Most businesses face fluctuations in sales due to seasonality. This is especially true for those whose business is completely dependent on seasonality. Fluctuations in demand, seasonal or event-specific restrictions, high competition, limited time to attract orders, etc. are the main problems faced by such businesses.
However, even they are not doomed to losses due to large advertising budgets!
In this case study, you’ll learn how our marketing department helped our customer receive more than 270 applications and about 510 B2B calls in a limited period of one month.
Here is a brief summary of our results in one month:
The CMO of the project is Serhii Soloviov.
Our service is an outsourced marketing department: website audit, analytics setup, Facebook ADS and Google ADS setup and launch.
Case navigation:
- Our customer
- Stage one. Identification of needs
- Stage two. Research
- Our team
- Our workflow
- Results
- Recommendations
Approximate time to read the case – 10 minutes
Our customer
GIFTS FOR YOU is an online store of sweet gifts for the New Year and other holidays.
Features of our customer:
Stage one. Identification of needs
We held a consultation with our customer and found that:
- the project is seasonal and focused mainly on the New Year holidays;
- the customer had not been marketing for a long time, the last advertising campaign was launched a year ago. He recently launched it again, but got no results.
Accordingly, the customer’s need is to quickly launch advertising campaigns to receive inquiries and calls for the New Year in a limited period of one month.
Stage two. Research
When we start working on a new project, we always conduct marketing research. It helps us find answers to the following questions:
Taking into account the customer’s needs and the results of the research, we built a promotion strategy that would help achieve the goals quickly:
- improve the company’s website to increase the number of conversions;
- set up analytics to track conversions for further website or advertising optimization;
- set up effective lead generation to attract the maximum number of applications and calls in a limited period of time.
Our team
After consulting with the customer and conducting research, we form a team of specialists who will be able to fulfill all the tasks.
Workflow
After completing all the preparatory stages, we started working on the implementation of our strategy.
1. Increase the efficiency of the website
Step 1. We analyzed the CJM (customer journey map) – the customer’s path from clicking on an ad to sending a request for wholesale purchase of New Year’s gifts and sweets.
Why did we start with website analysis? Our goal is not just to launch advertising, but also to achieve the maximum number of requests from potential customers. Since the success of converting traffic into requests depends on the quality of the website, we analyzed it in detail.
The result. We figured out what exactly needed to be changed on the website and provided the customer with a list of recommendations. Some of them are shown below.
A fragment of our recommendations for website improvement:
A fragment of recommendations at the stage of adding an item to the cart:
2. Set up analytics
We have set up conversion tracking in Google Analytics, namely:
This step-by-step tracking allows us to monitor the entire customer ordering process to understand if the customer is falling off at any step and fix it in time.
3. Prepare the terms of reference and examples for the implementation of the product feed on the website
A product feed is a file with data about each product of the company and its characteristics, such as name, description, price, image, and unique identifiers. Using a product feed allows you to run ads for all products simultaneously.
In this case, we will show you how to set up a product feed on the Horoshop platform. However, not every website can do this on its own – in most cases, you need the help of a website developer. Therefore, we prepared a technical task and handed it over to the developer for implementation.
4. Set up and run Google ADS
Our goal is to get wholesale orders from large enterprises, schools, kindergartens, clubs, and charitable organizations. To achieve this goal, we have created an advertising campaign that is divided into areas and groups:
We also set up a separate remarketing campaign. This way, we covered the entire range of targeted requests and optimized costs.
5. Set up and launch Facebook ADS
On Facebook and Instagram, we focused only on bulk orders for large businesses and launched ads on the website, lead form, and quiz. The latter turned out to be the least effective for this topic.
We chose a “broad” audience because our Pixel received a lot of targeted traffic from Google ADS, which helped speed up the optimization process.
The ads were split between Facebook and Instagram to compare their performance. We found that Instagram works better as a remarketing tool than for driving cold traffic.
Three offers were tested:
We received the most applications from the last offer – the conversion to the checkout stage was 19.4%.
6. Create advertising creatives
We created and tested dozens of advertising creatives that were used in our advertising campaigns. To make them, we analyzed the target audience, its needs and preferences in depth.
Below are some of the creatives we have created:
Results of our work
In 1.5 months of active work, we have achieved:
Recommendations for the online store
To improve overall marketing results, we’ve compiled a list of recommendations:
- For projects where the majority of requests are made via calls, we recommend installing call tracking. This will help you determine how many requests/calls are received from advertising.
For call tracking, we recommend using UniTalk, a platform that provides call tracking, IP telephony, call recording, and more.
Call tracking helps to identify the advertising source of calls and evaluate the effectiveness of advertising campaigns, correctly allocate the advertising budget and improve customer service.
- Develop a retail assortment to reduce the impact of seasonality.
- Create a calendar of promotions and actively use it in advertising campaigns.
- Develop a feedback page and a process for collecting feedback from customers.
- Create landing pages and quizzes that can be used as landing pages for various holidays and occasions.
- Implement email marketing to attract regular orders from retail customers.
- Create and launch a blog to attract new customers from organic search for medium and low-frequency queries free of charge.
- Introduce affiliate programs so that company employees order products here.
- Create a content strategy for social media to keep customers interested in the company.
- Install an end-to-end analytics system to track the effectiveness of advertising from interaction with an ad to a sale.
