How 3 brands pivoted to meet changing consumer demand and increase online sales
Posted: Mon Jan 20, 2025 7:52 am
The Covid-19 pandemic has shown how quickly consumer interests and purchasing behavior can change. To keep up with changing consumer demand for products and services, businesses are adapting their marketing strategies to respond in real time.
We speak to brands every day about how they are adapting their plans and adjusting their digital advertising investments. The challenges facing brands today are complex, particularly as marketers pivot their focus to e-commerce.
Here are three lessons learned from brands that have pivoted and increased sales:
Drive discovery and sales with engaging and enriching images
Today’s abundant choice and unlimited information make the buyer general manager email database decision process anything but linear. Instead, a complicated web of touchpoints bridges the gap between trigger and purchase.
For your ads to be successful in this “cluttered medium,” they must first win over and then defend consumer preferences throughout the entire shopping journey. One way to achieve these goals is to combine relevant ads with engaging, visually rich content.
With many of its retail stores closed due to the pandemic, clothing retailer Hugo Boss was looking to drive sales from new customers and improve customer retention.
To visually inspire people, the brand used image extensions to complement its responsive search ads. By adding images to its text ads, Hugo Boss achieved a 2.5x return and improved its click-through rate on search campaigns by 5%.
"Using image extensions with responsive search ads helped us not only improve customer retention, but also reach and inspire new customers," said Timothy Hartmann, Vice President of Ecommerce at Hugo Boss.
"Combined with automated bidding to maximize return on ad spend, we've seen great ROI, despite the dynamic market we've been working in recently."
Promote your products with a holistic approach
It’s important for brands to meet potential customers wherever they are online – whether watching videos on YouTube, checking email or browsing the web. But in a dynamic marketplace, managing multiple ad formats across different channels and geographies can be an added challenge.
That’s why, in 2018, we launched Smart Shopping campaigns. Campaigns react quickly to real-time signals to make sure the right product is shown to the right customer, at the right time.
A yellow magnifying glass hovers over a line drawing of a two-tiered birthday cake. Text reads: 500% increase in Google searches for “cake delivery near” year over year. Even as the pandemic forced New York-based bakery Milk Bar to close all but five of its 18 stores, Google searches for “cake delivery near me” increased 500% year over year as people looked for ways to celebrate friends and family from afar.
To adapt, Milk Bar changed its marketing strategy by investing in e-commerce to capture the increase in demand. “
E-commerce and digital have allowed us, despite the pandemic, to reach people where they absolutely unequivocally spend most of their time, which is online,” said Christina Tosi, founder of Milk Bar.
We speak to brands every day about how they are adapting their plans and adjusting their digital advertising investments. The challenges facing brands today are complex, particularly as marketers pivot their focus to e-commerce.
Here are three lessons learned from brands that have pivoted and increased sales:
Drive discovery and sales with engaging and enriching images
Today’s abundant choice and unlimited information make the buyer general manager email database decision process anything but linear. Instead, a complicated web of touchpoints bridges the gap between trigger and purchase.
For your ads to be successful in this “cluttered medium,” they must first win over and then defend consumer preferences throughout the entire shopping journey. One way to achieve these goals is to combine relevant ads with engaging, visually rich content.
With many of its retail stores closed due to the pandemic, clothing retailer Hugo Boss was looking to drive sales from new customers and improve customer retention.
To visually inspire people, the brand used image extensions to complement its responsive search ads. By adding images to its text ads, Hugo Boss achieved a 2.5x return and improved its click-through rate on search campaigns by 5%.
"Using image extensions with responsive search ads helped us not only improve customer retention, but also reach and inspire new customers," said Timothy Hartmann, Vice President of Ecommerce at Hugo Boss.
"Combined with automated bidding to maximize return on ad spend, we've seen great ROI, despite the dynamic market we've been working in recently."
Promote your products with a holistic approach
It’s important for brands to meet potential customers wherever they are online – whether watching videos on YouTube, checking email or browsing the web. But in a dynamic marketplace, managing multiple ad formats across different channels and geographies can be an added challenge.
That’s why, in 2018, we launched Smart Shopping campaigns. Campaigns react quickly to real-time signals to make sure the right product is shown to the right customer, at the right time.
A yellow magnifying glass hovers over a line drawing of a two-tiered birthday cake. Text reads: 500% increase in Google searches for “cake delivery near” year over year. Even as the pandemic forced New York-based bakery Milk Bar to close all but five of its 18 stores, Google searches for “cake delivery near me” increased 500% year over year as people looked for ways to celebrate friends and family from afar.
To adapt, Milk Bar changed its marketing strategy by investing in e-commerce to capture the increase in demand. “
E-commerce and digital have allowed us, despite the pandemic, to reach people where they absolutely unequivocally spend most of their time, which is online,” said Christina Tosi, founder of Milk Bar.