Cross-Channel Advertising and PR Campaign to Promote the VARTA Brand on the Russian Market

B2B Marketing Strategy

VARTA Partner Portal is an improved version of the partner portal, with expanded functionality for battery experts.

To inform the B2B audience about the new version of the portal, we ran an advertising campaign online and in print media. The campaign covered three CIS markets: Russia, Kazakhstan, and Belarus.

Since maximum brand reach was important, we chose the following key advertising channels:

• Programmatic ads;
• Posts in VK groups;
• Mass media.

We showed banners with key messages to the target audience based on website cookies and search queries — for example, to people interested in vehicle repair, buyers of car electronics, car services, tuning fans, and other target segments.

Posts about the updated VARTA Partner Portal were published in seven relevant VKontakte groups.

We ran a media campaign that included news articles in thematic print and online media, email newsletters, and banners. In total, information about the company appeared in 11 thematic media outlets.

As part of the PR campaign for the KAMAZ-master team's victory on VARTA batteries at the Dakar Rally in January 2022, we placed news releases in thematic and news media. In total, 3 thematic and 39 news outlets published articles based on the press release.

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B2C Marketing Strategy

To increase VARTA brand awareness among the B2C audience, we conducted an advertising campaign in digital and traditional media.

As the main promotion channels we used:

• Programmatic ads;
• Cooperation with bloggers;
• Posts in VK groups;
• Contextual advertising in Google and Yandex;
• Banner ads in GDN and YAN;
• YouTube promo;
• Banner ads in thematic media.

In the social media marketing campaign, the focus was on the product's seasonal advantages, which were reflected in both the text and the visual elements of the ads. In total, placement was carried out in 24 thematic groups in VK.

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On the Russian-language VARTA channel, there are many videos with useful content that are most relevant to the brand's key audience. However, before that, the channel was promoted only organically. In December 2021, we launched a large-scale campaign to promote videos, both new and already available on the site. This allowed us to increase brand awareness among the target audience and attract new subscribers to the channel.

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Millions of users search for information about car batteries every month. At the same time, brands have to compete with aggregator sites and direct competitor sites in organic search results. The launch of contextual advertising on Yandex and Google allows brands to reach large numbers of interested audiences and drive the most relevant, high-quality traffic to their sites. For VARTA, a large-scale advertising campaign was launched in winter, during the peak season, across search, Yandex, and Google networks.

By optimizing advertising campaigns on Yandex, Google, and YouTube, we significantly reduced CPC and achieved several times as many clicks without increasing the budget.

Since another powerful outreach advertising tool is cooperation with bloggers, we organized three advertising integrations of the VARTA brand:

On the car review channel PrivetTachka (1.5 million subscribers)

On car enthusiast Anton Vorotnikov's channel (1.5 million subscribers)

On Bogdan Bulychev's road-trip channel (571,000 subscribers)