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About Campus Colors
Campus Colors is an outfitter of officially licensed fan gear. When they first came to us at Seller’s Choice, Campus Colors wanted someone to help build a cohesive marketing strategy using different tactics across different marketplaces, such as Amazon, Wal-Mart and eBay as well as their own website.
Campus Colors was working with a huge product list and lacked strategy when it came to targeting and marketing them to consumers. The brand’s exceedingly long list of products has been scaled back significantly, allowing Campus Colors to focus on their most successful products and giving them the advertising support that has allowed them to truly flourish.
Before they grew to the NCAA outfitter that so many college students love today, Campus Colors came to Seller’s Choice for help with a branding facelift. This included partial rebranding, a full Amazon Storefront design, a custom-designed automated email campaign, social media ads, social media posts, in-store banner design, packaging inserts design, Amazon PPC campaign setup and management, and more.
Goals
Campus Colors came to us as a full-service client, meaning we took on the job of renovating their platforms to improve their e-commerce presence. Below are some growth objectives of Campus Colors:
- Create revenue-generating PPC and sponsored product campaigns
- Create a clean, organized Amazon Storefront design
- Market their products on Amazon to generate more purchases
- Grow a social media following
- Develop a consistent branding strategy and revamp their existing logo
Our Impact:
- Increased revenue over the course of one fiscal year by 90.89%
- Able to increase weekly revenue by an average of 40%
- Dropped ACoS (Advertising Cost of Sale) by 10% across all campaigns
- Achieved a total ACoS of 11%
Amazon Storefront Design
The Goal
The first priority was organizing their catalog of 40,000 SKUs in a branded and user-friendly format. Amazon shoppers are notorious for browsing with purchase intent, so creating a frictionless purchase process was the main goal of the project.
On Amazon, Campus Colors’ storefront was nonexistent, so the Seller’s Choice team started with a blank slate: a challenge and opportunity in and of itself. Campus Colors has a very large line of products, so organizing them in a manner that allows customers to find exactly what they want in the easiest way possible was a goal of utmost importance for Seller’s Choice.
The Strategy
Campus Colors wanted their voice to resonate throughout their branding design. Seller’s Choice rejuvenated Campus Colors’ look by updating its logo, fonts, and brand colors. The team at Seller’s Choice then took sweeping steps to reorganize the navigation of the Campus Colors site.
The Results
Now, Campus Colors’ Amazon Storefront has been optimized for users to easily browse by item category, team, or brand. Customers can also see the products “in action” with the new lifestyle photos implemented across the Storefront page.
Social Media
The Goal
When Campus Colors first joined the Seller’s Choice team, they were present on social media and utilizing the PPC ad features, but their strategy was not focused and their content and design didn’t appropriately highlight their products. They had rather small followings and any posts or campaigns they were pushing were aimed at fans with varying team allegiances. It lacked targeted approaches that would maximize their impact.
The Strategy
After Seller’s Choice determined that Campus Colors’ most profitable strategy was to focus in on their officially licensed NCAA gear, it was much easier to focus the social ad spend to boost click-through. Using demographic and geographic targeting based on education and interest in particular teams and programs, Campus Colors was able to target people who had real, tangible connections to the products they sell. After determining who they were targeting, Seller’s Choice drafted content and design to be mixed and matched for A/B testing. After social users interact with the ads, the least successful were be shut off until only the strongest performing remained. For their unpaid social strategy, Seller’s Choice focused on boosting the quality of design and content while putting Campus Colors’ products proudly on display in real-life situations. Customers were able to see people who are like them, wearing clothes that are applicable to their lifestyle. Not only does this make a brand more accessible, but it reminds them to purchase their favorite jerseys before opening game day!
The Results
In the first 8 months managing their social platforms, Seller’s Choice focused their wide strategy to cater to a more attentive, passionate, and profitable demographic. For example, Campus Colors’ Instagram following increased by more than 60%. On Facebook, its targeted ad strategy paid off tremendously. In August 2018 (when Seller’s Choice began managing Campus Colors’ social presence), Campus Colors had less than 23,000 impressions; in the time since Seller’s Choice taking over (December 15th, 2018-January 15th, 2019), Campus Colors garnered almost 383,000 impressions while spending less than half per impression than was spent in August.
PPC Campaigns
The Goal
The challenge Seller’s Choice faced when managing Campus Colors’ Amazon PPC was efficiently organizing and monitoring 40,000 SKUs with over 300 campaigns. Each NCAA team that Campus Colors licensed had 5 product types, and each of those product types came in many forms. At any given time, one college potentially had 400 different shirts and sweatshirts listing on the site. The sheer number of products meant a traditional approach of adding campaigns and optimizing as you go was inefficient and prone to leaving keywords unattended. This, in turn, would lead to ballooning cost and a negative return on invested dollars.
The Strategy
Seller’s Choice tackled this problem by creating separate portfolios for each school to house all of their respective targeted advertising campaigns. We then re-approached our targeting and product segregation strategy to cover as many bases as possible for every school Campus Colors is licensed to sell.
First, each school was given a manual targeting campaign with “research” and “success” ad groups. Each of the two ad groups contained keywords that we were testing, and those that we knew could convert at a high rate. Then, each school was also given a headline ad to capture the top of page real estate, an auto-targeting campaign to leverage Amazon’s A9 algorithm, and a product targeting campaign to advertise against competitor listings.
The Results
The PPC campaign’s restructured and newly implemented strategy has reaped positive results. We can now quickly go into each school and adjust bids based on real-world events like a game to capture the increased traffic from big-name schools. This means we can reroute money from less active product types to capture more sales without exceeding our pre-determined budget.
We were able to drop ACoS by 10% across all campaigns and achieve a total ACoS of 11%. Additionally, we were able to increase weekly revenue by an average of 40%.
