TRIP CBD

Fueling Exceptional Growth: How TRIP CBD Leveraged D2C Strategies to Become the UK's Fastest-Growing Soft Drinks Brand

947% growth in new customers whilst improving CAC.

TRIP CBD, launched in 2019, is the UK’s leading premium CBD brand. Their unique offering – crafting high-quality CBD products designed to seamlessly integrate into everyday life – helps users unwind and tap into their best selves. In March 2023, they were named the fastest-growing soft drinks brand in the UK, an extraordinary feat marked by a 522% growth over 12 months. Read on to discover how we assisted TRIP CBD in enhancing their direct-to-consumer (DTC) efforts, helping them scale and maintain their position at the pinnacle of the CBD market.

The Challenge

When we began our journey with TRIP CBD, we were met with a distinct set of challenges that demanded our utmost innovation and strategic thinking. This new brand was aiming to make a bold entrance into a new category, with aggressive growth objectives that reflected their ambition. Previous performance metrics on their primary customer acquisition platform, Meta, showed promise, yet the brand had encountered difficulties when attempting to scale their operations. Despite the seemingly successful preliminary efforts, translating these results into sustained, large-scale growth had proven challenging. As we stepped into this partnership, we understood that the task at hand was to not only navigate this fresh category but also to devise a successful growth strategy that would break the cycle of unfruitful scaling attempts, propelling the brand towards their ambitious targets.

The Solution

Taking on TRIP in late 2021, we pinpointed opportunities to amplify their performance. Our focus: creative testing, implementation of funnels that allowed us to navigate tightly regulated marketing whilst retaining high conversion rates and shifting from an in-platform ROAS focus to a model prioritising new customer acquisition. We revamped KPIs and introduced a superior measurement toolkit.

TRIP’s Meta reliance wasn’t a setback, but an opportunity. We amplified their ad strategies, leveraging our direct relationship with Meta—a key asset in the tightly regulated market.

We tackled the challenges of iOS14.5’s tracking and the post-COVID market normalisation, simultaneously overhauling the website’s landing page to boost CBD education, conversions, and engagement.

Our strategy put TRIP on the fast-track to their growth goals, setting the stage for scalable, sustainable success.

Driving Change: Harnessing Data and Refocusing on Sustainable Growth

When TRIP CBD first partnered with us, they had a ton of data but didn’t know how to make it work for them. They were also cautious due to previous ad disapprovals. In the first few months, we rolled up our sleeves, getting the data into shape, refining audience strategies, messaging and landing page strategies.

A major hurdle was the disconnect between the data available on the ad platform and TRIP’s own data. This was making it tough to really understand their performance and key metrics. We stepped in, cleared up the confusion, and enhanced their tracking abilities.

We were able to forge new paths by developing breakthrough funnels, despite operating in a highly regulated market. Our efforts included building educational landing pages and creating relatable ads that struck a chord with potential customers in a fresh market.

Major lever was shift in focus from just looking at immediate returns (ROAS) to considering the cost of acquiring a customer (CAC). This switch, from short-term gains to long-term growth, made a significant impact on topline revenue. By the sixth month, TRIP were bringing in 10x more customers, and doing so with a CAC that was 12% more efficient.

TRIP down the memory lane: graduating one of winning ads from test campaigns into BAU

Multifaceted Scaling Strategy

In addition to our shift in focus from in-platform results to new customer KPIs, we implemented several other crucial strategies to help TRIP scale effectively. These strategies involved creating a dynamic range of offers, leveraging data to inform creative iterations, optimising landing pages, and most importantly, maintaining a relentless focus on the customer. The following points will provide a detailed overview of these additional tactics we employed to support TRIP’s impressive growth.

Highrise created a testing framework to evaluate various creatives and hooks, allowing TRIP to understand which messaging resonated best with their target audience. This was key to refining their marketing campaigns and helping us scale spend as they were a new brand operating in a new category bound by regulations.

We harnessed insights from testing campaigns to fuel creative briefs. This provided consistency and ensured that any creative deployed in the main campaigns would perform strongly.

By-pass limitations of cross domain tracking, Highrise adopted a proximity-based approach to track user activity from the subdomain to the main domain. This helped them understand user behavior and optimise their funnel. This was critical given more complicated user journey that was bound by regulations.

Faced with advertising disapprovals and a climate of uncertainty, we embarked on an in-depth market research mission. We closely studied the strategies employed in the US, where the CBD industry is more mature, and delved into Meta’s policies to understand the constraints and possibilities.

Understanding the customer base was critical to refining TRIP’s value proposition. Through surveys and in-depth customer analysis, we identified what motivated their purchasing decisions and integrated these insights into our strategies.

The first breakthrough funnel was deployment of an educational video that drove traffic to an education Lander. This combination of education, value proposition, and engagement led to a dramatic increase in business performance.

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