A social media campaign devised by The Crocodile for hair and beauty supplier Ellisons used a mix of channels to engage a hard to reach B2B audience, delivering an uplift in online revenue equal to a 526 per cent ROI
Ellisons is the UK’s leading next day provider of products and equipment to the professional hair and beauty industry. The company offers over 12,000 products and operates three cash and carry warehouses. It also sells by telephone, mail order and an ecommerce website.
Ellisons’ customers include beauticians, hairdressers, salon managers and owners, and sole traders running mobile beauty businesses. This is a B2B audience that is difficult to reach via traditional marketing techniques. The nature of their work makes them less responsive to DM and email campaigns. However, while firmly B2B, Ellisons’ customers demonstrate consumer type behaviour and are active on social media.
The Crocodile was able to demonstrate ways this audience could be engaged via social media and was brought in to carry out a piece of transformational work to embed social media into Ellisons’ marketing and communications. Following this, The Crocodile was reappointed by Ellisons to help drive awareness of a new mobile website, grow its social audience and increase online revenue.
Specific objectives were:
- Increase social referral traffic by 50 per cent.
- Grow Facebook audience from 6 000 to 20,000.
- Increase Twitter followers from 3 800 to 8 000.
- Support a core business objective of growing online business by 20 per cent (£500,000).
B2B value in Facebook
The Ellisons customer profile was fundamental to the strategy of the campaign, the choice of social channels, the tone and style of the content and the nature of specific offers and promotions. Facebook was used as the primary channel. The target market is actively engaged on the platform personally, and hair and beauty professionals use Facebook Pages to promote their businesses.
Tactics included competitions, weekly offers and a bespoke Facebook Instagram gallery built by The Crocodile. In addition to these tactics a series of prize draws to win iPads and iPhones was used to promote the new mobile site and the benefits of shopping via mobile. All activity was supported with highly targeted Facebook advertising.
In addition to Facebook, a significant number of UK hair and beauty professionals are active on Twitter, accessing the platform via smartphones while on the move. Tactics for Twitter included proactive audience building to grow @Ellisons followers, regular competitions and offers, engagement with strategic brands, key influencers and media to extend reach and popularisation of the #MobileEllisons hashtag to promote the new mobile website
Instagram and Pinterest were also used to engage the target audience through a mix of channels. Instagram was included to underscore the link between mobile and Ellisons, and encourage user-generated content via the #MobileEllisons hashtag. Pinterest was included to maximise the highly visual nature of the hair and beauty industry, and to support multiple lines of business via pinboards dedicated to nail art, make-up inspiration, beauty trends and lashes. These boards included links to product pages on the Ellisons website.
Return on marketing spend
The Crocodile delivered a campaign over 10 months at a cost of £30,000 and was responsible for all content management and execution. The tone and conversational style of the content was designed to reflect Ellisons’ core brand and appeal to its B2B audience. From an investment of £30,000, Ellisons generated £187,850 in online revenue. This was equal to 38 per cent of the total online revenue growth target for 2013.*The total ROI from social media activity was £157,850, which represented a 526 per cent return on marketing spend.
Additional results included:
- A 73 per cent increase in social referral traffic YOY.
- A 749 per cent increase in Facebook referrals YOY.
- A 261 per cent increase in Facebook fans.
- A 161 per cent increase in Twitter followers.
- 41,918 visits to the new mobile site.
“Customers in our market are tough to reach via traditional marketing techniques and for a high-volume, low-value business model, traditional one-to-one marketing is expensive,” commented Ellison’s managing director, Geoff Morris. “The social media strategy and execution from The Crocodile achieved more than we could have hoped for and the campaign’s unequivocal success comes from it being so well targeted at our customer base.”
Social media has given Ellisons a vital new revenue-generating channel. As was always the plan, Ellisons has taken social media back inhouse but not before securing a social media award for ‘Largest ROI’. The company is now winning awards in its own right, most recently for Best Professional Sector Social Media Strategy.
* In addition to social media, other marketing tactics used to support this core business objective were:
- Vouchers in parcels offering a discount on the next web order.
- Telesales calls to lapsed customers with a discount code for web orders.
- Posters in colleges promoting the Ellisons website.
