Campaign: Virtual Road Trips

Client: Mitsubishi Motors

Agency: CarsGuide Labs in partnership with Wavemaker

Background 

Mitsubishi Motors is a top-five automotive car brand in Australia with 200 dealerships located around the country. When the global pandemic broke out in 2020, Mitsubishi was faced with the challenge of maintaining its retail sales volume and contact with its customer base in the face of several lockdowns. With dealerships, particularly those in Victoria, closed for extensive periods, Mitsubishi Motors turned to digital content to create an always on touchpoint with its future and current customer base.

Objective

The key objective was to create digital content that engaged a broad audience in an experiential way in the same manner that a Mitsubishi retailer would. Another key metric was organic traffic with the Mitsubishi team keen to grow brand awareness while in-person events were difficult to coordinate.

To achieve this result, Mitsubishi’s Media Agency Wavemaker worked with CarsGuide Labs to formulate a digital content proposal. CarsGuide Labs harnessed top Google trends to analyse what search terms consumers were engaging with. Following this analysis, it was shown that search volumes for ‘road trips’ was at an all-time high with CarsGuide Labs finding that average road trip searches had increased by 104 percent year on year and key searches like ‘The Ultimate Australian Road Trip’ saw an increase of 529 percent in June 2020. This formed the basis for the content theme allowing CarsGuide Labs, Wavemaker and Mitsubishi to then develop the channel delivery.

Strategy

Wavemaker and Mitsubishi made the decision early on to host the content hub on the CarsGuide website with amplification across social media channels. The reasoning behind using the CarsGuide website as the central content hub was that it was capable of hosting a data rich webpage ensuring a longer dwell time for visitors and a true digital experience as per Mitsubishi’s objectives. CarsGuide Labs also ensured that pictures, video, map graphics and a 3D visualisation of the vehicle on location were included within the brief to create multiple engagement points for visitors.

Speaking about the concept behind the activation Tim Flattery, Head of CarsGuide Labs, said: “There was a period when search engines rewarded online experiences for being light weight, easy to load and with minimal rich content elements on the page. However, as the technology has evolved so too has our ability to create engaging digital experiences that cause the audience to dwell and absorb the content that is available to them.”

Flattery added that the inclusion of 3D visualisation technology has been hugely successful, particularly in the automotive and travel industry where being able to visualise something is key to building people’s excitement.

In particular, this campaign set out to target a broader audience and so looked at ways to make the content more pertinent and relatable. After a year that included flooding, bushfires and COVID-19, there was a need to support businesses outside of major cities in Australia.

With that in mind, the project team made the decision to include regional businesses in the recommended road trip journey enabling the campaign to shine a light on the plight of businesses in country NSW and encourages Aussies to get out and explore their own backyard.

Execution

The first road trip was rolled out in December 2020 with the second published in February 2021 providing longevity, and ensuring each piece of content wasn’t compete against the other for search traffic. Both were amplified with strategic paid media via Wavemaker and Mitsubishi was able to maintain an always on approach to customer outreach. This was of crucial importance to Mitsubishi who were keen to stand out as many automotive brands competed for their share of voice online in an attempt to replicate the normal in-person outreach undertaken by both the brand and its dealerships.

Speaking about the initiative, Karen Bradley, senior manager of marketing at Mitsubishi Motors Australia, said: “Customers still want to see and experience their next car. When the lockdowns were announced across Australia, we couldn’t deliver this experience for customers. The automotive market was confronted with a sharp decline in leads and sales. We were seeking a new and inventive way to offer our customers the driving experience they expect when they visit any Mitsubishi showroom, but this time online.

“The CarsGuide Labs virtual drive routes offer both current owners and prospects the ability to take a virtual test drive to an aspirational destination here in Australia. At that time, they helped us to maintain an important presence in the market when it was difficult to test drive a vehicle.

“There has been a v-shaped recovery for Mitsubishi Motors and the industry, and we’re in a strong position to capitalise upon these gains as the content continues to receive positive customer feedback and generate enquiries for dealers.”

Results

Overall, the campaign delivered above average dwell times for readers who were required to spend 21 minutes absorbing the text, videos graphics and 3D virtual scan elements of the initiative. The Pajero Sport road trip on the South Coast was the best performing with users having an average dwell time of 9 minutes and 33 seconds. Users were also drawn to the 3D scans with the interior tour of the Eclipse Cross proving the most popular receiving 7,157 views from 5,543 unique users.

Speaking about these results Wavemaker CEO, Peter Vogel, said: “This initiative shows is that there is a genuine appetite for engaging content. In fact, based on the interest in the virtual road trips story we were able to develop complimenting content series including a competition on social media for followers to win their own weekend away. It was the research and analysis into search trends that enabled us to focus on the core content theme for the integrated experience.”

“In an age of information overload, it can be a fight for cut through,” added Flattery. “What the Mitsubishi road trip has proven is that there is still a strong appetite to experience things online. People are increasingly digitally literate and technology like 3D virtual scans enables us to deliver genuine online experiences that go some way to breaching the gap between virtual and reality. There is no substitute for real world experience, but equally there is no excuse for sub-par online experiences that don’t maximise the technology we have available.”

