In 2019, a NYC born, heritage fashion brand came to their existing agency partner, January Digital (JD), in need of a more effective marketing strategy to scale business growth.
JD and the legacy brand needed to establish a more streamlined marketing strategy that better supported their actual business objective, which meant a complete overhaul of how marketing was budgeted amongst internal teams, a change in strategy, and a focus on creating more brand awareness. This change started with the need to streamline measurement of bottom funnel and top funnel tactics so we could budget and optimize every single piece of digital media.
The primary objective of this centralized approach was to boost revenue and ROAS through increased awareness and goal oriented buying and budgeting. We worked with the brand to own execution of the full funnel digital strategy, starting with restructure of their budget, strategy, and audience targeting in a way that would utilize every stage of the marketing funnel and shift their media model toward one that achieved their business goals.
Prior to JD’s restructure, the brand’s budget and audience structure were set up according to legacy best marketing practices, and lacking in automation. The budget was divided evenly between all of their marketing channels which hindered performance, and the audience targeting was purely pixel based as opposed to utilizing the CRM, causing loss of opportunity to reach an untouched audience who did not regularly visit their site. We also found that this media structure had been in place long enough to cause a lack of budget contribution to the middle of the funnel acquisition strategy, which is a key contributor in understanding the purchase process.
We took the following steps:
Step 1: Strategic Implementation of Waterfall Budgeting Technique to Prioritize Most Effective Channels
The first step to successfully improving performance was reorganizing budgets so that they were prioritized by campaign goals, vs. being evenly distributed. At JD, we use a waterfall budgeting system, which utilizes automation to prioritize the highest performing channel by goal, and automatically adjusts the budget allocation in order to achieve the highest profitability. We implemented this budgeting technique, leveraged the data from the approach, and learned that paid search was driving the best performance. The waterfall method drove a 68% increase in Paid Search revenue almost immediately, so we set a plan to spend 71% less in display, and reinvest that in paid search.
Step 2: Effective Layering in of Automation, Analytics, and Structure Across Multiple Paid Channels to Scale Business Growth
Aside from Paid Search, we also set out to scale growth and increase ROAS across other channels as well through the use of:
1. Automation: We leveraged AI to more accurately target consumers at the lowest cost. Ultimately the performance resulted in a 53% increase of paid search conversions!
2. Analytics: We integrated more accurate tracking methodologies to inform optimizations and future decisions. Previously, the brand was optimizing their Display and Social campaigns against View Through Revenue, which was not in line with their business objectives.
3. Structure: Finally, we rebuilt their Social, Display, and Search structures from the ground up in order to develop a flexible structure that was adaptable to testing and measurement.
Step 3: Tying Brand Awareness Success back to the Full Funnel
We focused our branding campaigns around the brand’s spokesperson, a popular singer/songwriter, and leveraged our integrated audience insights to learn what parallel interest targets might work best. We then flooded them with the brand’s messages during the highly engaged time of Fashion Week. We further saturated our audience on YouTube leveraging affinity and contextual targeting to stay top of mind in every arena where our spokesperson had influence. The results showed it was working when our branding efforts drove a 94% lift in search volume, which ultimately resulted in a significant increase in incremental site revenue.
Q3 Results:
Overall Impact
Overall, we grew business revenue, increased efficiency by scaling ROAS.
Grew revenue from $628K to $822K, a 31% YoY increase
Increased efficiencies by scaling ROAS from $4 to $6, a 45% lift YoY across the funnel
Drove site traffic up 106%
Paid Search Impact
With enhanced cost efficiency and budget reorganization we scaled revenue, improved ROAS, and increased site traffic.
Through cost efficiencies, we drove 68% more revenue, scaling from $129K to $218K
Improved ROAS by 28% YoY
Drove 133% increase in site traffic for only 30% more cost
Brand Marketing Performance Impact
Through the optimizations, we were able to target a more qualified audience, which increased time spent with our ads, improved CTRs, and decreased bounce rate.
increase in time spent with the ads by 31%
Drove 206% increase in click throughs from .23% to .70%
Decreased bounce rate by 12%
Influenced revenue improved 192% YoY and achieved better cost efficiency by lowering CPMs by 42%