Today’s brands must blend powerful storytelling and creative with technology to engage customers and drive behaviour that ultimately helps to achieve business objectives.
At Fuel Digital we deliver brand success using a multidisciplinary team and approach; strategists, creatives and designers working collaboratively with our clients to combine data, planning and research, human-centered insights and creativity to build memorable, effective digital experiences and campaigns.
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“They have an absolute understanding of everything media and digital, where prospects are and how to get to that audience.”
National Recruitment Director, St John NZ
SwipedOn
SEO. PROGRAMMATIC. REMARKETING.
SwipedOn are the world’s leading providers of visitor management software, with their SaaS solution being smart, simple, and secure. What more could you want? Primarily used as a health and safety registry for staff, visitors and contractors, our key target is HR managers and senior administrators across the globe—that’s nearly 40 countries, including New Zealand, Australia, UK, America, and Canada. With SwipedOn founders wanting to exit, it was our job to grow their customer base quickly and within their global Cost per Acquisition (CPA) targets.
We got cracking by auditing and optimising SwipedOn’s websites across 39 countries, which led to our budget being increased to make room for Google Adwords, re-marketing, and programmatic. Needless to say, this paid off; SwipedOn sold in October 2018 and kept us on as their digital partner with a budget increase of 1,000% (yep, you read that correctly!) to further accelerate their growth on a global scale.
So, what exactly did we do? Firstly, we developed a bespoke attribution tool to provide insights in to customer behaviour, which helped us ensure their money was going in to the right channels to create conversions. We built custom landing pages for each country to optimise campaign performance, which meant we spent less on ads while gaining more conversions and increased organic traffic to each site. This ultimately encouraged users to convert from free sign-ups to paid plans from the very get-go.
From the website audits, we were able to identify technical SEO issues, deploy a global SEO strategy, and create SEM campaigns across paid AdWords on the Google and Bing networks. We simultaneously launched a programmatic campaign to create brand awareness, ultimately increasing SwipedOn’s customer base. Phew!
But the real question is, how did this translate in to actual results? We’ll let the new owners’ press release do the talking:
- SwipedOn has customers in 39 countries and is growing by over 100
customers monthly. - Annual Recurring Revenues of approximately NZ$1.7 million (£0.8 million), growing at +100% per annum
- SwipedOn has a Customer Acquisition Cost of NZ$609 with a Life Time Value (“LTV”) of NZ$6,700
- Excellent customer satisfaction: Net Promoter Score (NPS) of 60 with high customer retention and revenue churn less than 6% per annum
- The company grew rapidly over the last year with customer numbers more than doubling to over 2,279.
But our job doesn’t end there—we continue to grow SwipedOn’s customer base at a rate of 17 every day—that’s 6,000 per year! Our expertise in developing bespoke technology, tracking and measuring responses and continually optimising campaigns ultimately led to the success of SwipedOn, and a strong response for their stakeholders.
Blueberries NZ
WEBSITE. PROGRAMMATIC. SOCIAL.
We’ve been involved with Blueberries NZ for a number of years now, and each year we’re tasked with the challenge of helping them sell their blueberries all around New Zealand through Countdown supermarkets. Each year, the goal is the same: create a demand for the product and improve on last year’s profits. This is no mean feat, considering we live in a climate where blueberry sales in general are decreasing.
But how do you create demand for a product that isn’t, well, in demand? By using our powers of digital marketing and a good dose of creativity and innovation, we’re able to target both passive and active clients. Active buyers are prospects that are already on the buyer’s journey where passive buyers on the other hand haven’t begun this journey. These buyers may have a problem, but it isn’t big enough yet that it’s forced them to look for a solution. We tap in to these different markets by combining SEO, AdWords, re-marketing, social media strategy, and programmatic display in a bespoke way to ensure all markets are covered. Essentially, we define every customer’s online journey on a ridiculously detailed scale, so we’ve got all our bases covered.
So, what was our plan of attack for the last campaign? Firstly, we approached high-profile track and field athlete Eliza McCartney and had her jump on board as a brand ambassador for Blueberries NZ. Eliza was the face of the campaign and was the perfect advocate for healthy living (and a lover of blueberries!).
When it came to in-store solutions, we served customers in the grocery section of every Countdown in New Zealand, with ads being remarketed to customers’ mobile phones which offered free recipes, discounts and promotional offers, and loads of information around both the brand and the product.
