Chilly's

The Brief

Chilly’s enlisted our expertise for a strategic overhaul of the paid media spend which had been underperforming. Recognising the need for a data-driven and creative approach, we started with an initial assessment of Chilly’s paid media channels. From the outset, it was clear that Chilly’s had been relying heavily on conversion-based ad types, with a low ceiling to the Meta audiences they could target. Our audit identified structural and technical shortcomings in their Meta and Google setups, offering quick wins once we streamlined and restructured the accounts. Armed with this insight, we set out to build the creative strategy they needed to grow.

Here are some of the goals we aimed to achieve

• Distinctive Content: Develop captivating ad content to draw in both existing and new audiences.
• Scale Meta Account through Creative: Elevate their Meta account’s scale and impact through a creative-first strategy.
• Expand into New Markets, Focusing on the EU: Crack new markets with a specific emphasis on key European territories like France, Germany, Spain, and Italy.
• Break into the US Market and Enhance Brand Awareness: Establish a presence in the competitive US market while increasing brand visibility among American audiences.
• Leverage Native-Speaking Creators for Market Penetration: Harness the influence of native-speaking creators to seamlessly expand into diverse markets.
• Successfully Launch New Products: Execute impactful product launches, particularly highlighting the Flip bottle and the cutlery range.

The Approach

Performance

In the first few weeks, our team focused on making improvements to Chilly’s paid search and social accounts. We started with the initial restructuring of the Meta account which, in this case, involved scrapping the existing structure and relaunching with a lower budget so that we could gradually increase spend while improving ROAS. This approach allowed them to target a wider audience and optimise ad performance more effectively.

After initial restructuring we further consolidated the campaign structure, addressing issues related to audience overlap and budget allocation. This optimisation allowed them to allocate budget efficiently, reach a broader audience, and improve ROAS. We also implemented event matching, which enabled more accurate measurement of ad performance and better targeting of similar users who had previously made purchases. These changes resulted in a substantial boost in performance and laid the foundation for future scaling.

Aligning bid strategies to business goal was a critical component of this success story. We improved Chilly’s Google campaign ROAS by 41% after switching to tROAS from eCPC. This strategic adjustment allowed us to optimise bidding in real-time based on the desired return on ad spend, ensuring that every advertising dollar was spent efficiently in pursuit of our business objectives.

Additionally, we performed a split test between Advantage+ and manual campaign setups. The test revealed that Advantage+ outperformed the manual setup, resulting in an 87% higher ROAS. This noteworthy result was achieved while maintaining a balanced allocation of the budget, with a 50/50 split between the two campaign arms. This informed the decision to adopt Advantage+ as the basis for their standard conversion campaign setup, leading to more effective budget allocation and ad performance.

Creative

Creative was absolutely pivotal in our strategy for Chilly’s, especially given the unique challenge they faced initially: only having renders and animations of their products.

To address this challenge head-on, we kicked off our creative efforts with a product photoshoot. This provided us with a bank of assets highlighting their best-selling products and featured the bottles being held by real people in real-life scenarios. This may seem simple, but for a customer looking to buy a Chilly’s bottle, it’s a crucial piece of buying psychology to see the product being handled by another person.

To keep the account rolling with fresh creative we produce around 30 assets per month, ranging from videos and imagery to creator content, which we source from our network of creators. Many of those monthly assets are geared towards Chilly’s numerous product launches. Whether it’s the introduction of new products, patterns, colour variations, or engaging collaborations, it’s crucial that our team remains ahead of these launches. This involves a lot of project planning and making sure we have a range of ad assets ready to go by launch.

Creative Testing

Next, we tie the paid media and creative together, conducting an in-depth analysis of Chilly’s asset performance, focusing on identifying top-performing formats and messaging angles.

For example, for the launch of Chilly’s Flip Bottle range, we created a range of assets, including static images, videos showcasing product bundles, and UGC (User Generated Content) content, continuously testing what works best. Our analysis showed that static images often performed better than videos in certain cases. Notably, annotated images highlighting key product benefits emerged as top-performing assets for the UGC Flip launch, echoing what we saw work for the Series 2 bottle launch.

We saw that our UGC content for the Flip Bottles garnered significant traction, an area of creative that Chilly’s hadn’t delved into before. This content effectively highlighted key product benefits, showcasing how these bottles seamlessly fit into the active lifestyles of Chilly’s target audience. Consumers expect authenticity and relevance in what they see, and this is the core strength of UGC. After seeing the success of their UGC content we made sure to include it as a key element of their creative strategy going forward.

As Chilly’s ventured into the cutlery category, we also leveraged UGC to demonstrate the product’s versatility and practicality in real-life scenarios. Our approach of “putting it in people’s hands” proved to be highly effective in driving engagement and sales for the new product line. The Cutlery UGC collection we created featured a mix of male and female creators, further enhancing its appeal across demographics. Within this UGC content, we strategically integrated client reviews, weaving in powerful taglines such as “the ultimate on-the-go eating experience,”. We also emphasised the product’s longevity and durability over a lifetime of use, while underscoring its superiority over conventional plastic and wooden cutlery alternatives.

To date, we’ve developed hundreds of high-performing assets for Chilly’s. Leveraging our own product photoshoots and UGC sourcing, we can employ various creative formats to effectively showcase the unique benefits of their products in the best way. Overall, our data-driven and creative approach successfully amplified Chilly’s marketing efforts, resulting in boosted performance for their product launches and reinforcing their connection with the target audience, especially during crucial seasonal moments and back-to-uni campaigns.

The Result

We’ve achieved remarkable results with Chilly’s, seeing a 29% increase in top-line revenue, an increase of 54% to ROAS whilst actually reducing their marketing spend by 16% in Q2, highlighting our ability to drive efficiency and performance. When you have a business operating at the scale that Chilly’s does, an increase in efficiency like this makes a huge difference. This allowed Chilly’s to allocate resources more effectively and invest in scaling their business while maintaining a strong ROAS.

Looking ahead, we have two exciting developments on the horizon. Firstly, we are preparing for their expansion into the US market, a move that will reshape our strategy and amplify their impact. By leveraging our in-house data suite (Bark.Insights) we’re are poised to bring more rigour and analysis to Chilly’s future growth plans, making sure that spend is incremental and helping to maximise efficiency at scale.

Additionally, we’re gearing up to launch on TikTok, with creator content at the forefront. Although Chilly’s hasn’t ventured into UGC or creator content much before, our experience on other platforms and scaling other brands like DASH and Free Soul positions us well to apply similar strategies on TikTok. Given TikTok’s preference for creator-led content, we’re excited to roll out these ads and test their effectiveness on the platform, with a launch planned for the near future.

Having worked with Chilly’s for less than a year, we’ve been able to achieve significant results, even dialling back spend while increasing revenue due to fixing technical issues and generating high level creative ads. From this strong foundation, expect to see Chilly’s scaling into Q4 2023, ready to really push on and expand in 2024 with new products, new designs and a strong agency partnership. This all comes from trust and alignment together on the core goal, in-depth growth strategy, high level paid media expertise, creative strategy and rigorous data science.

Bring on the challenge of making reusable products a natural part of everyday life!