Naturaltein: Best Integrated Marketing Campaign

In the dynamic landscape of Direct-to-Consumer (D2C) commerce, ensuring brand visibility, trust, and conversion is paramount. Naturaltein, a D2C brand of whey protein powder, confronted this challenge head-on.

Despite offering a product of impeccable quality – a 100% natural whey protein sourced from Germany – sales remained static, predominantly due to a subdued digital presence. NATURALTEIN’s transformation journey began in 2022 when it partnered with BrandLoom, aiming to overhaul its digital footprint and drastically improve sales in India.

NATURALTEIN primarily targets health-conscious individuals in India, focusing on fitness enthusiasts, athletes, and young adults aged 18-35. Catering to the country’s significant vegetarian population, the product appeals as a supplementary protein source. Given its positioning as a premium product sourced from Germany, it resonates with the affluent and middle-upper class demographics, especially those residing in urban areas. As a D2C brand with a significant online push, tech-savvy digital natives and followers of health influencers, due to the brand’s influencer collaborations, form a substantial portion of its target audience.

So, how could we impress them and turn them into customers?
Team BrandLoom got to work.

The campaign’s objective was holistic digital growth for NATURALTEIN.
BrandLoom’s multi-faceted approach, focusing on user experience, influencer credibility, social media engagement, organic and paid visibility, and customer retention, has set a benchmark in how D2C brands can leverage digital platforms for exponential growth.

Below are the detailed objectives of the campaign:

Website Revamp: For any brand, its website is its most important marketing asset, because this is where it interacts with its customers. Unfortunately for NATURALTEIN, their website was lagging behind in crucial aspects like speed, user interface, and converting visitors into buyers. The first task on our list, hence, was completely renovating the website. After all, a modern and responsive website that prioritizes user experience is key to converting visitors into buyers.

Leveraging Influencer Partnerships: In the health and wellness communities, a trustworthy voice is highly valued. For NATURALTEIN, we decided to create meaningful collaborations with reputed health influencers- with the aim of building up the brand’s credibility and widening its reach. The idea was that these influencers would not only introduce NATURALTEIN to their audiences but also impress upon them the product’s USP (its natural sourcing and superior German quality).

Boosting Engagement through Social Media: With millions using platforms like Instagram, Facebook, and Google every day, another key objective was to elevate NATURALTEIN’s social media presence. We wanted to go beyond posting passively on social platforms- and initiate meaningful conversations with followers via interactive and engaging content. The end goal was to get the target demographic hooked and drive more traffic to NATURALTEIN’s website.

Optimized Paid Advertising: Every marketer worth their salt knows that an online existence is meaningless if a brand is not being SEEN by the right people. Our team sought to improve NATURALTEIN’s visibility on search engines and social media platforms; and decided to build ad campaigns around highly relevant and low-competition commercial keywords, ensure high returns on ad spend.

Strengthen Organic Traffic Through SEO: While paid advertising offers quick results, sustainable growth comes from strong organic traffic. By enhancing the website’s search engine optimization, the campaign aimed to gradually and consistently increase organic traffic, ensuring a steady influx of potential customers without the continuous expenditure associated with paid ads.

Email Marketing for Retention: Customer retention is as crucial as acquisition. Regular engagement with the existing customer base via email marketing, aiming for high open rates, sought to keep the brand top-of-mind and encourage repeat purchases.

The campaign strategies included technical optimizations, content-driven outreach, and leveraging influencer credibility. These were aligned with the brand’s objectives to ensure maximum visibility, engagement, and conversion in a competitive market.

Here’s a detailed explanation of the strategies adopted for NATURALTEIN’s campaign:

Website Overhaul to Boost Conversion Rate: Recognizing the website’s pivotal role in a D2C model, its speed, user interface, user experience, and conversion rate were optimized to ensure a smooth and appealing customer journey, encouraging purchases.

Influencer Collaborations: Tapping into health influencers’ trust among their followers, the campaign collaborated with them to introduce NATURALTEIN. With genuine testimonials and helpful, educational content; the influencers could impress on the audiences that NATURALTEIN products were 100% natural and of superior German quality.

Engaging Social Media Content: We focused on Facebook and Instagram to grab eyeballs and drive engagement. We could build up a brand community by focusing on its superior quality products, testimonials, health benefits and interactive posts.

Targeted Paid Advertising: We ran paid ads campaigns on digital platforms like Google, Facebook, and Instagram. Our ads were created specifically to target select pain points and desires and the campaign was based on highly relevant, low-competition keywords. This ensured that our ads were being seen by people actively searching for high quality protein supplements. Ads were strategically crafted using highly relevant and low-competition keywords. This ensured visibility among potential customers actively searching for or interested in health and protein supplements.

