CASE STUDY

From Print to Paid Social: Building Digital Awareness for Gasper Landscapes

Brafton helped Gasper Landscapes, a beloved local landscape and outdoor living brand, build its first-ever digital advertising program to reach a wider but still local high-intent audience.

Gasper Landscapes is a Pennsylvania-based outdoor living and building supply retailer with strong roots throughout Bucks, Montgomery, Delaware, Chester and Philadelphia counties. For more than 35 years, the brand has served countless customers across four major divisions: landscape, hardscape, outdoor furniture and garden center.

THE CHALLENGE

Expanding Beyond Print

Gasper Landscapes wasn’t looking to replace its successful print advertising strategy right away. But the brand did want to develop a digital presence to expand local awareness and reach potential customers where they spend their time online.

„They’d never done paid search or social advertising before,” said Samantha Dame, VP of social media at Brafton. “They’d always relied on print marketing, so this was really their first step into digital.”

That also meant that there was no historical digital advertising data for our paid social strategists to reference. This is a square-one start for our team.

4 Distinct Divisions

Another challenge was Gasper Landscape’s business diversity. The brand operates four divisions, each serving a completely different audience with distinct behaviors:

The Landscape division targets homeowners planning large and expensive outdoor projects ($100K–$200K).
Hardscape campaigns focus on contractors, professionals and DIYers.
Furniture promotions follow seasonal buying cycles.
And the Garden Center appeals to a broader local audience.

“Each division required its own audience persona,” said Samantha. “Landscape customers look very different from hardscape contractors or garden center shoppers, so every campaign needed highly localized targeting built around those audiences.”

Because many of Gasper’s customer purchases occur offline (i.e., in-store), our primary goal for this strategy was to build brand awareness and consideration to encourage website visits, engagement and ultimately drive foot traffic to brick-and-mortar locations.

Separate personas, Gasper Landscape’s focus on its physical locations and the high-consideration nature of customer buying journeys in this industry were key elements for our campaigns to ensure marketing dollars reached those most likely to convert in-store.

THE SOLUTION

Paid social advertising

A Multi-Format Meta Strategy

Brafton developed a full-funnel Meta advertising strategy designed to build awareness, encourage website engagement and support in-store visits.

Campaigns combined video and static creative throughout customer journeys — with video playing a central role in awareness campaigns. Not only did video help generate cost-efficient views, but the format also created valuable remarketing audiences for our social media team to continue nurturing down the funnel through strategic, synchronous consideration campaigns.

Brafton’s paid social media experts also conduct ongoing performance analysis, using that data to refine audiences, test recommendations, optimize ad placements, allocate budget and more.

Ahead of developing Gasper Landscape’s next set of seasonal campaigns, our strategists leveraged metrics like video completion rate and click-through rate to identify content that resonated most with audiences — so we could deliver more of that intent-aligned subject matter for each audience.

Because of our client’s localized geographic area and continued investment in physical advertising, Brafton also carefully managed campaign frequency to maintain brand visibility without overwhelming audiences.

THE OUTCOME

Building Awareness Across Every Division

6.9M+

impressions.

1.8M+

video views.

103K+

landing page visits.

600+

products added to carts.

The first phase of our engagement helped Gasper Landscapes establish a significant digital presence in its local markets. Thus far, our campaigns have generated nearly 7 million impressions and reached over 1.07 million unique potential customers throughout southeastern Pennsylvania.

Driving Strong Video Engagement

Video quickly proved its value as an effective awareness tool, generating 1.8+ million video ThruPlays on Meta platforms.

ThruPlay is a Meta advertising metric that tracks users who watch a video ad for at least 15 seconds, or to completion.

Turning Awareness Into Action

Brand awareness and visibility are top-of-funnel goals, but we also run consideration campaigns alongside to encourage meaningful customer engagement further down the funnel.

Brafton’s paid social efforts for Gasper Landscape’s core divisions have driven more than 103,000 landing page visits and generated 2,584 website searches (i.e., searches users perform on the website after arriving from an ad) and more than 600 add-to-cart actions.

“With print, you know how many catalogs you mailed, but you don’t know how many people engaged with them,” said Samantha. “Now we can see exactly how many people we reached, how many visited the website and how audiences are interacting with campaigns.”

Seasonal holiday campaigns, in particular, delivered even more results:

1.75M impressions.
456,000+ video views.
46,700+ landing page visits.

Meta campaigns created measurable increases in awareness, website engagement and high-intent customer actions aligned with overall business growth.

Further still, these metrics demonstrate how a full-funnel paid social strategy — even for a mostly offline business — can successfully introduce new audiences to a brand and its offerings, and encourage shoppers to take the next step toward a purchase or in-store visit.

Scalable Growth Through Paid Social

Brafton helped Gasper Landscapes launch its first-ever paid social program, but the partnership continues to evolve into a broader and ongoing digital marketing strategy.

Today, paid social campaigns continue across the company’s four business divisions. For the future, we’re strategizing expansions into ecommerce-focused initiatives for select product lines and continued optimization based on seasonal demand and historical performance.

Localized audience targeting, continuous testing and data-driven optimization ultimately helped our client build a scalable paid social foundation that complements traditional marketing efforts while also setting the business up for scalable digital growth.