DR: Hi Charlie, thanks for joining us today! Do you want to introduce yourself and just say a little bit about yourself?
CN: Yeah, of course! I’m Charlie, head of planning at Really B2B, which basically means that we look after the strategy side when we’ve got new prospects coming in, and work out what we think is the right fit of our product services for what their need is and matching it to that. Then, we continue to work with them, and they become clients of ours. So, we’re constantly bringing in all of the new innovations, giving our clients the best service possible.
DR: Brilliant, and Kristina, what about you?
KH: Thank you, Dave! So I’m the account director at Really B2B. I’ve been with Really B2B for five years, and my role is really to oversee all the projects that we deliver for the clients we work very closely with, such as the planning, strategy and creative teams in order to deliver on those projects and keep everything running smoothly for everybody.
DR: So Charlie, can you give us a little overview of the Kettyle Irish Foods campaign? What were you trying to achieve in the first place and what challenges were you facing?
CN: Yeah, sure. So it all started back in 2017.
Guinness was trying to grow their share of the food market and agreed a partnership with the Linden Food Group, which is the owner of Kettyle Irish foods the brand. They agreed to the partnership so that they could be the solo licensee of Guinness burgers.
So, Linden decided to use their premium brand Kettyle to push that product to market, but, after about two years, they’d had little to no success, and not been able to prioritise it as a project with their account managers because they were very time poor and, frankly, they simply didn’t have the evidence to justify a buyer taking on the new product, especially given there was a slightly restricted perceived target of a Guinness drinker.
So, they needed to make a decision on whether they were going to continue to invest in this product or cut their losses. And that’s when Maurice, the MD of Kettyle, got in touch with us. He knew about us and knew that we prided ourselves on our candour, so he could trust us to give them a frank answer on whether or not they should proceed with this. And so we went away, reviewed their challenge, and the market, and we thought there was an opportunity for them, created our framework to give it one last try, and I guess the rest is history!
DR: Fair enough! Obviously, the campaign won gold for best use of customer insight at our B2B Marketing Awards. So, can you give us a little bit more detail about how you gathered and used the customer insight to help deliver this campaign?
CN: Yeah, I mean, needless to say, all our campaigns are founded on research and insight. And, whilst every client and every campaign is different, the principles are the same and we’re looking for the insights to inform the four key pillars of who’s the target going after, what is the optimum message we need to deliver to that target and what’s the right channel mix to communicate it through and when?
What was different about this campaign is the level of insight we needed to create that optimum message. So, firstly, we did persona research. Kettyle was very clear on who they needed to target – it was buyers. Buyers in wholesalers, retailers, pubs and catering. So, we worked with them to form a persona doc for these different buyers conducting desk research, interviews, personality profiling and DISC research into them. This enabled us to understand their pain points and what tone and content we needed to justify them listing a new product.
It highlighted an opportunity in that these buyers always were tasked to expand and improve on their offering, but it came with a standout challenge, they were required to show evidence that there was enough demand for the product to justify the distribution. So, it’s a classic Catch 22 of MPD. So, we just realised that we needed to gather this evidence, and, in order to do so, we conducted a huge quantitative survey of over 1000 consumers, asking them about their perception of the product, how likely they are to purchase it in different situations, their demographics, and how often they drink Guinness.which This enabled us to quantify the demand by region demographic and the affinity to Guinness. So, spoiler alert, but the results spoke for themselves, showing there was huge demand for the product at 83% overall, even amongst non-Guinness drinkers.
But our insight didn’t stop there. We actually gathered the expectations on where they will be able to buy it and, with the majority of our respondents name checking the key target lists, we now had the evidence we needed. And this was it. This was the silver bullet of insight Kettyle had been looking for. Next, we just needed to package it up and land with our target.
DR: It’s no wonder that you’ve done so well, the food looks great! So, with that all in mind, what tactics and strategies did Really B2B employ to help Kettyle overcome these challenges and achieve those goals?
CN: So, this is where our account director Clare Rhodes and her team and our inhouse studio really came into their own. Given the time poor nature of the audience, we knew we needed a multi-channel campaign with a clear and consistent delivery of this insight and, using our proprietary access to data providers, we knew the exact person to talk to and each target. The overarching campaign we landed on was ‘TheWorld’s First’, which tapped into that buyer objective I talked about – to improve and expand on their offering. We created an infographic with the key insights from the consumer survey, built a landing page to host it, and used the CTA of arranging a tasting session. Again, this was leaning on the insight that tasting the product is key to realising its quality. So, we then drove our target to this page through multiple channels. We had: an in-depth multi-funnel email campaign copy written, built and sent by us; a high-quality direct mail campaign, which we designed, created and dispatched; and a social campaign, which again was managed by us. All of this was supported by our dedicated telemarketing resource. So, in short, over a short period of time, our use of multiple channels and concise messaging guaranteed we were able to land these killer insights with our target.
