Project Description
It’s not all monkey business!
Boost sales faster with a strategic marketing to mums approach!
The outdoor play & climbing equipment category has seen significant changes over recent years. Like many industries, it experienced a boom in sales during the pandemic and now sales have stabilised and for some, declined. It is also now a more competitive market than ever before with a very tight peak buying period. Coupled with Mums weighing up quality, value for money and longevity, it’s a category requiring substantial groundwork across the marketing mix for a large part of the year to see results – and growth.
The Scenario:
Funky Monkey Bars is an established and trusted household name manufacturing Australian-made Outdoor Play & Climbing Equipment frames founded through a desire to provide their monkey bar obsessed kids with something at home!
As the category has grown, the industry and Funky Monkey Bars are facing 4 significant shifts:
- A flooded market with new lower priced and lower quality competitors
- Mums buying journey has evolved regarding online vs offline experiences and social media playing a more crucial role in consideration
- Successful influencer marketing is demanding more from the marketer
- Digital advertising costs had gone through the roof – and there’s a limit to how much companies can spend
Funky Monkey Bars needed to understand how they could ignite faster growth and make better business decisions to establish them as market leader nation-wide.
They were:
- Coming up to a critical sales period – pressure was on to maximise it
- Time and resource poor – they did not have the systems to best manage elements of marketing and content creation anymore
- Unable to scale their influencer marketing further without the contacts, knowledge and systems required
- Challenged to grow brand awareness on the Eastern Seaboard
- Uncertain of Mums shifting online and offline buying behaviours for the category
They were at a roadblock.
Their incredible success to date mostly attributed to gut instinct and sheer grit, but now, the market, and their customer had changed too much and it was time to close the gap. They needed to look externally for knowledge and expert support beyond their current abilities, but there was trepidation and risk around their next steps:
- What if the experts didn’t deliver – would this be a waste of their precious marketing funds?
- What if they didn’t work with experts at all, guessed the answers and continued to do what they were doing in the same way and sales targets fell short?
Solutions
The first step was to get them back onto the right path and reconnect with today’s customer.
Mumpower, the experts in untapping revenue and boosting sales, recommended a customised growth action plan solution that was already proven to work which included:
- A full quantitative market research initiative – gaining market clarity on today’s buyer to realign with the customer and identify profitable growth opportunities
- A high impact influencer campaign – boosting brand awareness at scale to attract more potential customers during their peak sales period. This comprised of 10 best fit and aligned content creators that produced:
- 30+ pieces of content designed to strengthen social proof and brand trust
- 10 UGC (user generated content) videos for brand repurposing
These solutions were designed for them to be able to benefit from:
- Market research enabling them to ask all the unknowns so they don’t have to guess the best way forward anymore
- High impact influencer marketing that can be leveraged on: brand ads, social, website and influencers socials strategically in the lead up to their peak sales season
Outcomes:
The results speak for themselves.
Funky Monkey Bars boosted sales targets above forecasts and move Mums along the entire pathway through critical information to connect properly and proven expert systems to activate high performing marketing, faster.
Funky Monkey Bars founder and Director, Tracey Roberts, said they enjoyed 10% growth year on year.
Tracey Roberts:
“The results speak for themselves. Doing this contributed to that, otherwise I don’t know we would have reached it. It not only increased the brand awareness but when you look back at the research alongside, that content reflected what we want to reflect in our social channels.”
The targeted market research project garnered responses from more than 600 Mum-shoppers and enabled Funky Monday Bars to identify 6 key areas of opportunity that are a part of / influencer Mums buying journey including:
- Challenging assumed ideas of their primary demographic
- Refining marketing communications messages and language
- Targeting new, profitable market opportunities and customer groups
- Understanding the actual buying preferences in person vs online
- Identifying brand messages that customers resonate with most
- Clarifying the exact ways to extend the lifetime value of the customer
And the influencer marketing campaign leveraged results in the lead up to peak sales system delivering:
- Massive word of mouth and endorsements
- UGC, reviews and lifestyle images
- Higher converting digital ad content
- A content calendar that is exploding with material they can repurpose
Marketing to Mums today has to include effective Influencer Marketing as part of the mix, and the brand recognised the value of the content that was produced. Funky Monkey Bars benefited with outstanding metrics in a very noisy landscape enjoying an 8% average engagement rate and 46% more content than expected as bonus!
Funky Monkey Bars are now realigned with Mums Today.
Tracey Roberts:
“Just for us to be able to have so many (product) variations in market at that peak buying time in terms of colour, style of frame, equipment and age of kids…gave a good breadth of what we can deliver by the range of influencers we used – it was great. It not only increased the brand awareness but when you look back at the research alongside, how much that content reflected what we want to reflect in our social channels.”
The powerful combination of influencer marketing and market research allowed Funky Monkey Bars to have an immediate impact on brand awareness and sales through influencing and empowering potential consumers to convert, whilst gaining clarity on today’s Mum to refine marketing strategies and actions for 2024.
Ultimately, Mumpower delivered on Funky Monkey Bars objectives and exceeded expectations.
“This is why I came to you because this is time consuming and hard, so from a practical perspective in terms of womanpower, that meant all of this could happen because of your availability and your skills. You’re very good at what you do.” – Tracey Roberts.