Scale the business. Quickly. Claim the market share and spread our wings so that we can tighten our grip on the market. We need as many of our bottles out there as possible. We need Chilly's Everywhere.
When we began working with Chilly's back in 2017, we knew we had an exciting challenge ahead of us. With a hundred reusable bottle companies all promising the same thing - "we keep your water cold, we love the planet, there's no one else like us" - we knew we had to start to build a community around the Chilly's brand, and fast. We realised we first needed a concrete campaign, a creative platform if you will, to base all of our content and strategy around. What resulted was a branded hashtag. Urgh. Gross.
Who on earth wants to use a branded hashtag in this day and age? Unless you're going to give me some free stuff, I would rather curl up into a ball and roll down a muddy hill than use your brand's hahstag anywhere near my personal feed. Am I right? No, you're wrong. Filthy wrong in fact. We have run our #ChillysEverywhere hashtag since we began working with Chilly's in 2017 and simply can't remove it from our strategy, as it works so well. If it's not broke, don't fix it. This has been an ongoing thing too - and something that, over time has grown in popularity organically. Not by us shoving it down the gobs of our followers like some unwanted, warm shot of tequila. You take your Chilly's Bottles everywhere. You see Chilly's Bottles everywhere. You see Chilly's Bottles everywhere on social. It just makes sense for people to use it. So they do. In their droves.
We then started to focus our efforts on creative execution. Rather than creating big, expensive brand videos, we focused on a series of social-first, short and snappy videos that stopped people in their tracks (and feeds!). We tested hard - with 4,358 different variations of adverts over the year. We tapped into current cultural trends - such as Rose Gold, Avocado and Flamingo. It's safe to say the fans went nuts.
We hit our target audience from multiple angles in the feed, layering a micro-influencer campaign on top of our paid spend. We worked with 15micro-influencers over a period of six months to increase our reach and influence. We also undertook product collaborations with Pret A Manger, Refill UK, Emma Bridgewater and influencer powerhouse Zanna van Dijk.
We utilised the power of social proof, concentrating on a few key bottle designs as eye grabbers before taking people down the funnel. We let our customers do our selling for us, with our community flooding the comments of each post with positive testimonials.
"I didn't know I needed a water bottle until I saw Chilly's Bottles in my news feed."
Daryl Hughes, Head of eCommerce UK at Facebook, in his opening remarks at Facebook's Christmas in July event.
The social results are impressive enough by themselves.
1.6 million engagements.
300,000 new fans and followers.
6,000 #ChillysEverywhere user-generated posts (Instagram)
But all of that means nothing unless it all had a tangible impact on the bottom line. Luckily, we managed to have our cake and eat it too.
200,000+ bottles sold.
2.56x Return on Advertising Spend.
#ChillysEverywhere: Since rolling this hashtag out to Chilly's fans across all social channels back in Spring 2017, we have had 6,021 uses of #ChillysEverywhere on Instagram alone, as well as countless more on Facebook and Twitter. This a total mixed bag of authentic user generated content, which naturally builds a brand and a community around how people are using their Chilly's Bottle. We have been able to develop content pillars off the back of these results, as a basis of which to build the brand further and create valuable content for our fans. Chilly's have even developed patterns and designs based on findings from the hashtag. You can now buy Chilly's Bottles inspired by travel, summer, food and drink, sport and fitness, winter activities, hiking plus much more - all of which have appeared over the past 20 months in the hashtag.
