Nordic Morning Talks: How to reach consumers at the top of the funnel

On October 19th, we hosted the fifth session in our Nordic Morning Talks LinkedIn Live series. These sessions are dedicated to discussing emerging business challenges in the field of digital and a space to showcase some of our projects with some of our clients.

In this session, Project Manager Moa Rydlöv, Art Director Johanna Almorth, and Project Manager and Client Director Tomas Wihlborg discussed the creative process behind Kérastase’s Fusio Dose campaign, with the goal of increasing brand awareness and reaching a bigger audience.

In this session, you will learn:

• How to set up a tailored communication to reach a bigger audience
• How to create a seamless user journey to increase awareness
• How testing and re-evaluating campaigns is the secret to success

If you prefer to watch the session, click here

Let’s get started!

Part 1 - Kérastase, our relationship with the customer, and the circumstances surrounding this project.

Tomas Wihlborg (TW): Good afternoon everybody. And welcome to our 5th consecutive Nordic Morning Talks. My name is Tomas – I am your host for today.

Let me start with some background to this edition. Nordic Morning is helping several leading brands break through the noise of their competitors. We help them to reach local, Nordic and global markets. The assignments span from digital strategy to visual content and channel implementation.

One of our largest clients is the global cosmetics company L’Oréal. The company portfolio comprises a large number of household brands, and one of them is Kérastase.

For the next 30 minutes, we will access the knowledge and experience of two of our super experts – who will share key learnings from our comprehensive collaboration with Kérastase.

Let’s start off with our relationship with Kérastase. Would you like to go first, Johanna?

Johanna Almorth (JA): Sure! As you just mentioned Tomas we work with many of the L’Oréal Group brands. In this set up their media agency is in charge of the media strategy and we are responsible for the content. Sometimes that means creating content from scratch and sometimes we use global content and we adjust it to the Nordic market and to the different channels.

Kérastase is one of the world's leading luxury professional haircare brands. Our relationship has been going on for about 3 years now. Initially, it was mostly website maintenance. But this last year we have been helping out implementing their new marketing plan in the Nordics together with their media agency.

So basically there has been a shift - before they would sell products through hair salons now they also sell their products on e-com sites. Such as Lyko or Bangerhead.

So they made a transition from directing their marketing towards hair professionals into also making content directly to the consumer.

The first campaign we made together was for Fusio Dose. The target group is a woman between 20 to 60 and it’s a customized hair treatment. You can see what it looks like in the video. With 6 so-called conentrés and 5 boosters, there are a total of 30 combinations that makes it very customizable. This treatment is only available in hair salons. Which makes the customer journey a little bit different. So with this premise, we had to take a different approach than we usually do with more regular digital campaigns.

And at the same time Kérastse was in the early stages of building up its own CRM in the Nordics, so that was one of the main goals for this project too. But Moa can you explain this a bit more?

Moa Rydlöv (MR): Yeah, moving forward with this campaign Kérastase had three main goals. To increase their CRM data, build up a bigger customer base for tailored communication in the future, and increase brand awareness and awareness about the product Fusio Dose.

Kérastase also wanted to show good partnership with their partner salons. At the start of this project we just came out of quite extensive restrictions due to COVID, and hairdressers, Kérastase’s customers, had felt the effects of these for the last two years. Kérastase wanted to create a campaign that both parties could benefit from. You know, market a product that would drive people to the salons.

Part 2 - Nordic Morning’s approach to the Kérastase project.

TW: Thank you for that background. Could you now tell us a bit about our approach and how did you think of new ways to approach this project?

MR: As Johanna said earlier we had to look at our approach. Because it is an in-salon treatment, the customer journey would look different from other - solely online - customer journeys. It was also different since booking the appointment and receiving the treatment were not touchpoints that we were in control of. It could impale a risk for higher drop-off along the journey. It was important that we were aware of this when shaping the journey for our campaign and the communication around Fusio Dose.

We saw a strong need to create higher engagement and curiosity throughout this campaign, for it to fulfill all three goals.

TW: Creating engagement is also known as challenging to create, right? So how did you go about it?

MR: Agreeing on that - engagement will be key - we had to think outside the box. Or rather, we needed an approach to let the whole team think outside the box. We allowed ourselves to ‘think big and scale down’ in a sense.

