Winner of the Good Retail Awards’ Digital Impact Award, Horlicks has demonstrated the effectiveness of a well-planned digital strategy. Modern Retail had the pleasure of speaking with Jessica and Caitlin from Mosquito, about Horlicks’ impressive digital campaign.
Horlicks’ campaign
Horlicks decided to create a digital strategy to share their new nourishing shakes range. Their approach considered every step of the consumer journey, from discovery to retargeting those that had abandoned purchases.
Taking consumers on a journey to product discovery, the team strengthened their educational messaging around the new product launch. This was done by creating an incentivised quiz to drive users into the consideration phase, using this tool to inform people about the range and give targeted recommendations based on users’ individual answers. Horlicks’ campaign had measurable benefits, with impressive results at every touchpoint.
The importance of an effective digital strategy
Horlicks’ digital strategy included a strategic approach to grow awareness around their new product range.
“A digital strategy was hugely important for us when building brand awareness and educating consumers around the new Horlicks nourishing shakes range. Especially as this new product range focuses on an extension of messaging (from wellbeing into health) and demographics (an increase in the target age bracket) than the core brand activity.
“A full-funnel approach allowed us to create a targeted campaign and leverage our existing fanbase both online and offline. It gave us the opportunity to reach a large, engaged audience and meant we could target the right people in the right way.
“Additionally, it helped us track and measure the success of the new product launch. By understanding what worked and what didn’t, we were able to make more informed decisions about the direction of the product range.”
Identifying the best keywords to meet objectives
The Horlicks digital strategy was designed to target longer-tail non-brand keywords, to make sure they were able to reach the most relevant audience, Caitlin and Jessica explained.
“As the campaign and positioning of the Horlicks nourishing shakes products was not aimed at a traditional fitness-first audience, we did significant research within the keyword planner to stretch beyond a ‘protein’ themed search intent.
“This meant a large portion of our keywords focused on nutrition and health, which gave us scope to open up a large variety of searches to target, particularly given the unique blend of vitamins and nutrients tailored to each product in the range.
“We focused our attention on layering lower competition keywords into the mix, while also using broad match keywords. We knew these performed well from a cost-efficiency standpoint, as well as helping us facilitate more qualitative search query analysis.
“As the campaign spanned around 6 months, we were able to use our search query analysis over time and build out a large volume of long-tail keywords in an exact match format, based on a data-led approach from a sales performance perspective.”
Retargeting as part of a digital strategy
As well as the initial marketing approach, Horlicks utilised remarketing to reengage potential customers.
“Our targeting focused on 3-day and 7-day retargeting of website visitors (with the exclusion of previous purchasers) across Google Ads and Meta Ads, as well as previous ad engagers and followers on Meta Ads.
“Campaign-level budget optimisation was used to help feed the most budget to the best-performing ad sets, allowing continuous optimisation based on variances over time.
“Typically, remarketing campaigns can be more costly, which meant we had to constantly monitor the costs and adjust the maximum bids, to ensure we were controlling the costs.”
Including influencer marketing within a digital strategy
Influencer marketing was also a key part of Horlicks’ strategy, using two celebrity influencers and two macro influencers to boost brand awareness and generate conversions with a unique discount code for their audience.
“Many key factors came into play when choosing the right influencer, but first and foremost, we wanted the influencers to align with the brand values and have a genuine affinity for the new product range.
“We needed the influencers to understand the product and why it would benefit their audience, this helped us talk directly to our target audience in an authentic and meaningful way. In addition, we targeted a different demographic than with our usual influencer activity, aligning the brand with a slightly older age bracket.”
The success of Horlicks’ campaign
Horlicks’ campaign has been the perfect introduction to make consumers aware of their new nourishing shakes range, working to successfully meet the team’s objectives.
“We are incredibly proud of the campaign for Horlicks’ new nourishing shakes range. It was an amazing opportunity for us to showcase the unique health benefits of the range and reinforce Horlicks as a trusted and reputable brand.
“We loved being part of a creative campaign which captured the attention of both our current and new Horlicks audience and we’re really excited to see what’s next from the range!”
Winning at the Good Retail Awards
Having won the Digital Impact Award at The Good Retail Awards, Caitlin and Jessica explained what this achievement means.
“The response has been amazing and we’re so proud to have won the Digital Impact Award! It’s lovely to have the industry recognition and acknowledgement of the team’s collective hard work and dedication on the campaign.“
Catherine Erdly, Founder and Retail Strategy Consultant of the Resilient Retail Club, commented, adding: “Well, you’ve convinced me to give the new healthy shakes a try! Great co-ordinated campaign showing the benefits of dialling in to what your customer really wants.”
Click here to view the full list of Good Retail Awards 2023 winners.
Holly brings a wealth of experience in both print and digital publishing. As Modern Retail’s Content Editor, Holly is passionate about helping independent retailers to thrive in today’s ever-changing market.
