Evans Cycles, one of Britain’s largest cycle retailers, is working with Turn, the digital hub for marketers, to implement a data-driven approach to its online marketing.
Evans Cycles is using Turn’s Campaign Suite for programmatic advertising, to identify and target key audiences, and gather a single customer view of how cyclists behave online.
Challenge
One of the current challenges for digital marketers is that there is so much data available, generating many advertising opportunities, which cannot all be implemented at the same time. Evans Cycles wanted to reach new, wider audiences and grow omni-channel brand awareness. To achieve this, the group set out to partner with a digital marketing hub that would help them gain a single customer view across their online advertising.
Solution
Evans Cycles is using programmatic ad technologies to take a more consumer-centric approach to its digital marketing. This audience-first thinking decreases the guesswork in marketing, allowing Evans Cycles to optimise campaigns based on what is working well, and provides increased agility during the campaign delivery phase.
Process
By increasing its use of real-time bidding, Evans Cycles has been able to develop better digital marketing integration throughout the path to purchase. With Turn’s support, the retailer is co-ordinating brand campaigns at the start of the research process, following up with messaging focused around influencing the customer’s buying decision.
Turn has been able to provide some invaluable insights to Evans Cycles. For example, the data revealed that the core Evans Cycles audience is not always looking at cycling websites. Rather, their time online is spent on specific sections of marketplace sites like eBay and national news sites such as The Guardian. This enables Evans Cycles to expand its strategies beyond the obvious contextual targeting, and employ additional tactics around private marketplaces, retargeting and site extensions, to good effect.
Results
The adoption of programmatic by Evans Cycles has been so successful that the company is now expanding its digital marketing team to run programmatic campaigns in-house, full time. In the first two months using the Turn platform, the Evans Cycles prospecting campaigns have exceeded cost per acquisition objectives by 20% compared to the last year, and the audience insights gained from Turn have been shared across the business to inform planning.
Ange Bussy-Socrate, online marketing manager at Evans Cycles, added: “Using programmatic is like running a powerful road bike like the BMC Time Machine; it can be highly powerful, but only if you have the right rider and maintenance to keep it running successfully.
“The support we are getting from Turn enables us to use the technology to the best of its ability. The partnership will remain a key success factor on our programmatic journey.”
With an increasing proportion of sales now being driven through the website, Evans Cycles is investigating the adoption of Turn’s data management platform Audience Suite. This will enable Evans Cycles to more effectively utilise its first-party data and progress the group further on the journey to realising a single customer view across channels.