North Star Digital
No matter how good your product or service is, chances are it was born into a heavily-competitive or monopolized market.
Anna Clinic said themselves that the beauty clinic business has become another over-saturated industry. Too many companies are simply competing for the same people, and ads are getting way more expensive to run.
Although Anna Clinic offered their customers great value—extremely competitive prices, qualified staff and imported treatments—they were still losing market share to all the bigger brands.
They had even sought help from a previous marketing agency, but inevitably reached a dead end with their sales goals and simply couldn’t make more money.
Anna Clinic’s founder knew digital marketing was the solution, but he wasn’t getting enough results either; That meant he couldn’t put any more money into his ad campaigns to grow the brand.
And the more time they were wasting, the other 4,000 active clinics in Thailand were competing to the death for customers.
But one small tweak in their marketing strategy in mid-2019, ended up more than doubling their revenue in less than a year.
How did they manage to do it? Here’s a walk-through of how Anna Clinic is practically breaking new sales records on a monthly basis, and how you can apply these valuable solutions to your business too.
Anna Clinic needed to make more money to grow their business. To get more bookings, the family-owned clinic had to stand out in a sea of other clinics, all pining for the same audience.
They knew more brand awareness would lead to more sales. But awareness costs years of investment, and they couldn’t immediately afford huge awareness campaigns that just ‘may or may not work’.
Thus, Anna Clinic needed a tried-and-tested way to make more money with digital marketing from Day 1, so they could take that money and reinvest it into their own growth.
Anna Clinic had achieved an all-time high monthly revenue of around 600,000THB, but they could never repeat the figure. Then their monthly revenue started dropping to less than 400,000THB in the middle of 2019.
And the worst part was they didn’t know why the numbers were dropping, nor how to repeat their best sales month and exceed it.
They didn’t have an in-house marketing team; And being a family-run business, they couldn’t afford to hire a full team and risk it either succeeding or tanking horribly.
Anna Clinic couldn’t just rely on word-of-mouth recommendations forever; They deeply wanted to grow and show people they offered something truly different.
Anna Clinic needed to get their monthly revenue up before it was too late.
The resulting solution was this 2-step process: We (1) first used sales-focused marketing to make them more revenue, and then we (2) introduced content-focused marketing to create even more demand among the audience and get even more sales.
Here’s a breakdown of how we did it, and how you can do it with your business too:
1. Sales-Driven Performance Marketing Campaigns
Picture your market as a group of 100 people. At any given time, only around 3 people are ready to buy your product or service, then and there. Another 7 of them are “kind of open” to the idea of buying.
And besides those combined 10 people, you won’t find much luck getting immediate sales from the remaining 90; They just aren’t interested in you yet.
Here’s a visualization of what most markets look like:
Now, why am I telling you this? It’s because Anna Clinic’s direct sales campaigns were targeted exclusively to that 10% of the market who were ready to buy.
These people—ranging from those who already knew who Anna Clinic were, to people who were interested in beauty clinics and more—were aggressively targeted with the clinic’s promos, discounts and packages. We targeted these people on Facebook.
We didn’t waste time and money with the other 90% at this stage. We focused on showing our ads to people who were most likely to buy, in order to get more immediate bookings for Anna Clinic.
Here’s an example of a sales-driven ad we ran on Facebook (you’ll see the difference between this and content-based ads later in the case study):
This approach that directly spoke to the pain points of the target audience, such as getting a slimmer face at an affordable price, worked tremendously well.
And here’s how we made sure that the campaigns were working: We measured the amount of direct messages we were getting each day and tied them back to Anna Clinic’s increased sales revenue.
Why messages?
People need to ask questions before buying a planned-purchase product. This is something we’ve learned the hard way from working with hundreds of clients from all around the world.
Most people don’t just wake up one day and decide to book a Botox injection session. They slave over the thought for months, or even years, before even thinking of comparing offers from clinics. Only then will they finally make a booking.
Thus, the goal of Anna Clinic’s performance marketing campaigns was to get more high-quality messages, while decreasing the average cost per message.
