Client Overview
Ankorstore is a French startup that enables independent brands to sell their products to independent retailers across Europe. They trailblaze the “no inventory” marketplace, allowing retailers to order small quantities of products from a wide range of brands, paying up to 60 days after placing the order.
The Challenge
Being the LinkedIn of retail and creating a network of professional brands and retailers, Ankorstore had a complicated demand gen task. They needed to acquire huge numbers of both retailers and brands across 23 markets and even more verticals. With the biggest US-based competitor Fair entering the European market, they had to do it fast.
Strategy
From a high level, we decided to focus 80% of our efforts on acquiring retailers. A high number of retailers would attract Brands by allowing them to open a new sales channel and another opportunity to find customers.
Google & Bing
Retailers search in very different ways depending on the type of products they are selling and the market they operate in. We took the road less traveled, developing specific strategies for each Country, with native keywords, ads, landing pages, and value proposition.
For the campaign structure, we replicated the site architecture allowing us to have a specific offer for hundreds of products across different industries and even for different brands. We had a different offer for someone searching for “wholesaler” in France (grossiste), “facial cleanser” in Germany (gesichtsreiniger), or the famous bottle brand “Chilly’s” in the UK.
We started with manual bidding campaigns in order to set some benchmarks on the main KPIs and get some initial learnings on the positioning and keyword mix. Within several weeks, we were ready to switch to Target CPA and scale.
We took a similar approach on Paid Social, using different audiences and campaigns for different markets, verticals, brands, and even specific products. This resulted in running hundreds of campaigns and thousands of ads. The massive structure was a handful but after several rounds of creative experiments, it fueled our growth like gasoline.
Results
With our high-touch approach of segmentation and ongoing creative experiments, we were able to improve on the volume and CTR month over month while keeping the efficiency stable. Several people were needed just to keep the accounts going, let alone scale, but it was all worth it. We ended up dominating the European market and achieved 14x growth within a year, culminating in Ankorstore’s $2 billion valuation and a shoutout from the French President Emmanuel Macron.
