D2C Growth Marketing Strategy & Operation for Sports/Apparel Brand

As the leader of the digital marketing team in Japan, I was in charge of planning and implementing strategies to increase sales, traffic, and new customer acquisition for an international sports brand.

Challenges

The brand's revenue was heavily dependent on a small group of loyal users, and there were significant challenges in acquiring new customers.

Revenue depended on SEM advertising and email marketing, requiring frequent discount campaigns to maintain sales.

The team didn’t have members who have experience working for digital marketing and with global headquaters, which was hard to utilize the benefit from projects led by the headquarters.

Strategies & Actions

1. Optimization of Ad Operations

Shifted focus from SEM advertising to display and video ads, leveraging campaign materials from headquarters to maximize traffic and impressions.

Transitioned from a fixed budget to a flexible budget in SEM advertising, maintaining ROAS while maximizing impression share.

Switched the advertising vendor from the global one introduced by the headquarters to local one in Japan and hired an ad specialist to address resource shortages.

Levaraged Google Performance Max campaigns for new customer acquisition and campaign promotions, maximizing performance during peak periods.

2. Mobile App Improvements

Addressed numerous errors and poor user ratings, shifting focus from low-priority feature development to error correction and product navigation improvements, resulting in significant performance enhancements with minimal development costs.

3. SEO Improvements

The content on category pages was not enough, so we did not get top search rankings for specific long keywords related to our brand.

Changed the workflow from headquarters to translation agencies creating content, allowing direct editing of content, and optimized each category page's content for SEO collaborating with the branding team.

4. Affiliate Ads

Focused on affiliate advertising to compensate for the lack of UGC content, resulting in the numbers of product introduction blog posts from affiliates.

Selected 15 high-quality blogs to provide increased commision rate, product discounts, and shared campaign information.

5. Release of Loyalty Program

Localized and released a loyalty program led by the headquarters in the US, contributing to lead acquisition.

Started a campaign to offer 10% off coupon for new registrations, improving advertising performance.

Results

Sales from new customers increased by 7%, and the number of members rose by 25% (2021 vs 2022).