Background:

The International Rose Garden Festival is an annual celebration of award winning rose arbours, garden beds and trees transformed into festival by lighting, performance and sound held in Latrobe Valley for its third consecutive year. As a food and wine fiesta, this event is traditionally run as an in-person community stallholder event in which producers showcase amazing produce from the Gippsland region. Visitors typically enjoy a relaxing picnic-style setting amongst the main attraction of the rose garden itself, underscored by musicians, international presenters and performers over the course of three days.

As the limitations of in-person festivals were realised, Latrobe City Council enlisted the help of global events agency Alive Events to move this festival into a virtual tour environment. The 2020 festival was a hybrid style event encompassing a light installation in the rose garden and an online virtual live broadcast on the 14th and 15th of November. The virtual event featured many of the previous festival’s elements the audience knows and loves. Such as talks, workshops, stall holders and children’s entertainment, however, the virtual experience was interactive for viewers. Attendees were able to engage with the presenters, post questions, and take part in polls, live chats and workshops all from the comfort and safety of their home, anywhere in the world.

Objective:

The key objective of the production was to convert the traditional community festival into a quality, accessible virtual event where the client could produce and stream a well-paced, informative and engaging program for an audience ranging from children to seniors.

It was imperative to have the event available to all attendees wherever they were located around the world, on a mobile, tablet or computer. The client’s aim was to do so by collating content from Rosarians and entertainers from Latrobe, USA, UK, Sydney and Adelaide to have the virtual event play out as it would traditionally in person, and thus highlight the hard work that the volunteers do to maintain the garden each year.

The main attraction of the event, being the rose garden tour, was of course adapted by creating a virtual 360-tour environment of the Morwell Centenary Rose garden, which attendees can virtually ‘wander’ through. In addition to this, shoppable online stalls, live Q&A panels, speakers and workshops were to be filmed and streamed live for viewers to engage with through a 2-day period at certain time frames. All of which ertr managed by Alive’s external web development and content production team from creative ideation to premiere, to ensure all aspects of the physical event could be replicated for maximum community engagement in a COVID-safe manner.

Strategy:

With the challenge of a countrywide lockdown beginning in March, the Alive team and IRFG group organised a handful of virtual meetings to discuss the virtual event offering and the ways to host this community staple. 

The challenges of lockdown restrictions meant the remote direction of pre-recorded content and outsourcing a lot of production to local Latrobe contacts. Managing remote broadcast, multiple live linkages and moderated chat through the two-day event were also core hurdles faced by the client being new to virtual events. Alive’s external contracted specialist’s 360South & Show Division worked through any technical challenges on a tight deadline – especially the final turnaround of the virtual tour, as photography had to wait until the gardens were in bloom. 

Over the course of just 10 planning weeks and with a significantly smaller marketing budget, media and promotion had to be reduced. To overcome this, the team enlisted the aid of Destination Gippsland – the local tourism body to generate as many virtual registrations as possible.

Destination Gippsland was instrumental in securing media interviews and promotional opportunities including an article in The Age, ABC radio interviews and features on influencer blogs. The team opted to ramp up the above marketing efforts in the 4-weeks leading up to the event, and the fact that people didn’t have to travel to attend meant advertising lead time could be reduced which worked with budget limitations. 

Execution:

In order to be as accessible as possible, the event needed to maintain high readability, and be inclusive to all members of the community with the incorporation of Auslan interpreters for pre-recorded and live presentations on the main stage. To execute the many different offerings included in the festival, the content was first filmed, and a custom website was built, in which media was streamed via YouTube in order to allow for a public chat.

The festival ran over two days, Saturday 14th November from 3 – 4pm to Sunday 15th December from 12 – 5pm. VR was not used in the main Rose Garden attraction tour, and instead was created using 360-degree photos and stitched into a virtual map environment.

Pop-ups with information and images of roses were strategically placed throughout the tour, of which the footage will become the legacy from the virtual event that will be utilized for many years to come, and become the marketing tool to promote the Latrobe Valley region. The virtual tour will be implemented into the existing festival website and Visit Latrobe website in the future.

Through the above-mentioned streaming technology, the festival comprised of a live host, introducing guest speakers from David Austin Roses and the Royal Horticultural Society. Workshops on terrarium creation and bee hotels, food and cocktails master classes, as well as rose talks by Costa Georgiadis, streamed live for the participation of attendees.

Live chat interaction with these presentations was facilitated using YouTube. Sponsors and local vendors were provided with a virtual stall platform from the custom website in which guests could shop products to then be delivered to their home. Lastly, live artist painting, and art activities could be downloaded in addition to music and videos that could be enjoyed on-demand. 

Results:

The objectives of the festival were met with strong audience engagement and exceptional client feedback for the Alive team. The efforts for pre-registration to the event garnered 800 registrations and around 750 opting into the IRGF newsletter – this will serve as a valuable marketing tool for future events. The virtual event site retrieved 27,000 page views, and 11,000 main stage views. This production ran flawlessly over 2 days despite tight turnaround times and encountered zero technical difficulties.

Photo by Ameen Fahmy on Unsplash.

Background and Objectives:

Building a house is a mammoth effort, which is why only around 100,000 homes are built in Australia every year. It’s one of the longest, research heavy sales cycles at approximately 18 months.

