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SUMMARY:
You can go direct to your audience with email or direct mail. Or you can reach another organization’s audience with a third-party platform. For example, PR platforms have an audience of journalists, Booking.com has an audience of vacation seekers, and Kickstarter has an audience of early adopters. To spark your best ideas, today we bring you examples with results from a packaging manufacturer, vacation rental, and indoor hydroponics company. |
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Casita1906 is an Italian holiday home.
The initial listing's bland interior photo failed to captivate potential guests, offering no glimpse of the scenic beauty awaiting them.
Creative Sample #1: Booking.com listing of rental vacation home
When visitors did click through on the listing, there was no information about the home’s owners (the ‘hosts’) in the profile, other than a simple picture.
Creative Sample #2: Host info on profile page
The team conducted an AI photo analysis of the main photo in the listing versus other photos that were already on the profile page. The artificial intelligence suggested using a photo of an outdoor scenic view on the listing instead.
Creative Sample #3: New featured photo for listing
“Regarding AI tools, among the most used by our team are: ChatGPT, Copilot, Gemini, Talkwalker, Semrush, and many more,” said Andrea Succi, Founder, GetMoreBooking.com (Casita1906’s agency).
The team also added a host profile comprised:
Creative Sample #4: New host profile
I realize the above creative sample is hard to read, so here are some specific examples of copy from it.
The team conducted a competitor analysis and found keywords such as Mainarde, Abruzzo, Lazio, and Molise National Park. They gave suggestions to the AI, and it wrote ‘Imagine waking up surrounded by the majestic Mainarde mountains, in the Abruzzo, Lazio, and Molise National Park.’ “[Keyword optimization] is fundamental: Booking.com is a search engine. And it works as a search engine,” Succi said.
They interviewed the property owners as well, and manually wrote an emotional story about the property. For example – ‘Casita 1906 is the home where Rocchetta a Volturno's first television arrived, thanks to Don Ferdinando Peri. Here, the villagers would gather en masse to marvel at what came out of that new cathode ray tube.’
As a result of these changes, Casita1906 was able to exceed Booking.com benchmarks, according to the platform:
“How Booking.com works is simple, although extremely complex, and ultimately boils down to: the higher you are in the ranking when customers search for certain keywords, the more likely someone will visit your profile page. And the more optimized your profile page is, the more likely a visitor will make a booking. And I have seen more successful bookings,” said Alessandra Peri, Manager, Casita1906.
Hope Innovation is an indoor garden hydroponic company that sells indoor hydroponic systems and teaches people how to grow their own food.
Hope Innovation conducted online training about hydroponics. The team slowly grew its email list and social media presence organically with daily social media posts and videos, along with an ad to an opt-in page for the training. On the live training, they would mention their product.
“Using this strategy, we had accumulated 1,000 email subscribers and 10,000 Facebook and Instagram followers,” said Tessa Agrey, Co-Founder, Hope Innovations.
Agrey and her co-founder wanted to bring a new product to market – an indoor garden system. They needed 50,000 Canadian dollars to cover the mold and manufacturing costs and talked to potential investors. “Investors wanted us to trap customers into buying expensive refill pods and custom parts, but we didn’t want to go that route as we were trying to solve a problem,” she said.
Through research, they discovered crowdfunding, which seemed low-risk and had a low buy-in. “We chose Kickstarter to test the market and see if customers were interested. Kickstarter allows people to pre-buy your product, setting a goal you need to reach. If you reach it, you get the money to make your product; if not, the customers' money is returned, and you learn it’s not what the market wants,” she said.
Their primary challenge was the lack of awareness, engagement, and audience compared to the amount of money they needed to earn. They knew they needed to create awareness and buzz.
Their strategy, because they had a tight budget, was to not just create awareness and have people see an ad or two and then get lost forever. “We wanted them to interact with our ads and capture their email so we could control their warm-up journey and it wasn’t left up to the luck of the Facebook gods,” Agrey said.
The first step was getting specific with their ideal customer. They asked themselves who would be interested in growing their own food and then delved deeper into demographics, psychographics, and behaviors. This meant understanding what their potential customers were seeing, hearing, reading, feeling, and thinking about when it came to growing their food.
The team gathered this information by:
This allowed them to identify common pain points, and they refined their marketing and messaging to address these specific concerns. Using insights from competitor reviews and product feedback, they created a detailed profile of their ideal customer.
Creative Sample #5: Ideal customer profile
With this valuable information, they tested various audience segments, imagery, and messaging.
They discovered that their audience responded enthusiastically to visuals of the garden in home settings and simple pictures with text.
Creative Sample #6: Facebook ad
“We used sprint testing to pre-test sections of our Kickstarter page and images, ensuring a good conversion rate and appealing messaging upon launch,” she said.
Creative Sample #7: Examples of images and copy the team tested
“Knowing we needed to generate a lot of buzz without a huge budget, we decided to leverage a giveaway using UpViral,” Agrey said.
They offered one of their hydroponic systems as a prize, promising to give it away if they hit their target. Participants received one entry for submitting their email and could earn additional entries by sharing the giveaway on social media.
On the landing page, they:
This strategy significantly increased their exposure at a minimal cost – they were able to get email opt-ins from 10,000 people. By incentivizing shares, they maximized their organic reach and generated excitement around their product.
Creative Sample #8: Giveaway landing page
The team nurtured these leads with a series of emails featuring daily live sessions in the 12 days leading up to their campaign launch. They focused on teaching, answering questions, and building a community around their product.
