Brandao
About The Company
Issei Mochi Gummies is a mission-driven, innovation-forward, woman-owned company. They developed gummies inspired by the classic Japanese rice cake mochi. Their candies are vegan, gluten-free, and made of natural ingredients.
The brand was nominated for several food awards and won the World Food Innovation Awards 2024. They were featured in media channels like CBS News and CNN. The CEO Mika Shino has been featured on the cover of Inc. Magazine for being an outstanding female founder.
The Challenge
The brand was growing fast and expanding to hundreds of stores across the United States, so it needed a strong advertising strategy to both spread awareness about the brand, and increase sales in their online store. Due to the lack of strategy, the brand was spending its budget on boosting Instagram posts, without any data tracking about the impact of this action on sales.
The Strategy
First of all, it was established what were the goals for the brand. The owner wanted to both increase awareness about the brand (meaning to remind people to go to the physical locations to buy) and to increase sales in the online store. This way the brand would both guarantee a good relationship with the resellers and keep their spot on the shelves, and also increase revenue, since in the online store no commission needs to be paid and profit margins are obviously more generous.
3 types of campaigns were created: - Awareness: geotargeted campaign aiming for people living in the area of the physical stores selling the products. The creatives feature people going to the location and adding the products to their cart.
- Engagement: short-time campaigns to offer giveaways with the goal of increasing the following on Instagram and growing the email list.
- Sales: this was the campaign targeting a cold audience, which received 80% of the budget. 4 audiences were tested: vegans, Asian expats, moms, and broad targeting, with the budget being distributed at the ad set level according to performance. - Sales (retargeting): This audience was a combination of several audiences, including: previous clients, website visitors, cart abandoners, Facebook engagers, Instagram engagers, and email subscribers.
Several types of copy and creatives were tested, with the most successful ones focusing on the message "Life is short, eat candy". The ads with this message reached up to an 8.7 ROAS and were extremely profitable, giving us a better understanding of what type of message resonates with the audience.
Results
Not only all the goals were accomplished but also surpassed. The ads had ROAS as high as 8.7X and the revenue in the Shopify store increased 65%. The conversion rate went from 0.49% to 2.43%. With the advertising strategy implemented and the funnel fully built the brand continues to expand to several different locations across the country.