National property specialist G.J. Gardner Homes has been working in the Australian market for almost four decades. But the marketing team has witnessed the progressive shift of customers to conduct their research online. The property building industry is not alone – customers have come to expect a multichannel brand experience.

When Alpha Digital started working with G.J. Gardner Homes in February 2019, the opportunity to consolidate the national home builder’s approach and grow the national G.J. Gardner Homes brand outside of traditional, offline channels was identified.

Before engaging Alpha Digital, G.J. Gardner Homes had primarily invested in SEO copy to target location based searches. An expanded digital presence was needed outside of its traditional avenues of TV and radio. Alpha Digital’s role was to increase site visitation as well as cross-channel engagement with an integrated and informative digital experience that would educate customers about the complexities of building a home throughout their journey. Every click through to the website needed to be served with relevant information.

The goal was to support demand generation for the national franchise network through the new digital approach and help G.J. Gardner Homes to reach its ambitious 2020 target to double the number of annual leads. The key to driving continued growth for the home builder’s 80+ franchisees would be to showcase its display homes and expertise online.

Strategy:

“Typically, people start their home building journey after attending a few open houses and realising that their dream home may not be on the market. They set out on building their own home, and then quickly realise that the amount of learning required is almost equivalent to a ‘mini-degree’. The role of a reputable home builder, is to educate the customer on all of the factors they are yet to consider” says G.J. Garner Homes’ national marketing manager, Andrew Borg. 

“There are no accidents or impulse buys in the sector and customers are constantly looking for reasons to rule out providers to streamline their options during the purchase process. Due to the volume of decisions needed by customers, they look for any reason to rule companies out in those first 6-12 months and narrow the pool down to two or three trusted sources. Therefore, the focus was on building the brand-customer relationship and fostering customer connections throughout their new build exploration.”

Alpha Digital and G.J. Gardner Homes started creating digital resources for everything from soil type, landscaping, building techniques, cost saving measures, fixtures and fittings. Educational content was repurposed across all channels to nurture the lengthy sales cycle and increase lead volume above the year on year historical success. The aim was to drip feed the customer information and enhance their building IQ, ensuring there were minimal gaps in resources to maintain engagement with the customer. 

The user experience on the website also needed to realign with the customer-centric content strategy to improve the 40 percent drop-off rate of new visitors. The national website had been set up to support each state and one of the first questions customers were asked was where they wanted to build. The plan was to capture more information about what each customer wanted to build, so the journey could be completely tailored from that point on.

Execution:

To ensure that the business could serve customer needs and know where improvements might lie, a full rebuild of its legacy tech infrastructure was needed. The refreshed, customer-centric approach required a new website and CRM system that would integrate with the performance marketing strategy. Launching in February 2020, the new site acted as an anchor for customers, gathering information about them at any consideration stage. Alpha Digital started tracking on-site behaviour and ad interactions and retargeting audiences appropriately. The marketing partner also used first-party data and integrated search targeting to bid on users differently, depending on how far along in the planning process they were.

The first year together also involved constant CRO testing. One of the most successful changes was finding user friendly ways to showcase home design information, which was previously trapped inside the minds of staff.

Creating the right personas during the form submission stage on the site, also allowed Alpha Digital to build out different content journeys. This ensured that the series of email guides nurtured the customer throughout their own journey of discovery, whether they were downsizing, knocking down a site or a first home builder.

All of the onsite educational content being generated started driving organic search traffic, and could be repurposed across the home builder’s automated email flows and social media channels, to keep customers constantly engaged with the brand.

Results:

This fresh approach and new ability to capture customer information gave G.J. Gardner Homes its highest ever lead generation numbers in January, April, May and June this year. While competitors were pulling out of advertising during lockdown, Alpha Digital counselled G.J. Gardner Homes to maintain its spend.

Record April and May months were undoubtedly fuelled by the situation at the time, with customers having time to consider what they wanted out of a home while in lockdown. But with its now established strategic infrastructure, G.J. Gardner was in the perfect position to harness the soaring real estate traffic, onsite and social engagement rates.

The agile content-first approach also meant that when the $25,000 HomeBuilder grant was released in June, G.J. Gardner Homes was the first to market with a comprehensive content hub ready to go. So while the market conditions proved advantageous, the team was able to put itself in a position to target and engage customers searching for information about the grant and increase organic search traffic by 47 percent in June compared to the same period in 2019.

Having relevant information on hand from day one, afforded G.J. Gardner Homes the opportunity to have conversations with customers early in the grant release and the record breaking numbers contributed to the home builder meeting the goal of doubling leads in 2020 by the middle of October, despite an uncertain economy.

Borg says: “The integrated content approach, new CRM, and email capture techniques enable G.J. Gardner Homes to serve appropriate content at important moments in the customer journey. Having the HomeBuilder grant introduced generated interest, but we still needed to be able to provide relevant information and entice engagement from people. The total number of visitors coming to the site has increased by 44 percent and return visitations are up 73 percent year on year. When people arrive on the website, the value delivered is keeping them there for longer too. Visitors are now spending a minute longer on the site than before February, a 40 percent increase, which is a testament to the content strategy.

