COVID-19 has had a detrimental impact for many Australian industries and businesses.
To these businesses, we pay our respects.
However, for Cartridge World Australia and New Zealand, the combination of timing, marketing experience and a few late nights has actually led to a substantial increase in online sales.
The Market Ease team are thrilled to have supported a great Australian business and to have contributed to further job creation for our country and state.
This article aims to identify the opportunities that were present in the printing supplies marketing and also discuss the additional advertising channels that were used to capitalise on this opportunity (Hint: think Gmail Ads, LinkedIn Ads and a search engine that isn't Google).
Recognising Shifts In Behaviour
A Gartner HR survey conducted in March revealed that 88 percent of organisations had encouraged and/or required employees to work from home.
With the shift in working conditions, came the trendy acronym, Working From Home (WFM) and several key implications.
Employees enjoyed a zero-minute commute to their office, the demand for home office supplies doubled and most importantly, uniforms became more comfortable.
As seen in the Google Trends report, the interest for the search term 'Ink Cartridges' has greatly increased, in-line with the dates of the outbreak.
More people were working from home and with more home offices, more people were searching for ink.
But, as you could expect... If more people were interested in Ink, more would also be interested in complimentary items, such as Printers.
This trend is also evident when viewing the search term 'Printers' on Google Trends.
So, with the increased demand within the Printer & Ink industries, there was a huge opportunity for Cartridge World to capitalise.
The Digital Marketing Strategy
With this increased demand for both Printers and Ink, the Digital Marketing strategy had to be centred around the user.
Rather than just promoting their advertising on only Google and Facebook, which we were doing already, the Market Ease team created a Storyboard and mapped out where else Cartridge World's clients are likely to be.
From this strategy session, it was realised that people working from home could also be targeted on Gmail, LinkedIn and surprisingly, on the Bing Search Engine.
How Market Ease advertised on each marketing channel will be explored below.
Advertising on Gmail
According to Front
the average person spends 28% of their work week on email. That's more than 11 hours each week!
Although this is frightening for both an employee and their boss, this finding presented a great opportunity for Cartridge World to reach their existing and their potential customers on Gmail.
Instead of just sending promotional emails to someone's inbox, the Market Ease team also targeted prospect's Gmail accounts through the Google Display network. Get in contact with us if you would like to learn more about this targeting option.
The benefits of advertising on the Gmail platform, is that an advertiser can target prospects, based on the words and phrases that they include in their email.
So, for Cartridge World, when someone wrote the phrase "I need to order Ink Cartridges" and even the phrase "Order Ink Cartridges", they would receive a special Cartridge World promotion.
Not many Digital Marketers understand how they can advertise on Gmail - this presents a big opportunity.
Advertising on LinkedIn
As mentioned on our LinkedIn service page (shameless plug), businesses are failing to consider the opportunities that are present within the LinkedIn advertising platform.
LinkedIn provides advertisers with opportunities to target their prospects based on their 'Job Descriptions', the 'Industry' in which your prospects work in, the level of 'Seniority' the prospect has in the organisation and more.
From this, the Market Ease team targeted prospects in Australia who, based on their industry, are likely to need printing supplies.
This includes, but is not limited to, 'Legal Services', 'Financial Services', 'IT Services' and 'Recruitment'.
This targeting is then layered by the prospect's job description.
With lesser competition in LinkedIn, as opposed to Facebook ads, and their sophisticated targeting options, Cartridge World Australia & Cartridge World New Zealand have been able to sell to both businesses and their end consumers who are in need of printing supplies.
Advertising on Bing
The statement "no one searches with Bing" should be true, but it isn't.
According to Statista, in February 2020, Bing still has over 850 million users using their search engine - This is despite the daunting decrease in users visible in the graph above.
In fact, according to Bing's keyword planner, there were still approximately 5000 searches for the term 'Ink Cartridges' and even more for the term 'Printers' during the month of April, 2020.
These people were either not sure how to change their default search engine, or just weren't bothered enough to consider changing.
Regardless, at least 5000 people in Australia & New Zealand, each month were looking for Ink Cartridges on Bing, so Cartridge World needed to advertise there.
Some of Cartridge World's competitors were aware of the search demand on Bing and had also started to create advertisements, bidding on competitor brand names, so that they could appear first in the search engine.
With competitive bids and compelling ad copy, Cartridge World were now also br
The Results
With an increased market demand, a change of behaviour and a marketing strategy centred on reaching all users, Cartridge World Australia and New Zealand received record sales in the month of April, 2020.
Over the month of April, Cartridge World Australia received an additional $150K in online sales (in comparison to their previous year) and an additional $80K in online sales in comparison to the previous month.
Concurrently, Cartridge World New Zealand received an incredible $610K in additional online sales (also in comparison to the previous year) and an additional $500K additional online sales in comparison to the previous month.
By reacting quickly and effectively to this change in user behaviour, Neha the Digital Marketing Manager of Cartridge World had the following to say:
Neha Deoliya
Digital Marketing Manager
Cartridge World Australia & New Zealand
"The best thing I like about working with ME is the genuine effort that’s put in towards growing our account. I really appreciate your flexibility to accommodate our requests at short notices and the transparency you provide regarding the work being done.
While working with ME you’d never feel you are ‘just another account’ with an agency as they try hard to understand your business and provide suitable suggestions. Highly recommend the team!"
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