CASE STUDY: Proving ROI from our Chinese influencer activity for Holzweiler

Holzweiler is a Norwegian fashion house based in Oslo. The brand specialises in ready-to-wear fashion articles and accessories. Holzweiler's collections fuse seamless design with effortless functionality, with an emphasis placed on recycled and compensated materials. Originally gaining attention via silk, lambswool & cashmere scarf collections, the brand expanded to ready-to-wear in 2014. 

The brand wanted to launch in China, and so approached Hot Pot to work with them and deliver a full, insight-driven marketing strategy for market entry. In this blog, we share some insight into how we put robust tracking in place for the influencer element of the campaign we ran for them.

Context 

As Holzweiler was intending to launch in China, it was essential that all marketing activity was building awareness and driving traffic to their newly launched Tmall store - to ensure as much bang for their buck as possible. The Tmall launch focused on promoting the core Holzweiler product and driving awareness of the broader brand across social channels (both paid and organic) as well as through influencers. Following the initial launch, the focus switched to the promotion of the Holzweiler holiday campaign and the products featured. Again, this was activated on social and through our influencer marketing. One key area to address was how we can track our activity to ensure we were delivering sales on our Tmall platform and continually optimising our ads based on performance.

Challenge

Working with Key Opinion Leaders (KOLs) as part of a broader campaign is oftentimes seen as a ‘bolt-on’ piece of brand building activity. There is an understanding that it works, but in terms of measuring specific traffic and sales, it’s typically been quite hard to attribute. This was not an option for Holzweiler, who recognised the need to utilise influencer marketing activity, but equally did not have the luxury of being able to spend and not measure tangible success. 

A selection of screengrabs of our Paid campaign for Holzweiler

What We Did  

We worked with our tech partner, ipinyou, to (uniquely) cross-match data from RED, Weibo and Douyin with sales data on Tmall. This allowed us to track customers as they interacted with our ads or our KOL content and then went onto Tmall. With this data, we were able to see which KOLs drove the most sales and how to better optimise our ads. Unlike many other partners operation in China, and with the Chinese consumer overseas, we are laser focused on measuring our marketing campaigns for our clients, and were delighted that we were able to use this data to report back on the nuance within their influencer campaigns - which KOLs were better for brand building versus which were driving tangible revenues

Results
As well as a reassurance that measurability for the campaign was at a higher level than previous activity with Holzweiler, results showed demonstrable value for our KOL selection too. We worked with over 100 influencers in a 3 month period, and were able to measure KOL activity as driving sales with an ROI of 3.5x. In addition to this, paid ads drove over 21m impressions and delivered meaningful sales growth on Holzweiler’s brand Tmall channel

If you think China’s an unmeasurable ‘black box’ for marketing, think again. Get in touch with us at nihao@hotpotchina.com and we’ll work with you to deliver marketing that’s trackable.