“A new customer database has been built over the last 12 months with all new contacts segmented so each customer persona can receive tailored content, boosting open rates to 40 percent and click-through rate to 10 percent. The unsubscribe rate is also down below one percent.

“The new tech stack also allows each digital channel to complement one another. Tailoring messaging and creative based on geo-location and first-party data, has given the brand an advantage over competition. By avoiding hard sell tactics and remaining a source of relevance and education for customers, G.J. Gardner Homes has mirrored the online migration of customer research. Bounce rates are down 44 percent and conversion rates of users on the site are up 16.85 percent year on year.”

The fundamentals for the national home builder are now in place and the teams are building towards further innovation.

“COVID-19 has changed how people think about their work and living situations. People now may no longer need to live in cities and the home builder will be adapting its content strategy to nurture these emerging consumer attitudes.”

Campaign: Developing a scalable and diverse partnership network from a standing start

Client: Canva

Technology partner: Impact

Background 

Canva is an online drag-and-drop design tool used in 190 countries to easily create and publish professional-looking layouts ranging from social media posts to presentations. Up until 2019, it had a very informal and low-tech approach to referral partnerships – occasionally reaching out to content creators, bloggers and site owners who may be open to hosting a link.

But with a rapidly growing global network of passionate and engaged Canva fans, the company realised it could be harnessing their passion and evangelism. It set out to create a scalable and diverse partnership program that could be rolled out in multiple geographies and languages, manage payments in multiple currencies and be flexible enough to allow for cultural differences and bespoke contracts.

Objectives

The overall objective was to attract new and passionate users of Canva, develop a significant incremental revenue stream and ensure the new partnership programme would be ROI positive from day one.

Canva’s continued exponential growth means it requires all marketing efforts to have the ability to rapidly scale. Consequently, it knew that it had to automate as much of the partner programme as possible whilst allowing for considerable customisation.

The technology that underpinned it had to be flexible enough to manage, contract and reward a diverse range of partners; from influencers, through reseller agencies, podcasts and paid media – not to mention support different languages and currencies.

Strategy

The creation of a diverse partnership from a standing start was a key element of Canva’s continued expansion plans. Canva recognised it had a powerful asset in the Canva Certified Creative network, a group of Canva super-users who educate others on how and why to use the tool. Step one was to ensure they could be incentivised and rewarded for their evangelism, closely followed by ensuring they could easily discover and recruit new types of partners.

Critically, Canva wanted to ensure its partnership team, which are spread across Australia, US, Canada, France, Germany, Mexico, Philippines and Brazil, were freed up from time consuming manual admin and management tasks in order to focus on building and growing the partnership program. It set out to ensure that relationships remained at the core of its program to ensure its long-term success.

Execution 

Canva selected the Impact Partnership Cloud to establish its new partnership program due to its ability to combine a high-degree of automation with a high-degree of customisation.

Since its launch, Canva has focused on growth in five key global markets and it has found that each one requires a slightly different approach. The versatility of the technology makes it easy to adapt all processes and the degree of automation to meet cultural preferences. For example, Canva has found that in Brazil, partnership discussions happen over the phone or via WhatsApp, whereas in the United States, partners prefer to get information via email. The program is currently supported in seven languages with the ability to add up to 30 more as it continues to expand globally.

Results

In the first six months after implementing the Impact Partnership Cloud, the size of Canva’s partnership program and partnership revenue consistently doubled month-over-month, and its network grew to approximately 12,000 partners.

The diversity of its partnership network has also exploded, with YouTubers and bloggers, media publishers, podcasters, and B2B partners all coming on board. The company has also been able to launch and manage unique integration partnerships with companies like Hubspot and Wattpad, who share Canva templates within their platforms for use in designing things like marketing emails and book covers. Collectively, these new partners have added over one million new users and 150,000 new subscribers to Canva.

Canva was able to not only onboard a remarkably diverse array of partners, but also easily customise contract arrangements to meet partner requirements. The company estimates it has more than 25 different types of contracts in place with its referral partners.  The customisation of these contracts is simple as there is a full server-to-server API integration with Canva’s own platform. This means Canva is able to precisely control what they do and what they don’t want to pay out and partners can be rewarded via CPC, CPM, CPA or any other variable.

In addition, Impact’s attribution funnel allows them to tailor commissions and bonus payouts to reward partners at different parts of the funnel, not just at the last click. The customer journey can also be tracked in-app (where most traffic occurs) and via mobile acquisitions as the Impact platform does not rely on cookies.

Most importantly, the new partnership programme is poised to contribute five percent of Canva’s total revenue after just one year and is experiencing a 40+ percent growth in partner payouts month on month.

Photo by Kaleidico on Unsplash.

Background

Mustela is a French company that offers a complete range of natural and safe skincare products for the delicate skin of babies, children and pregnant women. Established in Australia for over 10 years, Mustela has built its reputation as a premium brand in the baby skincare category partly because of how user-generated content builds trust amongst parents. Tell Me Baby’s social marketplace has been our key partner in achieving this.

User-generated content (UGC) is a vital marketing asset for Mustela as our products frequently have glowing feedback from parents, which is why sharing reviews as widely as possible is fundamental to our ongoing marketing strategy. It’s a vital channel for convincing Mustela customers to buy our brand for the first time, after which they often become referrers themselves.

