From baby steps to a billion dollar business

THE APPROACH

We gave Bellamy's instant scale and experience.

We provided Bellamy's with a dedicated multidisciplinary team of digital experts (project management, strategy, creative, production and media) to work as an extension of Bellamy’s own marketing department.

The team took the time to truly understand the quality of Bellamy’s Organic’s products and were as knowledgeable and passionate about them as the internal team.

This approach gave Bellamy’s the experience, scale, flexibility, speed and excellence that was not possible with the resources and budget immediately available within the business.

Leveraging our DGF, we quickly established a deep understanding of Bellamy’s business, goals, brand and audience personas and mapped out a sustainable growth strategy via digital marketing channels.

We focused on building a foundation of trust and community through which sales would follow.

Choosing Baby formula is an extensively researched and emotional decision for families. We needed to demonstrate that Bellamy's were more than simply a product on a shelf. We had to build a brand that could be trusted.

We knew that to achieve this, we needed to build a meaningful and valuable relationship with mothers and the best way to do that was to enable them to connect with one another. So, we started to look at our audience as a community, rather than individual customers.

Naturally, with performance marketing at our core, we created a reporting model which connected community and brand growth back to sales, revenue and the bottom line.

Then we engaged them with authenticity.

As we used the DGF to create audience profiles, we saw we had to engage this community with authenticity.

We discovered that throughout the three-year early motherhood journey, from pregnancy to two years old (also the period during which Bellamy’s products are relevant), most mums did extensive research. This provided an opportunity for us to be there with the information and content that they needed, when they needed it.

We delivered a content-rich, engaging and connected consumer experience that aligned with the journey of early motherhood and built a community of mums who then acted as our champions.

#1 search ranking for “baby formula” for four years.

As we couldn't actively market baby formula, we focused on ensuring we had a high organic ranking on Google Search. We set the goal of ranking #1 for “baby formula” as this was one of the most prominent research keywords across the industry.

This meant we were competing with some of the biggest food brands in the world, such as Heinz. However, within a year, we hit our goal and continued to maintain Bellamy's ownership of the #1 position for the next 4 years, ensuring that Bellamy’s was the first brand parents saw when they were searching for baby formula, creating enormous value for the business.

We grew a lot in our first year.

In the first 12 months we created and executed a content strategy, brand strategy, social strategy and search strategy that delivered:

• 1,110% increase in online sales
• 635% increase in website traffic
• 378% increase in social community
• 2,655,913 video views
• Email open rates of up to 28% and CTRs of up to 42%.

By 2016 we had 8,000 User-generated images through instagram campaigns and 100,000+ Facebook fans.

By 2018 we created the multi-award winning Bellamy’s ‘Firsts’ campaign.

Building on the sense of community and credible peer-to-peer engagement in the baby space, we launched Bellamy’s Firsts; a campaign focused on user generated content (UGC), enabling young mums to become brand advocates by celebrating their baby’s ‘firsts’.

The activity successfully delivered:

• Over 4 million engagements on social media
• 94 million impressions across all channels
• Over 1.3 million video views
• Over 50,000 visitors to the Bellamy’s website
• Tens of thousands of new followers for the brand

The campaign was awarded winner of the Best Content Marketing Campaign, SEMRush 2018 and Content Marketing Award for Marketing Excellence, AMI Awards 2018.

Expanding into China without being in China.

Following the 2008 melamine tragedy, manufacturers saw increased demand for foreign infant formula, like Bellamy’s. However, Chinese consumers had become distrustful of all infant formula brands and conducted significant research before making their purchase decisions.

From our research we knew that the Chinese community within Australia had considerable influence in Mainland China, so we developed a strategy for transforming Chinese mums in Australia into brand ambassadors for Bellamy’s by:

• Visiting local community shops to understand what kind of content they consumed and what they needed to hear to make Bellamy’s the preferred choice in China.
• Creating a Chinese version of the local Bellamy’s website and running dedicated Chinese search and retargeting campaigns.
• Developing a dedicated strategy for leveraging Wechat — the Chinese multi-purpose instant messaging, social media and mobile payment app with over a billion users.
• Gaining valuable insights into how best to promote Bellamy’s in China itself and expand further into Vietnam and the rest of South East Asia.