DR: Sure. So, you’ve obviously given us a little bit of information about what the campaign consisted of, what you were trying to sell, and the challenges they were facing. So, just to bring it full circle, what results did Kettyle Irish food see? Are there any clear metrics you can share that demonstrate the success of the campaign?
CN: Well, yeah! I mean we hang our hats on our ability to report and show return on investment. And, at the outset of this, we agreed to a target of 18 MQLs and nine appointments. We actually landed 40 MQLs and 35 appointments, so beating our appointment target by 389%.
But what’s more is the quality of these appointments. Kettyle was now having conversations with the likes of Tesco, Sainsbury’s, Morrisons, Iceland, as well as multiple wholesalers and pub chains. In all, the pipeline is worth over £3 million, which yields a very significant ROI versus the cost of our activity.And, importantly, leaves Maurice in no doubt about the potential of the product going forward.
DR: So, with that in mind, it’s obviously a hugely successful campaign, and you’ll obviously have tonnes of other work in the future for numerous clients. So, what learnings have you taken from that campaign that you think you’ll apply to future campaigns?
CN: So, as I said at the beginning, we pride ourselves on our candour, and that’s key. Our confidence to be completely honest with our clients is the reason we have the faith of some of the biggest brands who know we’ll tell it to them straight. With regards to the campaign, we always bang the drum on how essential insight is in this campaign was no exception.
Our ability to rapidly uncover and deliver such significant insights was the foundation that’s needed, but the execution was spot on as well – a testament to our studio and account team and the relationship they created with Maurice and his team. Our best campaigns are when we perfectly mirror the needs of the client.
So, this campaign showed our ability to bring a previously unproven product to market in a very short space of time, and with a proven methodology, we’re now excited to be doing much more of the same.
DR: We’re now going to move on and talk a little bit about Really B2B’s other campaign which is for M&S Corporate Gifts. Now, this campaign won ‘Most commercially successful campaign’ at our recent award show in November. Kristina, can you just give us an overview of the campaign for M&S Corporate Gifts? What were they trying to achieve in the first place? What challenges are they facing?
KH: Yeah, of course. So, we’ve been working with M&S for quite a few years now. Over this time, we’ve focused on building up the awareness of their corporate gift card offering, and that’s across a wide range of businesses both public and private sector. I’m sure many people know of M&S. They’ve got a very strong brand presence in the UK and offer gift cards, which are obviously commonplace in our day-to-day society – probably more so now!
But our key challenge was freally to show that gift cards and egift cards are suitable and transferable into the corporate world. So, now we know that sales teams use gift cards to thank customers for their loyalty. And we know that HR departments use them to say thank you to their employees, and that can be either as a one-off piece, or as part of a regular employee reward and motivation scheme.
So, we know that M&S has got a quite large product range, from food to home furnishings to clothes, etc. So, from a gift card perspective, we know that the recipient can probably always find something that they want and that’s meaningful to them. So, going back to the early stages of the campaign, it was to generate awareness, and then we also wanted to position M&S as the go-to-partner for a corporate gift card.
We also wanted and needed to make the customer journey as easy as possible, so that we could help generate the revenue for the M&S sales team. And, whilst gift cards are beneficial all year round, there was a clear peak season in the months leading up to Christmas. So, the focus for us was to generate and nurture those businesses through, so that they would then convert during the peak season. So, it’s really finding the right point of time for them to purchase.
DR: Sure, so with all that in mind then, what tactics or strategies did Really B2B employ to help M&S Corporate Gifts overcome those challenges and actually achieve those goals?
KH: Yeah, as Charlie said earlier, our activity is heavily insight and data driven. We’re really lucky that we’ve got a wide range of data sources that we can use to get under the skin of our prospects. So, no matter what size they are or what industry they’re from, we can find out quite a lot about them.
And that means that our plans can be delivered using the right channels and the messages that really resonate with the target audience, no matter who they are. For this campaign, each year that we’ve worked with M&S, we develop a specific campaign theme. And that’s based on previous learnings and the insights that we know about the target audience. The last campaign that we ran was ‘Be Unforgettable’. The theme that we had for it was: in today’s transactional world, taking the time to show your appreciation as a gesture is something that is unforgettable.
It’s something that would really resonate with employees, as well as customers. So, the unforgettable aspect of the campaign worked really well for M&S because gifts from M&S are unforgettable, and also we wanted the businesses themselves to be unforgettable whoever their target audience was as well.
This theme really helped us to cut through the gift card market, and it reinforced M&S as the go-to-partner for providing those corporate gift card schemes. We used that theme to tie in all of our creative and our messaging. The approach that we take was to always optimise all the channels that we use. We want to ensure that we deliver a good return on our clients’ investments and, as you saw from Kettyle that’s something that we take pride in! So, we continue to adapt our approach and we utilise a number of different channels. So, for this campaign, we used direct mail, email, social PPC, amongst others.