Challenges

The biggest challenge for Mustela’s marketing is how we can communicate our premium product and value proposition to our customers. With a higher price tag than some of our competitors, it’s important that our customers understand the quality and value of our products. Mustela uses natural-origin ingredients, which are developed in partnership with healthcare professionals and Mustela researchers to ensure safety and efficacy. When customers understand that value, they’re more likely to be happy to pay a slightly higher price point.

Our second key challenge, but also our greatest opportunity, is that parents are often highly knowledgeable and selective about what they want for their baby and they trust other parents’ experiences of using Mustela products; this is a key factor that influences potential customers’ perception of the brand. It’s not a casual decision. Naturally, parents want the best for their babies and brand recommendations from other parents play an extremely important role in our customers’ purchasing decisions.

In light of that, Mustela needs to be highly visible on multiple touchpoints that parents use to research opinions and feedback from other parents who have already used the products. It’s usually not enough to be seen just once; we need to earn credibility and trust by consistently appearing in front of our customers, backed up by strong recommendations by their parental peers.

The third challenge faced by Mustela, which is fairly specific to our category, is the short life cycle of the target audience – their babies grow fast! Meaning that it’s even more important that our brand reaches front-of-mind quickly and stays there consistently for our audience.

Objectives

Our UGC campaign with Tell Me Baby had several core objectives. We want to be visible on the Tell Me Baby platform, which is an important channel to target parents who are actively looking to purchase baby skincare products and are seeking other parents’ opinions. We also want to syndicate reviews from Tell Me Baby to other platforms that are also important touchpoints for parents doing research – for instance, Mustela’s own social channels and brand website.

Strategy

Reviews are particularly powerful for more specialised products that solve a specific problem, such as a skin condition like eczema. In these cases, parents do extra research to ensure that they have identified the best product for their child and will rely more heavily on recommendations from parents who have used the product for the same condition on their own child.

Mustela recognises that reviews must always be independent if they are to be effective in driving purchases from other parents; therefore, mobilising Tell Me Baby as an independent, trusted third party to collect and publish review content is essential.

Mustela partnered with Tell Me Baby via a premium listing, mobilising every relevant tool to boost our brand – page and ROS ads, an API feed and widget for our own website, the ability to respond to reviews, native review ads, reward points for members and placement on social media and subscriber emails.

In terms of audience, our core demographic is reflected in Tell Me Baby’s readers: female (86 percent), aged 25-44 (64 percent) with 1-2 children (86 percent) and most of those children are aged 0-3 (70 percent). 17 percent of them are pregnant at the moment and they’re making their purchasing decisions. 31 percent are on a household income of $50,000 to $100,000 – 24 percent are between $100,000 to $150,000.

Rollout and results

Mustela’s metrics for success for its UGC campaign are straightforward but stringent. On the Tell Me Baby channel itself, we sought a significant increase in the number of reviews published each month; a high average star rating for every product and for the brand as a whole; and consistent traffic flow to Mustela’s product pages.

On our own channels, we closely monitored how syndicated reviews performed by reach, impression, engagement and clicks.

The initial campaign was rolled out for a 12-month period. It was highly successful; so much so, in fact, that Mustela has now been a partner of Tell Me Baby since May 2017 and is now in our fourth year of the partnership.

457 high-quality genuine reviews have been collected to date on the Tell Me Baby platform, with an increase in reviews each and every month of the partnership. 314 user-generated product images of parents using the product with their baby were also collected and published alongside reviews.

We’ve seen 0.94 percent click-through rate on Mustela’s native review ads on Tell Me Baby, which is significantly above the industry average. Putting UGC in front of our customers on competitor product pages has driven significant traffic to our own page.

Syndicated reviews on Mustela’s channels (social and brand website) have provided a significant increase in traffic, engagement, and click-throughs to retailer websites, with consistently successful retargeting campaigns for audiences who have already engaged on our channels.

Recently, Mustela was informed that Tell Me Baby has partnered with Bazaarvoice, the world’s largest UGC platform and as such, Mustela is anticipating a further boost to its UGC content in the near future.

In the coming months, Mustela will launch the Tell Me Baby widget on our brand website, enabling Tell Me Baby reviews and average star rating to be published. Parents will be able to read the UGC content wherever they prefer – on the Mustela website, or on Tell Me Baby.

Conclusion

Overall, UGC has been game-changing for the way Mustela speaks with our customers. At the end of the day, parents trust other parents when it comes to their babies’ comfort and wellbeing. Content from peers has authenticity and relatability that cannot be replaced by other forms of marketing. Now, it’s not just about Mustela communicating with our customers; it’s about facilitating conversations amongst our audience through a reputable social marketplace and allowing the facts and positive personal experiences with our brand to speak for themselves.

Photo by Khoa Pham on Unsplash.

Background & Objectives

Bakers Delight has 525 stores across the country. It’s a well-known brand in its sector and sits behind the Coles/Woolies duopoly, with around 15-16 percent market share.

