6 Digital Marketing Case Studies to Learn From

Writer:
Stephanie Lica
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Published: Jun 26, 2020
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Today, marketers are becoming increasingly savvy to the fact that digital marketing is a great way to increase traffic and generate leads for their businesses. According to the Content Marketing Institute, 69% of the most successful B2B content marketers had a documented digital marketing strategy as of 2020.

With so many businesses and people online today, upping your digital marketing game often means refining your digital marketing and content strategy. You can start that process by asking:

  • What kind of content best suits your company?
  • Who is your audience?
  • What are you doing to get that content to your audience?
  • How are you optimizing that content to bring in leads?

Using good digital marketing practices means combining different methods and channels of marketing to boost your content. Which ones you choose will depend on the type of content you're creating, the target audience, and the platform that content will be shared on. Do it right and you’ll get your brand in front of new eyes.

6 Digital Marketing Case Studies You Can Learn From

Each of the case studies below offer examples of companies that used digital marketing to boost sales, build their brand, or improve the customer experience. Let’s see what lessons we can learn from brands that are doing it right.

1. Envelopes.com

Our first case study in digital marketing comes from the team at Envelopes.com. They wanted to see if they could solve a problem all too common to ecommerce businesses: cart abandonment.

To do it, the team decided to try sending out reminder emails to customers who’d visited the site, put an item in their cart, and exited without buying. They sent targeted re-engagement emails at two different times following a customer visit: one at 11 a.m. the following morning, and another 48 hours later.

The 11 a.m. email was decently effective, with a conversion rate of 27.66%. But the 48-hour email resulted in a staggering 40% conversion rate. The emails sent the next day had a higher open rate, but a much lower conversion rate than the ones sent two days later.

2. Beardbrand

By focusing on its brand image, the team behind Beardbrand was able to build their ecommerce business up to $120K in revenue per month. The company sells beard oils and personal grooming products to what it calls “the urban beardsmen” of the world.

How did they build such a strong brand? By building up their word-of-mouth reputation, developing their brand story, and offering incentives like one-business-day shipping.

The company chose to market to a narrow demographic instead of trying to market to everyone, then put effort into crafting a story and aesthetic that appealed to that demographic. It created an image that its customers can relate or aspire to (the manly “urban beardsman”), and crafted its brand image to fit that persona. It makes sure to mention the quality of its product in its messaging, tie its brand image together across all of its channels, and don’t offer discounts.

While this method of building a customer base may be more expensive and time-consuming than more conventional digital marketing methods, it’s paid serious dividends for Beardbrand in the long run.

3. Dunkin Donuts

In a digital marketing case study on effective mobile use, Dunkin' Donuts was able to increase its store traffic via a text message campaign. Its marketing efforts ended up bringing 21% more traffic to its Boston locations.

Dunkin' combined on-air promotion via a Boston radio DJ with online ads to get people to opt in to its text messaging campaign. 7,500 people ended up opting in to get updates from the company. Of those:

  • 17% forwarded or showed the text message promotion to a friend
  • 35% considered themselves more likely to buy lattes and coffee from Dunkin’ Donuts

Mobile use among shoppers is already high, and it’s only going up. According to data from Statista, there are 3.5 billion mobile users worldwide as of 2020. More and more, we’re living on our phones. Your marketing strategy should take advantage of this with mobile-friendly content.

4. Mint

Chances are you’ve heard of Intuit’s product called Mint, the app that helps track spending. It’s something of a household name in the personal finance world today. But when it started back in 2006 as an account aggregation app, nobody knew what Mint was. They needed to get the word out, and they did it with an excellent content marketing campaign.

The team at Mint chose to build the app’s brand and reputation by making themselves thought of leaders in the personal finance arena. That’s a pretty standard approach in digital marketing, and it’s been proven to work. But Intuit had an unusual hurdle to clear: they had to convince people it was safe to consolidate its banking data in one place.

Intuit used three key pieces of content marketing in its strategy to get users on board:

  • The MintLife blog
  • Responsiveness on social media
  • Explainer videos to break down the app and its benefits

Intuit used every avenue available to them to engage with and educate its customers on why they needed to use the app. As the company was already known for financial products, they had an advantage when it came to building thought leadership around Mint.

The company used its social media presence to partner with other companies in the financial space that would lend it credibility — such as credit card companies — and engage heavily with customers. They were responsive and approachable, which built rapport.

The MintLife blog established the app as an authority in the personal finance space and made use of SEO best practices to draw in new leads. Its explainer videos took advantage of the growing trend of video in content marketing while furthering its image as an authority. And with that authority came trust.

5. Underwater Audio

Underwater Audio, a seller of waterproof headphones and music players, boosted its sales by almost 41% after making some simple changes to its ecommerce website. It noticed people would often abandon its purchases at one particular point in the sales funnel: the comparison page.

According to the company’s CEO, the comparison page wasn’t very engaging. It had information on products being compared in a table organized in no particular order. The table wasn’t aesthetically appealing, and the information got split so some of it was below the “fold” of the page.

To try and fix the problem, Underwater Audio redesigned its comparison page from the ground up. They got rid of the tables, made sure all the information was displayed above the fold, and streamlined the page copy. The new page saw sales increase by 40.81%.

Drawing new leads into your orbit is vital, but don’t forget to make sure your UI and UX design will keep people around.

6. Kettlebell Kings

Fitness equipment retailer Kettlebell Kings generated hundreds of thousands of dollars by ditching paid advertisements and focusing on organic social media marketing instead. Specifically, the company used Instagram to boost engagement.

Kettlebell Kings started its campaign by creating instructional workout content the company shared on Instagram. This played into the already enormous fitness Instagram community — trainers and influencers with thousands of followers already use the platform to post workouts, so there was a template ready for the company to use.

Once engagement went up, people in the fitness space started posting workouts of their own using Kettlebell Kings products. The company’s social team started reposting certain user-generated content on the corporate account, giving people even more of an incentive to post workouts with their product. They also created a set of guidelines for users to meet in order to qualify for a feature.

From there, Kettlebell Kings paired its increased brand awareness with calls to action like shoppable posts and stories people could swipe up on for free downloadable content. Today, the company makes seven figures.

Customer engagement is crucial. We saw it with the Mint case study, and we see it again here with Kettlebell Kings. If you can engage effectively with your customers, you can take your business to new heights.

Making It Work For You

Used correctly, digital marketing is an incredibly effective tool for your business. It leads to an increase in brand awareness, which in turn generates more sales and higher revenue. And you can take that revenue and funnel it back into your business to create an even higher-quality product and experience for the people that shop with you.

As marketers move further away from conventional platforms like print ads and television commercials, they’re finding new ways to make digital advertising work for their businesses. It’s flexible enough to allow for creativity, letting you use several different angles to bring in new leads. And you can do it without spending a whole lot of money at the beginning.

Use these case studies as templates. Though not all of them will be perfect for your business, you can still draw inspiration from the effective digital marketing tactics they employed. Could you be more active on social media? Start an Instagram video campaign or YouTube channel? Experiment. Test out different approaches and channels, find what works for you, and run with it.

This article was written by Compose.ly writer John Bogna.

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