Case Study
Mitchells Nutrition
Background
Mitchells Nutrition is a tried-and-true kiwi business that all began with a bone broth recipe passed down through generations. Founder, Rob Mitchell’s great, great grandfather, James Mitchell, set off to New Zealand from Scotland in search of gold. He brought with him the beloved family bone broth recipe, and it too became “fuel for the gold miners”. Rob relied on this family recipe as a source of healing throughout his decade-long career as a professional snowboarder – eventually, he decided it was time to share the bone broth with the world.
From simple beginnings, Mitchells Nutrition has taken this base recipe and ethos and developed a range of health-orientated products – from protein powder to botanical tea blends – with nutrition and well-being remaining at its core.
Objectives
Increase social ROAS
Increase total purchases
Decrease social cost per acquisition
Digitella first helped Mitchells to gain traction in the PPC space. They came to us with the goal of getting more traction in direct-to-consumer (D2C) sales via their digital channels. Having already established itself as a wholesaler, with a large network of businesses already re-selling their products online, this created a unique challenge – causing them to compete against other online retail partners who were also selling their products.
We leveraged direct consumer reviews and harnessed the authenticity of Mitchells being the producer of the product, allowing them to cut through crowded search results pages. We succeeded in almost tripling their ROAS in six months, hitting a 9.0 ROAS by September.
Then, recognising the untapped potential of acquiring new customers, Digitella established a non-branded targeting strategy to reach “cold” audiences that had yet to try Mitchells products. While the cost per click for non-branded keywords is generally higher than for branded keywords, Digitella recognised the value in expanding Mitchells’ customer base and increasing revenue in the long-term. The lifetime value of a customer acquired through non-branded traffic could offset the higher cost per click. With a returning customer rate of 60%, retaining and engaging new customers was crucial for scalable and sustainable growth.
To achieve this, budget was allocated towards non-branded keywords while also keeping focus on brand search terms. This approach helped to diversify Mitchells Nutrition’s customer base and reduce its dependence on existing customers, while also maintaining a high level of ROAS long-term.
After getting things cranking within the PPC space, Mitchells asked us to take over their paid social marketing the next month. This was great news as we were now able to create a strong synergy between channel strategies and ad creatives.
The Digi social team’s main goal was to lift their Meta account campaigns’ ROAS, which had been sitting quite low before take-over. Our first step towards success was to complete a thorough audit of their account which had been under the management of another agency prior to us.
We found that many of their top-of-funnel prospecting campaigns had surprisingly low click-through rates. Considering the high-quality nature of the ad creatives they were using, we discovered that they had poor bidding strategies and campaign optimisation goals for an e-commerce company.
Our first major change was to switch off all underperforming campaigns, directing the budget to condensed target audiences with the correct campaign optimisations. A tightened and clear prospecting & retargeting customer flow was then established, with a detailed review of customer retention days within these.
To increase ad engagement, we added Lookalike Audiences based on past customers and site visitors and kept their historically best-performing creatives running. Mitchells then created new ads, which were optimised for a range of social ad placements to lift the look of the brand. We paired this new video content and statics with dynamic catalogue ads for our retargeting layers.
Testing unique variants of messaging and imagery against each other was also important for long-term momentum. We were able to get a good sense of what was resonating with our tightened audiences and continued to tweak and build upon these insights for future ad refreshes. Honing in further on the funnel approach and ensuring our ads spoke to each part of the customer journey.
Result
After implementing a number of Social Account optimisations over the course of 7 months, when comparing April 2022 (just before we started) to November 2022 we’ve seen:
A decrease in total social spending by 36%, purchase numbers increased by 109% and Mitchells’ ROAS by 165%, resulting in a cost-per-acquisition decrease of 69%!
We continue to test campaign types and optimisation goals to see which partnership between the Meta algorithm and Mitchells’ audience targeting shows the best engagement and sales!
From The Client
Digitella is a great team that really gets the digital marketing space. These guys have listened and learnt about our brand, what works and what doesn’t and doubled down on what does. We continue to see great results month on month across multiple platforms.
Rob Mitchell
Founder