The franchise business was processing around 2 million transactions before lockdown. Last year the ‘local marketing’ (LM) team was under severe pressure, with franchisees demanding 1800+ individual art and design requests a year for in-store materials. The team was going to have to grow by 50 percent to keep up. But instead of bringing on more internal resources, the group marketing manager decided to bring on a brand management platform.

Outfit was chosen to help automate a lot of the creative production needs and free up time for the team to proactively help support franchisees, rather than being stuck with reactive demands.

The implementation of templates for franchisees proved vital in being able to respond on-brand and at scale to the COVID-19 crisis.

Strategy

When everything first started to close for lockdown, the senior leadership team created a Virus Management Team (VMT), comprising the head of each department (supply chain, corporate communications, marketing, operations, information services, HR, CFO and both CEOs).

This core group met to discuss what was happening in the business, in the world, and how to  best deal with it for customers. After these sessions, the department heads would break away and implement this strategy and regroup 24 hours later to report on how it went. This process has been in place since lockdown and will be rebranded and remain part of the business in the coming months.

Execution

For the marketing team, disseminating information and materials to franchisees was paramount. As you may expect, this included social distancing guidelines to display in-store. Two new campaigns were rolled out over an eight week period. The templates that were created on Outfit allowed the team to get the materials out to the network quickly and efficiently.

But this also meant changing a lot of the operational procedure. After lockdown the decision was taken to package the loaves of bread and have them pre-sliced, both of which were options for customers at POS previously. The team had to remain in constant contact with stores to ensure that they were familiar with governmental advice, on an almost daily basis. The ability to pivot in terms of what all stakeholders need to know was invaluable to the brand.

During this time, the marketing team created materials to update each of the stores on Outfit’s design automation platform and was able to deliver the vital resources easily.

A WhatsApp group was created to share common questions or requests from the public. It’s where the idea for protective cashier shields was first raised, and also where the first trial of these measures was coordinated.

Social media channels provided a place for Bakers Delight to communicate with customers and using automated templates the team created a number of bespoke social posts informing customers about operational changes while gleaning insights about which customer queries would need the most attention.

Source: Bakers Delight, example of social posts during COVID-19, the toilet roll one reaching 2 million organically

Results

The business has been fortunate to continue the growth it was experiencing prior to restrictions. The ability of the Bakers Delight business to move swiftly as lockdown laws were implemented allowed it to adapt and maintain its status as an essential service, which enabled it to continue trading while other retailers closed. While the volume of transactions have dropped, the average basket size has tripled, resulting in a small growth in revenue, during a hectic and potentially damaging time.

The marketing team is happy to report that all but four stores remained open throughout lockdown; those that closed did so based on their location in malls and CBD locations, rather than any virus related reason.

All franchisees have remained supported throughout. The marketing team thankfully was able to keep them all informed and armed with the latest updated materials via Outfit’s platform. It meant that customers were kept informed and franchisees were one of the few companies that were able to remain on-brand throughout the initial lockdown stages.

Since starting to automate its brand collateral with Outfit, Bakers Delight has seen a drop of around 70 percent for bespoke art requests from franchisees. By being able to automate template designs and limit the options in each piece of creative, it’s become a more manageable process for the team. It has meant that the LM team has been able to remain the same size, while providing a higher level of value-add advice for franchisees.

In short, doing more with less people.

Background 

Known for offering a wide range of products, BWS is positioned within the market as a convenient and efficient liquor option. While the brand is currently sitting as Australia’s largest liquor retailer, it has always had a detailed vision for how to stand for something that would be compelling to Australians.

With the team considering new ways to capture consumer’s attention on social media, BWS landed on the Insiders program.

Objectives

The overall purpose behind the program was to create advocacy beyond the shop floor. The method of doing so was to create a program that empowered team members to become brand advocates on social media.

In line with its core and ultimate vision for the brand, BWS aims to elevate the meaning of true convenience. By tapping into an internal network of digital natives, who genuinely know the individual customer and what they want, the brand can create content that is helpful and anticipates consumer’s needs.

Program key performance measures include cost-effective content production (attributing a production value to the number of uploads), equality of imagery, and shareability of the content and engagement rates.

Strategy

A key insight that helped springboard this program was that people trust other people more than anything else. Essentially, authenticity really matters to everyone, but even more so to millennials, who rely on genuineness to guide them on which brands they choose to support.

While most brands now accept that they require a social media presence, many still struggle to know how to maximise social platforms to their benefit and overcome their fears of allowing team, staff and customers to control such an influential platform.

Business brands no longer cut it – customers want to know about the personality behind the brand. Customers don’t want to be told what to buy, they want to feel like they’re discovering things themselves. Through each of the BWS Insiders customers will begin to discover new drinks and expand their repertoire.

The strategy roll-out involved each of the Insiders first capturing consumer’s attention as a brand advocate, then building trust and finally inspiring action. This process starts by telling frequent, consistent, and generous stories that engage and educate an aligned audience, and as a result, builds customer confidence, and earns permission to influence behaviour.

 

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Bringing Italy home today with this delizioso Fiano . Colpasso Fiano brings a crisp, citrus acidity paired with beautiful floral and honey notes. Guess I’ll be taking that Europe trip after all. #bwsinsider #athomewithbws

A post shared by Ricky & Wine (@bws_rick) on May 8, 2020 at 2:10am PDT

Execution 

The initial pilot program was held over the course of 3 months. Off the back of this successful pilot, BWS has expanded its Australia-first program to accommodate a total of 30 advocates hand-selected from over 300 applicants.

