New Lifestyles Lead to New Growth
With high-quality, high-style products for the enjoyment of pets and owners alike, Wild One is a household staple. Shifts in demand, lifestyle, and mentality of their core audience stemming from stay-at-home orders meant uncertainty for everyone. However, this presented an opportunity for Metric Theory and Wild One to shift with their audience, and develop new strategies to continue growing. The nimble and collaborative work of both teams was recognized as a finalist for Best Cross-Channel Campaign in the 2020 US Search Awards.
The Goal: Respond to Changes & Maximize Revenue
The onset of the pandemic brought on major and abrupt roadblocks to Wild One’s growth strategy. As product demand was changing and ‘typical’ performance became unpredictable, the teams were challenged to find ways to continue brand growth, by maximizing revenue at their existing return on ad spend (ROAS) goal.
Our Strategy
- Shifting Product Focus & Ad Messaging
- Cross-Channel Audience Insight & Ad Personalization
- Top-of-Funnel Expansion
Shifting Quickly: Product Focus & Ad Messaging
Some of Wild One’s more popular products are the Commuter and Travel Carrier, products for transporting pets. With the pandemic leading to travel shutdowns and shelter-in-place orders, demand for those products suddenly plummeted.
The teams quickly pivoted to focus ads on products where need was higher for pet owners, like harnesses and walk kits. Ad investment for these products increased, shifting from the travel products, to capture and grow qualified traffic across channels like Google Shopping and Facebook Ads.
Pivoting required a lot of quick work to produce new social ad creative within days to reestablish new customer growth. The unique circumstances also provided an opportunity to show empathy with new customers by making Wild One products more accessible. A price promotion was launched, along with promoting the availability of alternative payments like Afterpay. Wild One leaned on Metric Theory daily throughout this process. For more on how this plan came together, check out their Marketing Through Uncertainty feature on the Metric Theory blog.
"We don’t want to make panicked decisions, we want to know exactly what to do when the time comes. Our strong team and communication with Metric Theory allows us to do that."
Cross-Channel Audience Insight & Ad Personalization
The teams use audience insights from across Google Analytics, Google Ads, Microsoft Ads, Facebook, Instagram, and Pinterest to create audience personas that influence their campaigns. Looking at conversion frequency by interests and lifestyle helped them better understand where and when to serve ads to improve return on ad spend, especially when pursuing new customers in prospecting campaigns.
This research showed that specific demographics were most likely to become new customers. With that insight, targeting and ad creative was updated so that ad imagery would best reflect the lives of the people who buy Wild One products. Personalizing ads to the unique demographics and locations of prospecting customers further improved ad engagement to fuel growth.
Top-of-Funnel Expansion
Toward the beginning of 2020, prospecting campaigns accounted for a small amount of advertising budget due to ROAS targets and a very intentional middle- and bottom-funnel approach. But, as behavior changed because of the pandemic, business uncertainty led to a change in the advertising landscape on Facebook. Because Metric Theory was monitoring the impact on the ad landscape, Wild One’s team was able to identify and move quickly to seize on lower ad costs and reach new people.
All of this quick action and thoughtful strategy allowed Wild One to grow even faster thanks to a trend that no one could have predicted – a surge in pet adoption and ownership. People simply needed companionship more than ever before, and Wild One was positioned to seize on that moment and feature their brand and pet products in front of a whole new generation of pet owners who were a perfect fit for their well-designed products. By working together and outmaneuvering competition, the teams grew prospecting campaigns substantially, driving over five times more revenue from them quarter-over-quarter.
170%
increase in business revenue
20%
increase in business ROAS
130%
increase in paid media sales
