Retail

Industry: Retail, E-Commerce, International Retail Market (US) The Client If we talk about conversion volume and traffic both online and offline, the retail industry seems to be the one with the most activities amongst others. Brands are created and made visible in their markets in such a short amount of time with less and less effort. Goods are sold at prices ranging from pennies to 6-7 digits or even higher. The urge to own physical objects has become a new human need since the Industrial Era has emerged and it never drops.  However, that does not mean marketing and advertising in the retail industry is a walk in the park. In this project, our client was a Thai manufacturing company that was granted the manufacturing and distribution patent by a brand owner in the U.S.. The enterprise is famous for its explicit sexual lifestyle content since 1953. And of course, its latest product could not speak any louder – condoms. The Challenge OK. So, it’s obvious, we’re talking about sensitive content here. All marketers and advertisers in the world know how ad channels have incredibly strong restrictions for sensitive content in countless categories to protect their audience’s privacy, and sexual content is one of the most notorious one. We were on a mission to target the U.S. local markets in 3 states i.e. Texas, Florida and California. Having the past experience with the previous agency located in the U.S., our client had some difficulties working with them due mainly to Thailand-U.S. time difference, followed by loss of control in marketing, sales and advertising strategy, and lack of transparency. During the period of 10 months plus a huge amount of ad spend, their targets were never reached. (ROAS < 1). The marketing challenge? We immediately realised that our client’s product as a new brand had to fight for the market share against the U.S. staples in the condom market, at the same time, the client also had to meet the minimum sales committed to the product owner enterprise within a tight timeframe.  On top of that, don’t forget that we are talking about highly sensitive content here. Even with the right ad channels, enough budget and efficient sales channels, it’s not like we can shout out loud, “Hey! Buy these condoms, they’re cool!”, even if we wanted to.   The Intelligence & The Effort We first started by looking at the client’s available sales channels, Walmart stores and Walmart Online, Amazon, and its own sales page on Shopify and realised what the product desperately needed was an intense boost of brand awareness.  The campaign strategies were revamped. From running local radio ads targeting areas around Walmart stores, we shifted the focus to increasing online brand awareness together with search frequency which would help increase the online stores (Walmart Online and Amazon) and website traffic (Shopify page). Let’s forget about the most popular ad channels like Google display ad and Facebook ad as it’s nearly impossible to get past their content restrictions without ruining the creatives and/or the key messages. However, thanks to our past experience with XPO, we learnt that Google Search ad, native ad on websites and in-app ad are the channels that can keep it under the radar.  So these were a few channels possible for our client’s case–seemed a little limited. But to make the most out of a few channels available for us, Global Ad Exchanges feature on XPO enabled us to run ads on not only one but several different native ad platforms at the same time. Plus, it is another benefit of XPO to advertisers that not only provides (secret) room for sensitive content via the use of native ad channel, but also intelligently optimises the client’s budget on the channels and/or platforms that perform well thanks to its Cross-Channel AI Auto-Optimisation ability.  Learn more: Digital Marketing Execution at Scale: Automate and Scale Your Programmatic Campaign with XPO. The Results We started seeing results from our campaign a couple of months after the launch. The increased brand awareness showed in the significantly increased Google search frequency within the first 3 months. A 0.9 click-through rate accompanied by increased website traffic and online store (Shopify sales page, Amazon and Walmart Online).  On top of all, we have seen a significant increase in sales from all channels along with gradual improvement of the market share. What we were the happiest with was that the client felt more control in all aspects of campaign execution from building the campaign strategies, budget allocation, detail optimisation to reporting. Beyond Satisfying Results: Ideas for the Future Findings and learnings from our project with the client have opened a new path to its strategy building. Our campaign technique set a new benchmark for dealing with sensitive content and proved that it worked. And with XPO’s unique abilities, it was possible for us to push for the best results. One of XPO’s intelligence that allows endless possibilities to both agencies (platform users) and clients (result bearers) lies within its profound data extraction and data analysis capabilities. Not only did it give transparency in campaign execution and reporting, those data and analysis were used in ways that improved the client’s future plan – an intelligent growth tool based on real stats, no guessing! From our local targeting strategy by states i.e. Texas, Florida and California, XPO system allowed us to extract the in-depth performance analysis by city. Instead of only 3 big states, this information let us see into smaller detail and identify which city performed well with our campaign and product, making it possible for the client’s marketing team to develop effective future marketing campaigns for city-based execution.