These digital natives have been tasked with sharing the drinks that they love across their Instagram, interacting with and growing their community, acting as spokespeople on behalf of BWS, working with the marketing team to generate awareness and educating customers and the wider team on what’s new and trending, together with highlighting old favourites.

To ensure that they support these budding superstars, BWS is providing them with access to social industry leaders who can show them how to create content schedules, develop social strategies and understand their insights.

Results

The Insiders implemented real-time market testing whereby they approached their content with flexibility and viewed it as a two-way street with their audience. They adapted their content off the back of their audience engagements to ensure they were curating content with the perfect balance between aspirational and relatable.

Following the pilot program which included 13 Insiders and 4,328 followers, BWS identified the clear strengths of the program and expanded this year to capitalise on this success. With an average engagement rate of 35 percent, a rate well above the industry average of 3.5 percent, The Insider content now stands as the best performing content across BWS’ socials.

Background and objective

Each year Optus’ service agents engage in more than 20 million customer conversations, helping them to manage broadband, mobile and entertainment queries.

While the company has always strived to reduce wait times for callers, sometimes call enquiries spike resulting in customers waiting on the line longer than would be desired.

According to Optus’s vice president for its Digital Consumer division, Vaughan Paul, the desire to resolve inquiries faster has meant more recently the company has worked to shift many customers to digital channels to use tools such as self service and digital messaging. Critical to the success of this strategy has been the My Optus customer app, which currently holds a 4.6-star rating in the Apple App Store.

“We haven’t just yet finished migrating all customers but we’ve had a lot of success. We’re around 50/50 messaging/voice, which is a lot higher than many other US Telcos at 20-30 percent messaging/chat,” Vaughan says.

“The success of servicing customers through digital channels led the company to investigate other ways in which it could use new technologies to improve their experience.”

“We knew we wanted to offer our customers even faster service and more engaging experiences. So we came up with an ambitious plan to offer customers their own personalised, transactional Optus Assistant, powered by AI.”

Strategy

Vaughan says Optus took a considered approach to its plans for AI. This meant examining and testing multiple options rather than simply rushing a solution to market.

“We saw other companies’ bots often getting a bad rap,” Vaughn says. “For this reason, we knew it was critical understand what purpose our Assistant would be serving.”

The goal was to create an AI-powered bot that would allow customers to have a personalised experience that was matched to their current product mix and service history, and that would also enable them to resolve queries and complete transactions without the need for human intervention.

Accordingly, three principals were developed to help guide the Optus Assistant’s development. The first of these was to ensure that the Assistant delivered a consistent experience, regardless of whether the customer was interacting using voice, text messaging, or via a ‘digital human’ online.

The second principle was that the Assistant should be able to deliver service that was personalised to the needs of the specific customer using it, rather than simply providing generic answers. This would mean that the Assistant could provide customers with exact information about their relationship with Optus, such as their contract end-date, as well as being able to make changes to their account.

And while the goal is to achieve end-to-end servicing using the Assistant, Optus also adopted the principle that in those instances where human intervention was required, an Optus agent would be able to easily step in to complete the resolution of inquiries.

Execution

The desire to provide a personalised and relevant experience led Optus to create the Optus Assistant as one of the first API transactional assistants to be released in the market. This means the Assistant can interact directly with an account, rather than just providing information, and make changes to services such as direct debit and payment dates.

“Optus Assistant’s purpose is to offer service that is fast and personalised, with the ability to transact and resolve queries end-to-end,” Vaughan says.

The AI-powered Optus Assistant was launched via a messaging service available on the My Optus App, as well as on the company’s website. Further development work has since enabled the Optus Assistant to scale to assist more than 100,000 customers each week, and Vaughan says the company will continue adding new functionality to the Optus Assistant to provide better service and enable it to resolve a wider range of inquiries.

Optus is also looking to use the AI bot technology to better service customers when and where they want by improving its integration into voice channels, while also boosting their experience with greater use of personalised elements and more empathetic responses. This includes integrating the Optus Assistant into smart speakers such as the Google Home, where it is able to answer questions relating to topics such as billing and usage.

“Our customers should be free to make up their minds how they want to be supported, and it is our job to ensure that we are meeting them where they want to be met, with the most pleasant and effective service solution we can deliver,” Vaughan says.

“So we’re experimenting with digital humans, and adding more empathy AI and personal elements to our digital experiences.”

Results

Today the Optus Assistant welcomes, triages and services. Optus has found that customers have a better experience with the combination of the Assistant and human agents, rather than human agents alone.

“This is demonstrated by our Net Promoter Score being 10 points higher on average for the combination,” Vaughan says.

The Optus Assistant has also proven especially valuable during the current COVID-19 pandemic, by providing customers with immediate answers to common queries.

“We are able to service the most vulnerable customers first by routing them directly to the small amount of people agents we’ve had available through this challenging time.”

“With many of our people in our contact centres impacted by the lockdown measures, the importance of digital channels and Optus Assistant in ensuring Australians are connected through this time has never been clearer”.