The daily emails included a feature of the garden, common questions the team answered during their live sessions, and then a push to that day’s video so people could see the product.
Creative Sample #9: One of the daily emails
The team decided what copy and images to include on their Kickstarter page based on how it performed in pre-testing.
They also made sure to address common questions from comments, groups, and live sessions:
Kickstarter’s guidelines also influenced their content – requiring specific elements like video, stretch goals, and timeline.
“After gathering data on what people wanted to know and considering Kickstarter's requirements, we used Mouseflow and our sprint testing method to refine our content,” Agrey said. This involved testing different images, messages, and their placements to see what kept users engaged.
Creative Sample #10: Testing the Kickstarter page
Their Kickstarter page had the following price points:
Each garden offer came with everything needed to start right out of the box. They wanted to guarantee that their customers were set up for success and could easily grow their gardens.
Creative Sample #11: Product packages
They had two promotions – Super Early Bird (first-day sale) and Early Bird (days two and three). As part of the email and live event warmup, the team had announced that there would be a Super Early Bird one-day sale on launch day, offering the lowest price ever with limited availability. “This created urgency and scarcity, encouraging immediate action,” she said.
Kickstarter also includes stretch goals. If the team reached certain amounts, backers would get additional items for free, encouraging sharing and making the campaign more viral. “In hindsight, our stretch goals were too close together; we should have spread them out more, but we didn’t expect to raise more than CA$100,000,” she said.
Creative Sample #12: Stretch goal rewards
They saw a 45% opt-in rate from their landing pages, with each lead costing less than CA$1 thanks to the organic reach generated by the giveaway. Their emails got a 56% open rate with a 28% click rate. All this led up to their successful Kickstarter campaign.
The Kickstarter page achieved a 31% conversion rate.
Creative Sample #13: Final draft of Kickstarter page
Their Eden Tower launch exceeded the duo’s expectations. They reached their CA$50,000 goal within the first 15 minutes and nearly hit CA$300,000 by the end of the first day. By the end of the month, they had raised CA$455,000.
The most popular tier was the Super Early Biard special for the four-layer Eden Tower priced at CA$449. It generated 346 sales.
"By strategically defining our audience, leveraging organic marketing techniques, and engaging directly with our potential customers, we were able to have a wildly successful Kickstarter campaign. This allowed us to take the steps to turn our side hustle into a crowdfunding triumph while working full-time jobs. Our journey from a small startup to a successful campaign is a testament to the power of targeted marketing and community engagement," Agrey said.
Packsize is a packaging and containers manufacturer.
Founded in 2002, It initially focused on sectors that required oversized and sometimes unusually shaped boxes, such as furniture, cabinets, and audio equipment. The company saw an opportunity for expansion in the ecommerce space, where made-to-order boxes can be sized for each unique delivery.
The company estimates its right-sized boxes have saved more than 1 billion pounds of CO2 emissions since 2013.
Packsize’s public relations and marketing efforts were highly technical and product-focused, with detailed explanations of how the hardware and software functioned and a lack of storytelling or reporter appeal.
For example, one of their product-focused press releases had the headline ‘Packsize On Demand Packaging Technology Maximizes Savings.’
Its product-focused press releases lacked the human touch needed to engage reporters and audiences alike
Kicking off in early 2023, the team and its new agency launched a campaign to B2B decision makers that focused on benefits, not features.
The goal of the campaign was “…to develop and deliver deep storytelling that connected to audiences’ desire for operations solutions that are economically and environmentally sustainable,” said Jessica Whidt, Managing Director, Warner Communications (Packsize’s communications agency).
They also communicated B2C end users’ environmental concerns, to encourage B2B decision makers to use industrial packaging that was more appealing to their customers.
Public relations was a key component of getting this message out, including on the PR Newsire press release distribution platform as well as direct pitching to reporters.
For example, the team got included in a Packaging Dive article by connecting with senior reporter Katie Pyzyk regarding a recently authored article on unboxing, and inquired about interest in writing about right-sized packaging as it related to e-commerce.
The reporter spoke at length with then-CEO Rod Galloway about the economic and environmental benefits to e-commerce companies. Galloway focused on storytelling around the challenge of providing positive unboxing experiences, which was included in an article in Packaging Dive by Pyzyk titled ‘On-demand rightsized packaging technology is changing the e-commerce game.’
This focus on storytelling about ecommerce benefits also supported major announcements such as Packsize’s partnership with Walmart, by highlighting the greater context of the business and environmental benefits of right-sized packaging, and the market issues Walmart was looking to address.
This resulted in an article by Liz Young in The Wall Street Journal titled ‘Retailers Tackle Cardboard Overload With Made-to-Fit Boxes.’ The article did not merely discuss the announcement, but also the story the team was telling – difficulties faced by warehouse distributors, manufacturers and retailers in appealing to consumers who were tired of the extreme waste and nuisance of oversized and multiple boxes as experienced in the e-commerce retail boom of the COVID pandemic.
With more of a story to tell, the company also increased its social media posting by 30% year-over-year.
By framing their narrative around environmental and economic benefits, Packsize not only captured media attention but also resonated with eco-conscious consumers.
As a result of this initiative, Packsize saw a 72% year-over-year growth in share of voice (from an 18% SoV to a 31% SoV), 63.5% increase in social media followers on LinkedIn (now 38,000 followers) and X (now 3,739 followers), and an estimated audience reach exceeding 489 million.
The average domain authority of outlets Packsize was featured in increased 11.6% YoY.
“[The campaign] was able to elevate our brand across multiple channels,” said Adam Fray, Director of Marketing, Packsize.
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