Casper Hessellund is one of the most knowledgeable persons within digital growth and has been successful growing large brands internationally as Google Ads Specialist for more than 8 years. With his clients, typically large CtC brands, he has been active in more than 30 countries having marketing budgets of +USD 100 million and generating revenues of + USD 500 million. Casper is partner at Obsidian Digital, to whom he sold his own business recently, and acts as strategic advisor as well as helps to execute marketing plans directly.
Casper – How do you start a growth trip?
We prefer to start by putting the fundamentals in place, i.e. we look at the entire business and then plan the marketing strategy.
It is important that you can establish a local setup, and for each individual market it is important to consider whether you can meet local needs, including freight, payment solutions, security tags. In some countries, e.g. Germany, you must master the local language and provide service in the local language. Shipping requirements are not just price, also speed and choice of carrier can be crucial. Should they need delivery within 48 hours or are customers okay with longer delivery time? Can the order be tracked? The culture is super important, and we prefer to make a small communication manual for each market to use across all marketing channels. It’s different what makes customers respond and it is important to find the 10 phrases you need to nail for each country.
At the same time, we use a data–based approach – what is the market size, who are the competitors and what is the intensity of competition. We also assess to which extent you can handle the local requirements, as mentioned earlier, by setting a score or percentage.
This data-based approach often leads to decisions that are completely different from what would otherwise have been chosen. For example, Sweden is often a highly competitive market, while it is advantageous to focus on countries with common languages such as Malta, UK and Australia.
This puts us on the right track to formulate a progressive marketing strategy with the Marketing Director, making a roadmap for how this can be executed and helping the marketing team to follow the plan and execute it in the best possible way. This is a scalable plan of with a mapping from top to bottom including order size and transaction ratios.
We are involved in continuous evaluation and adjustments – there are always changes and improvements to be done.
What are the main challenges you see for companies who want to expand into new markets?
A big challenge is when the preliminary study has not been done. You need to know the basics – i.e. freight, payment options, customer service, understanding of language and culture, security tags on checkout etc. as mentioned earlier. In general, you really need to have a highly localized setup. It makes a huge difference, and this is where most people fail.
Another potential problem is entering a market with an insufficient budget. Therefore, the market analysis and the scaling plan is incredibly important. A common mistake is only to choose low hanging fruits and focus on “bottom funnel”, but you also need the branding and to use “top funnel” marketing.
Generally, my recommendation is to run “full funnel”. Social media, Google Ads, YouTube all work well for “top funnel” – and add email-follow-up to expand lifetime value. Compound is effective.
What is the strategy work behind choosing marketing channels and how do you measure the effect?
The strategy for choosing marketing channels depends a lot on what you want to achieve.
I see two approaches,
Select multiple markets and see what’s trending. It is a heavy investment and can get expensive as you expand. There will be used a lot of bullets that will miss – but some streams will work and can be increased while you shut down the ones that do not work.
Select very few markets based on your analysis and spend most of your budget here. You enter the individual markets more prepared and forcefully.
It all comes down to how much you want to spend and how fast it needs to happen.
If you are entering a new market where you have no recognition, then “top funnel” and push marketing is very important to create awareness. For that, social media is good, as well as YouTube and banner marketing.
Google Search Ads and Google Shopping are often very good at capturing the “bottom funnel”, i.e. the low-hanging fruits and this is necessary to be able to create some performance also in new markets.
While measuring the “bottom funnel” effect, usually acquisitions and cost per acquisition, seems easy, it is more complicated with “top funnel”. We often use a Brand Lift Study to measure awareness and the cost for each lifted user to remember the brand. We focus on frequency in relation to hitting customers, but also to avoid hitting a customer 20 times a day. Factors such as engagement time, and opportunities to do remarketing are important.
Of course, we have a broad knowledge of benchmark figures, but it varies a lot, and the most important thing is that the individual brands collect their own data and experience. The longer you are in a market the more and more you get, and this is a competitive advantage.
Casper – Please share with us some of the best cases you have seen…
One of the best cases I have seen in the period I have worked with digital marketing is Hobbii. They are a fantastic company that I have had the pleasure of working with a long time on their wild journey.
Today, Hobbii operates in +15 markets and has stores in Denmark and Germany. Growth, of course, is driven by high ambitions, but what they have achieved in such a short time tells a lot about the team. It takes a lot of hard work to create the growth on so many markets and do it profitably.
They have been good at activating customers through social media and replicating their concept to new markets. Part of the strategy has been to try things out, and what has worked has been used even more to support growth and the concept.