SEO Optimization: To increase organic visibility and website visits, efforts were made to improve search engine rankings. This involved keyword optimization, high-quality content creation, and building authoritative backlinks.

Email Marketing: Utilizing a direct line of communication with existing and potential customers, emails were crafted to keep the audience informed about new products, offers, and health tips. We wanted to nurture leads and get repeat purchases- and we could achieve that with an impressive 30% email open rate.

Data-Driven Decision-Making: We rigorously monitored the campaign. Looking at the performance metrics allowed us to make real-time adjustments to the campaign, thus ensuring the highest ROI. Whether refining ad campaigns or tweaking social media content, decisions were data-backed.

Positioning & Brand Narrative: We positioned NATURALTEIN as a premium whey protein brand in the Indian market by focusing on its 100% natural ingredients and German origins. By maintaining this narrative across all channels, communication remained consistent and unified.

The journey of transforming NATURALTEIN’s digital footprint and elevating its sales in India, from ideation to successful execution, was challenging.

Understanding the Indian Market: One of the first and foremost challenges was decoding the vast and diverse Indian market. With varied consumer tastes, preferences, and buying behaviors spread across regions, formulating a one-size-fits-all strategy could have been more practical. NATURALTEIN had to understand regional nuances, dietary habits, and socio-economic factors to tailor their approach.

Overhauling the Website: The website, the central hub for the D2C brand, needed to be performing better. Upgrading it regarding speed, UI/UX and conversion rate optimization demanded significant time and resources. A smooth website experience is critical for customer retention, and achieving this standard proved challenging.

Influencer Partnerships: While influencers can significantly boost brand visibility and credibility, finding the right influencers aligned with NATURALTEIN’s brand values was a task. Authenticity was key. There was a need to ensure that these influencers genuinely believed in the product and were not just promoting it as another paid partnership.

Competing in a Saturated Market: The health and wellness space, especially whey protein, is crowded in India. Differentiating NATURALTEIN was a significant challenge, stressing its 100% natural composition and superior German quality while competing with established brands.

Optimized Paid Advertising: Achieving visibility in the digital realm through paid advertising without burning through the budget was another hurdle. Selecting highly relevant yet low-competition commercial keywords that would provide a high return on ad spend required meticulous research and constant monitoring.

SEO Efforts: Organic growth is a marathon, not a sprint. The team faced the daunting task of steadily climbing search engine rankings amidst competitors. This required consistently producing quality content, optimizing website elements, and building a robust backlink profile.

Social Media Engagement: Social media is an extremely competitive space for any brand to make its mark. Users are inundated with thousands of messages on their feed, and get easily distracted. Add to that the decreasing organic reach on platforms- NATURALTEIN had to create truly engaging posts for Facebook and Instagram to get their audiences hooked.

Email Marketing: With everyone’s inboxes getting flooded by daily promotional emails- getting a 30% email open rate was going to be a challenge for NATURALTEIN. What they needed were intriguing subject lines, mobile optimized email designs and careful audience segmentation to ensure that audiences felt compelled to open them.

Measuring & Adapting: As everyone knows- it’s not enough to create or deploy a marketing strategy. You have to continuously monitor them and have to think on your feet to keep tweaking them for maximum performance. This required going through huge amounts of data to understand what was clicking with the audiences and what wasn’t.

Managing Expectations and Deliverables: With the promise of transforming NATURALTEIN’s sales, there was immense pressure to deliver results. Balancing expectations while ensuring all campaign elements worked in harmony was a constant challenge.

While traditional media channels still have their merits and reach, the decision to leverage digital and social media platforms for Naturaltein’s campaign was strategic. It capitalized on the platforms’ advantages of targeting, cost-efficiency, and adaptability, ensuring the brand reached its desired audience effectively and efficiently.

Social/Digital Media Platforms Used:

Website: As the primary D2C (Direct-to-Consumer) platform, NATURALTEIN’s website was the central hub for information, product details, and sales transactions.

Google Ads: For search engine marketing, Google Ads are indispensable. With them, we could target customers precisely on the basis of the health information or related products they were looking for.

YouTube, Facebook & Instagram: We chose these platforms for both organic posting and paid advertising. With their wide user base and powerful targeting capabilities.

Email Marketing: There’s nothing like talking to your customers one-on-one and for that, email marketing is the perfect medium. With a strong email campaign, we could continuously engage the customers and provide them with personalized offers and important product updates.