The results? We fulfilled our challenge and sold a record amount of product both online and through Countdown, of course!
Under Armour
WEBSITE. PROGRAMMATIC. SOCIAL.
Under Armour were launching their HOVR footwear range—just like how Nike have the Air Max range—and we jumped on board to help drive more traffic to their retailer’s websites, as well as increase foot traffic to the likes of Rebel Sport and Stirling Sports.
We needed to channel our inner GenZ and Millennial mindsets with this one! Under Armour have a very youthful, brand-astute audience aged 15–25, and in this case their audience love an active lifestyle but need their shoes to work for a multitude of different activities from going to the gym, to hiking, to going to a café.
Their budget allowed for a 3-month campaign period, and we used our expertise to determine where this budget would go. Our insights in to the demographic came from extensive research and data, and after taking a deep dive in to TV, radio, cinema and digital opportunities, researching consumption data, and comparing competitor media spend, we were able to settle on an allocation of 60% outdoor and 40% digital marketing. Our team of media buyers were beyond effective, as they were able to negotiate a crazy savings of a 65% on the usual rates.
Although Under Armour provided all creative for the project (based out of their regional office in Panama) we effectively produced:
- Media research, including consumption analysis, category and competitor spend reporting
- Media planning, negotiations and buying
- Presentation of the media plan to the client
- Media liaison and coordination
- Ongoing digital media optimisation
- Campaign reporting
The goal here was to essentially reach a niche audience within a mass audience, which led us to target these people through demographic modelling and geo-fencing while in-store as well as online. With video being a much stronger and more compelling tool to tell the Under Armour story, we delivered these along with animated display ads which resulted in just shy 4 million impressions!
Despite outdoor advertising targeting the masses, in our case it effectively built brand awareness in general, as well as specific awareness of the new footwear range. Auckland was our base for this; we spent 60% on large format digital billboards in the heart of Auckland, with a crazy 3.78million views giving these ads an impressive CPM of less than $15! Fun fact, a good radio campaign would likely deliver a CPM of $60, with TV well over $100.
Collectively, the average CPM was around the $10 mark across all three channels—outdoor, display, and video. That equates to a whopping 7.7million ad impressions! If that wasn’t enough, we were able to identify a positive shift in sales once the campaign was over.
There you have it, proof that we put audiences first! Through intensive research, overlaying data inputs, and good old fashioned experience we’re able to effectively combine media channels to reach the targets and ultimately change perceptions—in the most cost effective way as possible.
Matuku Moana
BRANDING. DIGITAL. PROGRAMMATIC.
In 2018, Auckland property developer Ben Turner hatched a plan to turn a 400-acre working dairy farm in Pukehina into an eco village and nature reserve, called Matuku Moana. It was a big, audacious idea – the first of its kind in New Zealand, and possibly even Australasia.
Fuel Agency was tasked with building public awareness of the project, and rallying submissions in favour of the development.
Like all ahead-of-their-time ideas, Matuku Moana had an education job to do. We needed to let the public – particularly the Western Bay of Plenty – know exactly what an eco village is, and the positive effect it would have on the community.
On a nuts and bolts level, the goal was to gain double the average number of 44 submissions, rallying tangible support and excitement for the development.
We designed and built the Matuku Moana brand from scratch. We created a beautiful landing page, where all the information needed was clearly laid out – and submissions could be quickly made through a simple digital form.
The site was populated with 15-30 second videos, making the sometimes-complex information easy and fun to take in.
We took care of every piece of collateral, from beginning to end – includin 3D renders of the housing and community designs, direct mail flyers, press and digital ads, copywriting, branded email comms, and an integrated PR and comms strategy.
We smashed the client’s goal of 88 submissions, gaining a massive 222 through the website’s simple digital form – and a staggering 95% of those submissions were positive or neutral.
Our PR plan gained positive exposure across a wide range of media, including national and regional print, TV, and radio.
2,208 people visited the site during the submissions period of 14 October – 16 November 2018.
994 users came to the website directly, representing 155 of the form completions.
Our overall conversion rate for submissions was 7.3% – blowing industry standards of 0.89-2.7% out of the water.
In total, we served up 319,146 programmatic ads and 7,015 AdWords. Gained clicks of 339 programmatic ads and 290 AdWords. Plus, racked up 411 YouTube views and 7,476 programmatic ad views.