That way we could connect more interested people to Anna Clinic’s services by giving them a platform to inquire before booking. And more importantly, we could get more bookings at a cheaper cost.
Again, the crucial step here was that we tied the amount of messages directly back to sales revenue, on a daily basis. That was the only way we could see whether they were getting more sales from all the effort.
By doing this we also helped Anna Clinic simplify success, by making the monitoring process easy for them: We kept track of the amount of messages they were getting per day, and they told us how many bookings they received per day.
Doesn’t that sound better than asking “How many comments did we get? How many shares? Likes? Impressions? How many people did we reach?” or “Where are these sales coming from?”
While those metrics are valuable for awareness, remember that at this stage Anna Clinic had to purely focus on getting sales before scaling into brand awareness campaigns. Anything other than messages and cost per message was simply not prioritized.
2. Boosted Content Marketing Campaigns
Around 4 months into performance marketing campaigns, monthly revenue more than doubled, and Anna Clinic was finally ready to invest into awareness!
Now you may be asking yourself why awareness campaigns even mattered anymore if they were already looking at an almost 3x increase in revenue in literally months.
Remember that all of that money only came from the 10% of people I mentioned above. Content marketing for awareness, is where we start targeting the other 90%.
The objective of content marketing is basically to get people to become interested or willing to buy your product.
In contrast to straight-up performance ads, boosted content ads warm up the audience by giving them information about your brand.
Who you are, why your existence matters to them, what problems you solve for them, what promotions you offer—content marketing shows your customer everything they need to know before making a purchase.
Being in the beauty clinic industry, Anna Clinic thrived on building trust with their customer base. That meant we could use their existing USPs, or unique selling points, in the strategy itself.
Anna Clinic had actual doctors to administer their treatments/injections, used Swiss products and boasted fair prices. And you bet we content-marketed the hell out of those high-value benefits, and got people to send direct messages.
Here’s an example of a content marketing ad:
As you can see, the approach is almost totally different from the performance ad in Step 1. This content approach revolved around appealing to the daily struggles of the target audience, and offering high-value content that is meaningful for them.
And with Anna Clinic as the source of the information, the result was brand awareness, with trust in the brand as a credible source.
Developing Winning Practices to Use in Ads
Through this setup, we also tested the results of ads from both content and performance marketing campaigns, to find out crucial information, such as which promos worked and which clinic branches people visit more.
With this data, Anna Clinic now had insight on where more of their budget should go, for them to maximize their revenue.
Again, you can see that every strategic decision made from the steps above was sales-driven. We never went off track. And that’s one of the benefits of keeping the KPIs simple: No matter how big you scale, keeping things simple will keep everybody in the team on the same page.
Here’s an overview of Anna Clinic’s 129.8% increase in sales revenue under our Facebook marketing campaigns in 8 months:
In addition to the awesome sales growth, Anna Clinic also clocked in these figures with us:
Anna Clinic’s content marketing campaigns also received an average Facebook engagement rate of 0.58%, beating two key competitors in the process. Keep in mind the global 2019 average engagement rate for Health/Beauty pages was only 0.05%.
(The engagement rate is calculated by the number of engaged users divided by total reach, then multiplied by 100 to get a percentage.)
Always Start with the Strategy
The simplest way to develop a sustainable ad strategy is to sync your sales goals with your marketing efforts from Day 1. Make your marketing efforts share 1 KPI, and tie everything back to the amount of sales you’re getting.
If the observed KPI doesn’t work, pick another KPI, hypothesize that it will effectively lead to more sales, and test it until you find a winning formula.
For Anna Clinic, it was the amount of messages, as their services are a planned purchase.
If you’ve got something a little more impulse purchase-friendly, consider optimizing your Facebook ad campaigns for direct purchases instead. We’ve also got a case study for that here, where we helped a men’s razor brand increase their sales revenue by over 1,700%!
Anna Clinic is now looking to build a clearer brand image to nurture their existing customer base and attract even more new customers, more so in such a competitive industry.
They’re firm believers in online marketing and were forward-thinking from the start, and that’s what helped them succeed.
Now they’re looking to create even more brands under their name!
