years HomeServe, one of the UK’s leading home cover and emergency repairs providers, has worked with RocketMill to transform how they use digital marketing to drive business performance. Looking to diversify their media activation further, they set their sights on TikTok. 

Our brief was to:

• Define the strategic role of TikTok for HomeServe
• Establish ‘pillars’ for content creation and ideas we could turn into executions 
• Execute a ‘trial’ channel launch over four months with a focus on learning from performance data to inform our long-term strategy

We tackled the brief in two phases; the first focused on platform research and strategic planning to define TikTok’s role in HomeServe’s marketing mix, ensuring content alignment to their brand values and consumer offering. 

Reaching HomeServe’s target persona, ‘Jason’ a 45-54 year-old male, on TikTok would prove challenging. ‘Jason’ only represented an audience of ~1M, so we broadened our targeting to ‘Jason adjacent’ audiences, opening up lateral interest-based targeting including home repair, life hacks, and interiors and decorating. 

The second phase involved defining content ‘houses’ based on HomeServe’s brand values and communication strategy to guide concepting and content planning for the trial period. With representation across strategy, creative, media and client leadership, we held a session to generate a pipeline of ideas, leaning into TikTok’s role as an ‘edutainment’ platform while focusing on entertainment value:

Planning the production, from talent casting, shoot and location planning to creation of scripts and storyboards, we then set about bringing our ideas to life on the platform.

We launched our first piece of TikTok content during the festive period, a tribute to Home Alone featuring the HomeServe marketing team, which garnered almost 300k views alone. Our last ‘trial’ post went live in April and, so far:

• 20 content pieces have gone live 
• We’ve achieved 3.56 million video views have been achieved with an average watch time of 01:46
• We’ve seen engagement of over 10.4k interactions including 9.7k likes, 343 comments and 930 shares 
• We’ve observed a follower increase aligned to content publication (with a 67% skew towards males)

@homeserve_uk

👏👏 Bravo 👏👏 #plumbinglife #heatingengineer #commentary #sport #clap #funny #funnyvideos #homeserve_uk

♬ original sound – HomeServe UK

“RocketMill supported us on launching an initial test on TikTok. This included crafting the strategic role, defining prime content routes – which supported our wider content calendar, and the production and delivery of channel assets.  A one stop end to end project.

Their enthusiasm, passion and knowledge of the channel made the process simple and straightforward, whilst not being afraid to challenge us when we needed to remain focused on channel needs to maximise potential results.”