While we did have a plan that initially covered the full 12 months, what we do is that, as we’re starting through the activity, we are able to adapt and benefit from the insights that we uncover as part of the scheme. And we can make changes to the messaging or the channels that we’re using. So, we are really responding to customer demand.
We also had quite a detailed approach in terms of our segmentation so we were able to identify specific audiences that were responding well to the different messages that we had.
So, it was this agile approach that allowed us to increase the engagement, and then we can leverage sales at key moments that’s appropriate to the audience. Also, obviously, it delivers that revenue that M&S are wanting.
DR: Really B2B won Gold for ‘Most commercially successful campaign’ at the B2B Marketing Awards. So, why do you think the campaign was so successful if you had to really pin it down to one thing specifically?
KH: So, learning from previous activity, having a really strong dedicated account team that knew both the client and the target audience inside out, and also the ability that we all had to respond to the market factors. As I mentioned before, we’ve got a really good relationship with M&S and. because we’ve worked with them for a number of different years, we were able to dig a bit deeper and gain some really good insights.
So, we took some learnings in terms of what they were seeing on the consumer side of their business, and we matched them against what we knew about our target audience. The outcome of that was some really strong messaging. So, we developed a really good high messaging hierarchy, and we knew that that resonated with our target audience groups, and that helped us to keep the engagement high throughout the campaign, no matter what channel we were using.
And again, for this campaign, it was a multi-channel approach. We used a combination of content and activity, and that delivered a halo effect, creating a brand awareness and the product awareness that we really needed. And then we followed that with a more personalised sales message approach, and that pushed the audience down the marketing funnel and converted them, so when they met their ‘right time, right place’ type criteria, they were ready to buy, and we could then pass them over to the M&S sales team.
It was also the highly engaging content that we were able to deliver, and that made us stand out from our competitors, and we used that across direct mail, social and email, and it provided us with a good level of cut-through when it was a particularly busy time of year for gifts and the gift card industry.
DR: Okay, great! So, you’ve obviously talked a lot about how the campaign did so well and the challenges that helped to overcome, so what results did M&S Corporate Gifts see?Are there any clear metrics you can share that really just demonstrate how the campaign was so successful?
KH: Unlike the Kettyle campaign, we didn’t have previously defined key metrics. However, the main objective of the campaign was to deliver a high-end impact integrated campaign that resonated with the audience, and obviously drove the sales for the M&S team.
We weren’t given a specific target, but there was an unofficial target that bounced around throughout the campaign between us and the client. And it was kind of a ‘nice to have, but, probably, you won’t achieve it’, so it turned into a ‘do your best’ type of thing’.
And that target was generating £1.5 million worth of sales, but we like a challenge at Really B2B, so that’s definitely what we aimed for.. And the results were brilliant. The campaign generated nearly £2 million in revenue, so we smashed that £1.5 million target. And that was the equivalent of just over 1500% ROI. And, in addition to the sales, we delivered a 114% increase in orders, 2.1 million impressions on social media, and a really high conversion rate from direct mail of 55%. So, I’m pleased to say that we surpassed our target, so much so that we gave the sales team something more to worry about than just generating sales –It was about fulfilling the orders at the end of the day as well.
DR: Sure, well that’s great! I mean I’m glad to hear you’ve absolutely smashed that target by, what, half a million pounds? Okay, so, with that in mind, then what lessons can you take from that campaign that you think that you can apply to future campaigns?
KH: I think it has to be the multi-channel approach, and responding to the changes in the key metrics. By getting into the skin of the target audience, we were really able to adapt to their needs, adapt the messaging and adapt the channels that we’ve been using. And when you combine this with a continuous optimisation that we do as a standard throughout our campaigns and across our channels, you can see how small changes can make a big difference. If the results weren’t what we expected, we then look to see what the variables were. Then we can make some changes, no matter whether that was to copy, or to the channels.
Then, we could monitor the subsequent engagement levels. Again, we were quite lucky because we have near real-time feedback from the M&S sales team, so we could actually see if the things that we were doing were making a difference in terms of the revenue. So, by being able to track and respond in this way, we were able to ensure that our focus was on the target audience and the channels we were using were giving us the best return. Once we had those core channels that we were delivering, we were able to test other channels to see how well they behaved.
And, for us, an account like this is really the truly integrated campaign that’s the best approach for it. And we’re so lucky that so many of the brands that we work with, trust us to delve into the kind of unproven channels to see how far we can go to generate the revenues that are required for their business. So, we’ve got a really good relationship with our clients.
DR: Great stuff! Does anyone have any final thoughts on either campaign?
CH: Yeah, I mean, like we say, it’s all about the insights. Start with the insight and make sure that you’ve got the foundations in place, and then actually consider the channels that you’re going to use to execute, and just make sure it always leads back to that insight. You’re saying the same messages that you really need to land with them. But the biggest takeaway, frankly, is if anyone’s got any questions or anything they want to ask about this do just drop us a note! Come to the Really B2B website or drop us a message on LinkedIn.