We took the opportunity to gather mixed competencies from both Nordic Morning and L’Oréal to get the right insights about the product and experienced challenges for the different touchpoints and talked to hairdressers and potential customers.

On the list of potential ideas, we had everything from creating a Fusio Dose app to a filter on Snapchat, influencer material, to pop-up hair salons. We also talked about creating a Fusio Dose community. We used those ideas to see what can use having in mind our budget and restrictions.

We found that giving this campaign the angle of a recipe kind of unified all ideas we had on the table.

JA: I would like to add to this that when we were thinking about the angle that would be most effective for engagement, we came to the conclusion that the recipe should be the core of this campaign. The fact that a product is customized was a great approach for our communication. So we basically played that all the way.

MR: We wanted to find a way to not only tell the customers but, show them what it meant with the customized treatment. We created an interactive form, where we would ask customers about their hair concerns. Depending on their answers, the form would generate a custom recipe based on that. Or rather a custom half recipe based on that. We would tell them that the hairdresser played an important part in finding the best recipe for them, and they will help them with the second half of your recipe.

Part 3 - How to increase awareness and engagement in the user journey.

TW: How did you tailor the communication to increase awareness and engagement in the user journey? Please walk us through the process.

JA: For the first part of this customer journey we wanted to spark interest and curiosity in our customers. First with awareness about Fusio Dose. Here we show what the product is all about. So we started off with a social media campaign. In this case, we used Kérastase global visual assets and played around with our recipe angle.

The media platforms booked for this campaign were Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, Pinterest, and also high-impact display.

What you can see is from the Swedish launch. We made two video ads and two still image ads for Facebook and Instagram. To get more exposure and opportunity to optimize for the highest performance. We usually keep the videos to about 6 seconds. Through testing, we know that it’s been working well to get a good view-through rate in similar ads. For Snapchat, we made a couple of collection ads, as they have also been proven to have a good click-through rate.

And for Pinterest we made two carousel ads, also they usually work well on this platform. So these were running in rotation optimized towards the best performing one for each platform.

We used the phrase “find your mix” as our call to action and the customer was then directed to the form we made on the website.

JA: Once there we made, a two-step is formed in which the customer enters their hair concerns (it could be a lack of shine and dull color for example). They were asked to fill in their email address to get the first part of their customized recipe. And as you can see we added information about the result and product on the site as well.

In the next step, the customer gets directed to the “salon finder” to find a salon close to them. Of course, we added an email sent out to this, with the same goal. Confirming their recipe and encouraging them to book an appointment in one of Kérastase’s partner salons.

Part 4 - Campaign challenges and ways of testing and re-evaluating it.

TW: What were some of the challenges of this campaign? Did you test and re-evaluate it? What’s the secret sauce for success?

MR: Well, we could start by just mentioning the technical solution as one. We were restricted by the fact that all salons had their own booking systems, so we were not able to include an actual booking in our journey. And the interactive form took us some time to figure out.

In today's technical environment we have to consider security, we have to consider GDPR. Especially within big groups like L'Oréal that have guidelines and processes for their technical tools, we had to take that into account when we chose the technical solution.

The functionality we were after, wasn’t available at the start of this project. But just with the right timing, L’Oréal rolled out a new tool that would allow us to create these forms. This was the first project in the Nordics that got to try it out!

JA: But the treatment is great by its nature from a marketing perspective by being so customizable. And the form gave the customer an extra way of experiencing that. It’s a great way of showing how Fusio Dose works and how flexible it is. So this form will be part of the communication on the website even after this campaign.

The first launch of this campaign was in Norway and now it’s running in Sweden. We looked at how it performed in Norway and fine tunes the communication after our findings. For instance, we went for only collection ads on Snapchat, we took away Youtube and we made the videos shorter and we added more posts in rotation on Facebook and Instagram, and so on.

MR: We might also want to mention that this form is a good way to add valuable data to our CRM system. To go back to what we talked about before, increase your CRM database to create tailored communication: Asking customers about their main hair concern, and not only asking for their email addresses, the possibilities to create communication on point are many. Knowing that your customers have the feeling of their hair as dry, damaged, or with a lack of volume… Imagine what we can do to create tailored communication.

That was a little bit of a sidetrack when talking about challenges.

TW: Let’s go back and look at how this campaign performed compared to other campaigns. Shall we?

