Cotton Council International (CCI) is the U.S. export arm charged with promoting U.S. cotton, branded COTTON USA™, globally. U.S. cotton sets the standard for quality and grading, but supply chain players didn't understand the value U.S. cotton could bring their business. CCI came to C-K to make U.S.-grown cotton matter. Shifting from B2C to B2B, and decentralized to centralized, in digital communications became critical to driving the premium perception and encouraging more uses of U.S. cotton worldwide. C-K developed "The Cotton the World Trusts," an integrated campaign utilizing localized digital, social and sales marketing to communicate U.S. cotton's value.
This marked CCI's first B2B-centric global marketing initiative. CCI had been running consumer-focused communications efforts across decentralized local operations worldwide. C-K set out to build one global brand and activate a targeted communications plan.
The objective: grow export U.S. cotton sales by X%. *
To accomplish this, we had to find a way for an organization based in the U.S. to begin new conversations with a mill manager in Vietnam, or brand manager in Italy – to elevate the value of U.S. cotton and reinforce COTTON USA as the partner these audiences were seeking. We did it through CCI's first-ever digital campaign built on
trust.
*Exact export sales growth goal is confidential and included in the confidential section for judges only.
We identified two audiences, Mills & Manufacturers and Brands & Retailers, drove cotton exports. We needed to shift a B2C strategy to B2B, focusing on these audiences in priority global markets. Not only that, they had different business needs, and CCI had separate objectives for each, so we couldn't talk to them the same way.
1. MILLS & MANUFACTURERS
- Business Needs: Look for efficiency, cost reduction and ability to create fabrics to client specs. They understand superior cotton ultimately means more productivity, as machine adjustments/issues due to contaminants or poor-quality aren't required.
- Key Markets: Vietnam, China, Pakistan, Turkey, Thailand, Bangladesh, India, Taiwan, Korea, Japan and Indonesia
2. BRANDS & RETAILERS
- Business Needs: Care most about getting products to spec in terms of quality, timing and final product cost, plus sustainability and labor standards under which the input (cotton) was grown.
- Key Markets: Hong Kong, China, United Kingdom, France, Germany, Italy, Spain, Japan
We needed a powerful message that would reach two niche audiences in various geographic regions through market-specific flights. We had to think "global" and create multi-channel content to leverage across COTTON USA operations worldwide to successfully educate and connect the supply chain.
Making COTTON USA the go-to cotton provider among the supply chain relied on three strategies:
- Creating localized engagement opportunities to the tell the U.S. cotton story
- Reaching B2B audiences worldwide through people and places that influence them
- Inserting U.S. cotton points of difference into global conversation
To successfully implement these strategies, we kept key considerations in mind:
- Since our audience members were out there in the digital ecosystem but finding them wasn't as simple as reaching a U.S. Millennial male, we needed highly targeted executions to be efficient and impactful.
- Trust doesn't just happen, so we couldn't simply deliver a pitch for U.S. cotton – it was crucial our content provided valuable business resources for partners.
- We were balancing cultural and linguistic barriers in our delivery, so every video, white paper, article, email, media and social unit was translated into 12 languages.
We set out to make COTTON USA synonymous with trust across channels – and markets – worldwide:
- We built a centralized COTTON USA website. It served as the hub where all digital communications drove, enabling COTTON USA to become the supply chain connector like never before.
- C-K launched COTTON USA's digital presence, executing different tactics, from IP to location-based targeting, to prospect and retarget decision makers – efficiently finding our audiences and running our message across 17 markets.
- We leveraged LinkedIn and Facebook as B2B tools, activating highly targeted campaigns, based on job title, level, industry and geography unique to our two audiences.
- Aware of linguistic barriers, C-K developed long- and short-form video to tell our story across the ecosystem. Knowing we had to communicate different key benefits to mills/manufacturers and brands/retailers, we developed content for both.
We brought digital content to 1:1 communication too, like globally distributed emails, sales presentations and kits for local teams to share in meetings, plus trade show materials for COTTON USA's footprint.
We worked the entire digital ecosystem worldwide, and our marketing efforts have been attributed by the client as a key contributor to helping achieve the objective.
- Objective: Grow export sales X%* by increasing the demand for U.S. cotton outside the U.S.
- Results: Overall growth in export sales exceeded goal by 137.5%. In the six largest cotton-importing countries, shipments (bales) increased in the double digits (China 15%; Vietnam 13%; Indonesia 20%; Bangladesh 58%; Pakistan 56%; Thailand 25%)
- Traffic to the COTTON USA website across all markets increased 83%, and traffic specific to the six priority import countries listed above increased by 147%.
- We increased downloads, rep contacts, video views and email subscriptions via the website overall by 39%.
- The cost per landing page visit rate from geotargeting media in M/M audiences efficiently netted out to $1.40 and accounted for 37% of all paid display site visits.
- On social, we outperformed overall LinkedIn CTR benchmarks by 234% (M&M campaigns) and 149% (B&R campaigns). We were also able to leverage Facebook extremely efficiently, seeing an average CPC of $0.48, which is 81% below B2B benchmark, by optimizing both bids and creative to reach our niche target.
- Our target saw us as a resource on social too, growing our LinkedIn (+43%) and Facebook (+4.8%) followings.
*Exact export sales growth goal is confidential and included in the confidential section for judges only.