Targeted Audience Reach: It’s a no-brainer that the new, savvy audiences who NATURALTEIN wanted to impress were reachable on these social media platforms. Moreover, these platforms’ superior targeting capabilities enabled us to deliver content and ads precisely to the intended demographics, locations, behaviors and interests. This helped us manage the ad-spend wisely.

Cost-Effectiveness: While media channels like television, print or radio are extremely effective- advertising on them requires a substantial budget. Marketing on digital platforms, on the other hand, do not require that kind of investment, and yield much higher return on ad spends (ROAS). In this case, the campaign clocked an impressive ROAS of 18.6.

Measurability & Adjustability: The best thing about digital platforms is that you can get real-time data on campaign performance. By utilizing various tools, we could analyze web traffic, conversion rates, engagement rates and more- which let us know what the audiences were liking and what wasn’t working for them. This let us tweak the campaigns on the fly and optimize them for better performance.

Greater Engagement: Of course, with social media platforms- like Instagram and Facebook- communication is instantaneous. Brands can directly talk to their audiences, resolve queries and build a community on social media that’s not possible on traditional platforms.

Niche Marketing: NATURALTEIN’s protein powders’ USP is that it’s 100% natural whey protein sourced from Germany and that it was a premium product. With digital platforms, we could neatly segregate our target audience and market specifically to premium customers interested in wellness and fitness.

Relevance & Contemporary Appeal: It goes without saying that most people in the urban, 18-35 segment are digitally savvy and spend a lot of time online. These were the people who fall squarely within NATURALTEIN’s target demographic- and to engage them, digital channels are more effective than traditional ones.

Flexibility & Scalability: One good thing about digital campaigns is that based on the campaign performance, marketers can scale it up or down. As a result, with digital platforms, we could pause or optimize ads, adjust the budget and tweak our strategies quickly- which we couldn’t if we chose traditional media.

Content Variety & A/B Testing: While traditional platforms offer limited content formats- on digital platforms, we could try out many more. As a result, we could create carousel posts, statics, infographics, videos and interactive polls- and even do A/B testing with them to see which performed the best.

BrandLoom’s NATURALTEIN campaign had a rejuvenating effect on the brand. It skyrocketed the brand’s growth and visibility and increased market penetration. With strategic planning, impactful messaging and smart execution- the campaign surpassed expectations and established NATURALTEIN as a front-runner in the Indian whey protein market.

Significant Sales Uplift: The most striking impact was on the sales figures. Monthly sales went up from around Rs 20 Lakhs to an astounding Rs 100 Lakhs on average from June 2022 to March 2023. March 2023 alone saw sales clocking at Rs 120 Lakhs, on back of the strategic campaign.

Website Traffic Surge: Simultaneously, NATURALTEIN’s website saw the web traffic quadruple. Monthly visits jumped from 10k in FY21-22 to around 40k in FY22-23, peaking at 50k in March 2023.
Organic Visibility Boost: Organic traffic which is an indicator of a brand’s visibility on search engines and credibility also went up significantly. Between April 2021-March 2022, visits soared from 4K to an average of 18k during the campaign period, hitting 35k in March 2023.

Conversion Rate Enhancement: The best part of it was that NATURALTEIN’s website did not just see passive visitors- it turned the same into buyers. During the campaign, the website’s ecommerce conversion rate catapulted to a remarkable 7.5% .

Social Media Success: On platforms like Facebook and Instagram, engagement rates touched a commendable 64%, suggesting a strong resonance with the audience. The conversion rate on these platforms also stood at an impressive 2.2%.

Email Marketing Efficiency: The email marketing segment wasn’t left behind, boasting open rates consistently over 30%, leading to heightened conversions and brand loyalty.

Ad Campaign Profitability: The ROI on the advertising campaigns was exceptionally high, with a ROAS (Return on Ad Spend) of 18.6. With an average order value of 2700 and a cost per sale at just 150, the profitability and efficiency of the campaign were evident.

Brand Positioning and Awareness: The brand image was elevated beyond the tangible numbers. NATURALTEIN was no longer just another protein brand in India. Through consistent messaging, influencer partnerships, and quality assurance, it was positioned as a superior, 100% natural whey protein from Germany, setting it apart in the crowded marketplace.

Customer Trust and Loyalty: The campaign’s success wasn’t just acquiring new customers but nurturing and retaining existing ones. The brand fostered trust and loyalty among its consumer base through engaging content, direct communication, and a commitment to quality.