Case Study:
Bonboni Mercantile
The Challenge
Planning ahead for the hectic, busy retail seasons of November and December, Bonboni needed to curate eye grabbing and precisely targeted ad campaigns to help push new traffic from social platforms to visit their web store for holiday gift shopping.
- Facebook Ad Design
- Facebook Ad Targeting
- Leveraging Social Proof
Facebook Ad Design
We had the pleasure of working with content and photography provided by Bonboni, which performed very well with the local St. Louis viewers as well as customers who had never heard of the brand before.
Content we used in our digital ads included a beautiful storefront photo, bright flat lays of holiday gift boxes, and rotating carousels of an assortment of gift items that would make meaningful gifts.
During the busy holiday retail season, it was important to use content that was visually appealing as well as uniquely different from what other local and commercial stores were advertising. It was also important to communicate that the brand revolves around offering creative and thoughtful gifts, as well as original local products. Bonboni provided the perfect creative content to capture the viewer’s eye and to prompt customers to engage on social media.
Facebook Ad Targeting
For our Facebook Ad Targeting, we focused on three specific groups of people to ensure that the correct ads were being seen by the correct audiences. For visual reference, please refer to this Digital Advertising Funnel.
Cold Audience - These people targeted in the Cold Audience were people who had potentially never heard of Bonboni or shopped on the online store. The purpose of this audience was to introduce new shoppers to the Bonboni brand without trying to sell them anything.
Warm Audience - These are people who have visited the Bonboni website or engaged in some kind of interaction on social media. Since they were already familiar with the brand, we decided it was time to offer a special discount in these ads that would entice the Warm Audience to complete their purchase.
Hot Audience - Finally, the hot audience includes people who have added items to their cart at some point in time, but did not complete the transaction. Here we offer the Hot Audience a deal they can’t pass up! During the Holiday season, this audience saw ads offering 20% off for Black Friday to give these customers further incentive to complete their purchase. Since (unlike the Cold Audience) the Hot Audience was already familiar with the Bonboni brand, it was appropriate to offer a discount.
During the November - December holiday retail season, ad spend was boosted on the hot audience targeting to put the ads in front of people aware of the Bonboni brand that may be looking for local holiday gifts. Since the hot audience also consisted predominantly of return clients or clients who abandoned carts, boosting ad spend to these specific people yielded an extremely high 9x return on ad spend.
Leveraging Social Proof
After pushing our Cold Audience Ad campaign live, we noticed one specific ad performed exceptionally well: The Bonboni Storefront Photo Ad.
The photo was provided by the client, and included a photo of the owner in front of her beautiful store. This photo was very personal and made the storefront look welcoming! With over 2k likes, 91 comments, and 189 shares, this ad became immediate “social proof” that Bonboni was a trustworthy and popular local store and resulted alone in over 100 purchases. Not only did the like count continue to increase steadfastly after the ad was launched, but new customers in the Cold Audience who saw the ad went to the Bonboni site just by seeing how many people had liked the post. Even more so, customers who were not convinced to make a purchase yet signed up for Bonboni emails to see future product launches and sales.
The engagement on this ad (comments, likes, shares) not only reduced cost of delivery, it resulted in building Bonboni into a trustworthy brand for prospective customers, before they even visited the site due to the high amounts of engagement on the ad (AKA SOCIAL PROOF) - which resulted in higher conversion rates, and overall better return on ad spend. The final CTR maxed out at 25.35%.
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