Knowing how to reduce your ecological footprint while living your busy, everyday life can be a challenge. But one retailer has tapped into a way to ease consumer consciousness. By selling products that were initially destined for landfill at a 20-90% discount, Swedish online store Matsmart enables their customers to benefit from lower prices for branded goods, while contributing to a more sustainable lifestyle.
With a story so current, Matsmart knew they had to put video at the forefront of their marketing strategy. To ensure a strategic approach, the retailer partnered with agency Precis Digital. “We needed to increase brand awareness while also focusing on conversions and a direct return on investment,” says Carsten Schmidt, Head of Digital Marketing at Matsmart. “This can be especially hard with a branding medium like YouTube,” explains Fanny Lundgreen, Digital Specialist at Precis.
YouTube had mainly been used for raising awareness and broadening reach, and had not been perceived as a platform for direct response marketing. But together, Matsmart and Precis Digital tried and tested different setups until they found a 3-layered structure that didn’t just drive conversions, but proved to be cost-efficient, too.
1. Awareness
The first thing Matsmart and Precis did was build a broad campaign focused on driving reach and brand awareness. To that effect, ad creatives used in this phase were longer and mostly informative.
After some trying and testing, the team discovered that using TrueView bumper teaser ads—6-second ads viewers choose to watch played before, during or after another video—in the lower end of the funnel worked best. So they decided to target in-market (people already searching for similar products) and affinity (people with relevant interests) audiences.
2. Consideration
Once people had showed an interest in the brand, the next step was to usher them into the consideration phase with a snappy, product-focused ad. “To move potential customers deeper into the funnel, we retargeted website visitors and those who had viewed the branding ad with an action-focused video displaying Matsmart’s huge, low-priced inventory,” says Lundgreen.
It was during this stage that the brand took advantage of the new interactive TrueView for shopping feature, connecting viewers directly to their products. This proved particularly successful when users had previously been exposed to a TrueView bumper teaser ad.
To maximise success throughout these first two steps, the brand ensured ad goals were clearly reflected in their call-to-action videos, encouraging viewers to either “learn more” (consideration phase), or “shop here” (conversion phase). “We also focused on cross-channel work to ensure all platforms were complementing each other,” Lundgreen adds.
3. Conversion
To ensure customers would complete their path-to-purchase, the final step was to show the last video again — only this time it included a feed of product details. Displaying great deals on various goods, the brand hoped this feed would encourage users to not only browse their website, but actually click on the feed to land on the product page.
The 3-layered plan showed strong results, driving an overall conversion rate that was 136% higher than any Search campaign Matsmart had ever run. The decision to utilise Shopping for Trueview towards the end of the funnel paid off equally well, boosting the conversion rate by 936% compared to normal TrueView ads. “But,” Lundgreen ads, “we find it very important to continually optimise, even after a campaign is set up and activated successfully.”
The great outcome proved to both Precis Digital and Matsmart that YouTube could go beyond a storytelling platform and be a powerful tool to generate conversions. Lungdreen reveals: “It’s exciting that an upper funnel such as YouTube can be so powerful in driving conversions as well – we can’t wait to continue experimenting with these new features and create even more targeted campaigns.”
Key takeaways:
- Apply a try-and-test approach to your video advertising;
- Tap into the different stages of the user journey with a multi-layered campaign;
- Combine complementing features to connect the different funnel stages, and deliver a more cohesive user journey.
