One business, two overlapping brands
Kirsty is the Marketing Manager of a company that encompasses two of New Zealand’s largest and best loved beauty brands.
One is known for its brick and mortar salons found in malls and high streets up and down the country, although it also offers hair, styling and beauty products online. The other, meanwhile, is an online-only retail store that has made a name for itself more recently.
The two brands offer a very similar product range, but do so in very different ways, which presented Kirsty with an interesting marketing challenge. And this challenge was made more acute by the fact that the NZ beauty industry was facing aggressive competition from international brands entering the market.
Capturing market without cannibalising yourself
The main challenge that Kirsty faced was that the two brands had very similar product ranges, with a wealth of SKU overlap. Unsurprisingly they also had very similar target markets.
Kirsty had to find a way to grow the total market share of both brands, but without one brand stealing share from the other, and without driving up the cost per click of key terms that both brands would need to focus on.
It was a rather unique situation, and one that Kirsty knew she needed help with. She turned to Traction.
“We chose Traction Marketing because they gave us honest, realistic growth projections backed by data,” Kirsty explains. “They have a great understanding of New Zealand’s ecommerce landscape, and we felt that their data-driven approach made them a great marketing partner.”
Playing to each brand’s strengths
Traction soon got to work, focusing on Google Ads and digital strategy. The process began by developing an understanding of the business goals and target markets of the salon-focused brand versus the online-only brand, to identify ways to differentiate the marketing for each.
Traction and Kirsty’s team worked together to build a strategy that focused on driving brand loyalty, particularly among buyer personas who were less price sensitive. The strategy would help to avoid the race to the bottom that so often comes with a pure commodity play.
Once implemented, Traction assessed the strategy on a weekly basis, optimising and adapting it based on insights drawn from key metrics. The goal was to ensure that the budgets for both brands were used as effectively as possible.
On top of all this, Traction ran strategic workshops and marketing deep dives with the company, and provided ongoing marketing training and support.
“Traction Marketing has a strong understanding of our business needs,” says Kirsty. “They’re also highly flexible in adapting to new strategies.”
Instant growth across the board
With the salon brand well established, Kirsty recognised that the online-only side of the business had real potential. And with Traction’s help, the size of that opportunity quickly became clear.
Within just one month, the campaign had driven incredible growth:
- Website visitor numbers more than doubled
- Returning customer numbers doubled
- The number of new customers grew 5.5x
- Revenue grew 2.4x
And all this was achieved without taking sales away from the more established salon brand. In fact, the market share of both brands grew.
“We are really happy with the performance of the ads so far,” says Kirsty, who is also glowing in her praise for the Traction team.
“They’re adaptable, super knowledgeable and have great communication skills! They work hard to understand and cater to your unique business needs, and they’re experts in helping you scale.”