Campaign: Holiday Lab

Client: Luxury Escapes

Agency: Graffiti Experiential and Character + Distinction with Luxury Escapes

Background

Travel company Luxury Escapes is one of Australia’s fastest growing ecommerce businesses, with over 500,000 people choosing to take a Luxury Escape in 2019 and more than 3 million subscribers globally. 

In 2017 Luxury Escapes trialled physical retail with their first pop up store concept in Melbourne’s CBD. While this pop up proved to be a success in community engagement and retail, the brand was keen to elevate the pop-up retail concept for another iteration, this time aligning the concept to a unique PR spin in order to ensure maximum exposure and return to drive awareness and retail sales.

Objective

Awareness was the top objective for this initiative. Specifically, the pop-up needed to generate at least 10 quality PR pieces in national or Melbourne based publications and attract significant footfall for its area. 

To deliver an exceptional brand experience in a concept that would meet both PR and retail objectives, Luxury Escapes needed to capture the expertise and category leadership that the brand is known for. The goal was to create an engaging and unique pop up where people could experience the Luxury Escapes brand personality, interact with the team and purchase their next travel experience. Revenue from the pop-up was a further, but not primary, objective for the brand.

The pop-up also needed to be timed to align with the broader consumer behaviour of booking holidays and interest in travel. With January and February being some of the highest selling months for the travel brand and with the majority of schools and businesses fully back to ‘reality’ by February, a pop-up that would offer Australians some respite from ‘post-holiday blues’ would naturally align to media and customer outcomes while providing the basis for a creative way to bring the pop-up concept to life. 

Strategy

Luxury Escapes have a strong following in Australia across a broad age and demographic range. As the team is based in Melbourne the decision was made to host the pop-up in a high foot traffic area within the CBD, attracting both existing Luxury Escapes customers and a broader audience. The concept needed to be relevant for Luxury Escapes subscribers to make the trip in (that is, it needed to be more than just a store) as well as engaging and interesting enough to attract the general public to take a look. 

Using the perspective of ‘post-holiday blues’ to anchor the thinking behind the pop-up, the space needed to provide a solution or positive experience beyond merely selling a holiday. The experiences of the space needed to bring Luxury Escapes’ highly curated approach to holidays to life, in an engaging and interactive setting.

While the opportunity to activate in a physical setting was appealing to Luxury Escapes, as an ecommerce business, the physical retail setting needed to tie in to the broader digital business and play a role in the overall brand experience for Luxury Escapes.

Knowing they had more than 2 million Australian consumers to potentially reach, Luxury Escapes didn’t want the physical retail experience to limit engagement, so the pop-up concept needed to offer a way to engage consumers beyond those that could make it down to the space.

Execution

Luxury Escapes thoughtfully curate, test, and design every holiday package, and with the ‘Holiday Lab’ concept, they brought this unique brand offering to life in an immersive physical setting.

The Holiday Lab is an interactive pop-up experience designed to prescribe Australians with a luxurious and soothing remedy for their post-holiday blues. Designed with input from certified psychiatrist and founder of Mindful in May, Dr. Elise Bialylew, the Holiday Lab offered consumers to experience a series of questions and participate in a range of interactive, sensory experiences in order to help evaluate and identify their ideal Luxury Escape. As each consumer interacts with the experiences and experiments, a custom digital tool tracks their responses to form a deeper knowledge of their behaviour, desires, and ultimately develop a tailored travel profile and package to suit their needs. 

Each sensory experience – sound, taste, touch, colour, aroma and nature – offer a unique action for the visitor to take, for example, custom diffusers release different scents when pressed. The digital tool was also made available online, so the broader Luxury Escapes audience could try it out.

The Holiday Lab was conceptualised and developed by Luxury Escapes with experiential agency Graffiti, with communications agency Character + Distinction handling the media plan and relations. 

The Holiday Lab was launched in late February to follow the return to work and school for most Australians in January and early February. Ahead of the Holiday Lab launch, a media famil was held for a small group of key lifestyle media, with the journalists experiencing their own 24 hour Luxury Escape to Melbourne, including a visit to the Holiday Lab. 

The Lab was launched with a VIP industry event, followed by media and influencer visits throughout. The Lab also hosted partner events for Luxury Escapes, with tourism bodies and aligned brands. 

Results

As a result of the media famil, over eleven stories were produced on the Holiday Lab concept in publications including the Herald Sun, The Australian, Harper’s BAZAAR, Vogue Living, InStyle Australia and Broadsheet. Overall, the Holiday Lab concept generated more than 19 stories and over 5.5 million in reach. 

The Holiday Lab attracted strong foot traffic with over 1,000 visitors to the pop-up across the 10 days, and more than 4,800 total surveys completed using the in-store and online digital tool. Building on the value of the reach and awareness generated by the pop-up, more than 2,600 business leads were generated through the pop-up, creating many opportunities for Luxury Escapes to engage with their customers on their personalised holiday offers. With guests spending an average of 10 minutes in the Holiday Lab, the concept was a strong example of how brands can create immersive and engaging retail experiences, particularly for online brands looking to connect with their audience in a brick and mortar environment.