MR: Yes, that would be interesting. We got a thousand signups from this campaign, at a cost of 30 Euros per signup. Some people that are listening now, will not react to this cost as high, as it is across industries considered to be a fair amount to pay. However, compared to other campaigns for L’Oréal when we have sampled something, to get CRM data, a sign-up can cost one Euro -or even less. It tells us what motivates our target group a bit, doesn’t it? What actions can we take to make sure everyone signs up? Imagine if we could give away a free treatment?

TW: Yeah that would be great! (not that I really need it, but you know what I mean). Did you see any challenges with the approach that you used?

MR: The hardest part of the approach we took is to stick with it for as long as you can, and to go back to see if you really pushed your solution for success. I think removing a lot of restrictions lets you come up with great ideas. With some modification, they will fit your budget. Just remember to go back and see if you kept the spark and the ‘X factor’.

Takeouts & Learnings

Johanna Almroth 

In this project, we had a pretty large target group, women between 18 and 64 interested in beauty and living in a metropolitan area. A large target group is great but when it comes to communicating with a large group you might want to divide it into smaller segments in order to be more relevant. I think knowing the customer's needs and preferences is key to getting the right engagement. So basically we want to tailor our communication and our customer journey. Aiming to widen the target group might result in not being relevant enough.

Moa Rydlöv

Seamless customer journeys are hard, but when you succeed in creating them your payback will be so much greater. Remember that your customer is the hero of your story, it is their problem you are trying to solve. Be true to that, be honest to yourselves when creating your offer, your communication, and your customer journeys.

It is really important to go the extra mile here. It allows your content to be experienced in the right way, for your technical solution to support the touchpoints you need them to, and for you to get the data in the end. But do not forget the motivation, why should the customer go through the full journey? Talking about secret sauce Tomas - I think this might be it.

T: I would like to summarize these takeouts very shortly for our audience.

Bonus Content- Live Session Questions

Question 1 - Every marketer talks about personalization, but when it comes to bigger audiences, what kind of personalization do you recommend to make the biggest impact on audiences?

MR: Well I know this sounds harsh, but truth be told we are not talking about personalization with bigger audiences. But having said that, it is all about knowing your target group to make that call. What are the biggest differences within your target group and what are the strongest similarities? In this case, for instance, what do an 18 and a 64-year-old have in common talking about hair care?

But Johanna, we have had bigger audiences in the past where we have found a way to break it down a level.

JA: Yeah! As I mentioned earlier we can divide target groups into smaller segments and create different assets for each group. So, for instance, when working with SkinCeuticals now we have a wide age span in our target group knowing that the younger part of the target group is more interested in ingredients and the older target group responds better to the benefits. We then can make two tracks for each post. New media landscape specific in our targeting. True personalization can occur in the next step when we get the CRM from the consumer.

Question 2 - What are your top tips for reducing friction between user-journey steps?

MR: There are several things to consider here but know that, if anything is “a hassle” for the customer, be sure that you will notice it in your results. Meet the expectations that you set. Or set expectations you are able to meet. For example, if you show an ad for 20% of on shampoos, make sure when you click the link you end up at the website with that filter, only showing those products.

You just have to have those things figured out. If I repeat what I said previously about the fact that the customer is the hero of your story, what is the problem that you are trying to solve? Make sure you always give value to the customer to complete that next step in the customer journey.

Question 3 - You have mentioned that you adapt global content to the Nordic Market, can you give an example? Or How does that work?

JA: First of all, we always make sure to stay true to the brand, even though we make changes to appeal to other cultures we want to find a good balance.

We know that the Nordic market responds well to clean aesthetics and relatable content. We try to be down-to-earth, inclusive, inspiring, transparent, and caring in our tonality.

So sometimes we might use the global content as the main part of the campaign. We don’t want to go too far away from the brand's image. We can add something to the campaign like tutorials in the local language or some extra assets with a well-known influencer to find that local connection.

TW: Thank you all for those great questions. We are running out of time so let’s wrap it up here. If you have any questions we haven’t had time to answer, we’ll try to get back to you. A big thank you to you Moa and Johanna for being on the panel today.

You all know where to find us, so reach out to us if you need help with your communication challenges.

Finally, we at Nordic Morning are happy that you have attended our Nordic Morning Talks – and do follow us on social media to get notified about the next session!

With that, have a really good day, and see you soon again.