Cross-channel advertising and PR campaign to promote the VARTA brand on the Russian market

Client

VARTA automotive batteries by Clarios - a global energy storage solutions company.

Goal

To increase brand awareness of VARTA on the Russian market in B2B and B2C segments.

Solution

B2B marketing strategy

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

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

Since it was important for us to get the maximum brand coverage of the audience, we chose the following as key advertising channels:

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

We showed banners with key messages to target audience related to our product using websites cookies and search queries. For example we showed the banners to those who are interested in the repair of transport, car electronics buyers, auto services, fans of tuning and other target audience segments.

Posts about an updated version of VARTA Partner Portal were published in seven relevant groups in VKontakte.

We conducted a media campaign, which included news article placement in the thematic printed and digital media, e-mailing, banners placement. In general, during the campaign we placed information about the company in 11 thematic media.

As part of the PR campaign dedicated to the victory of the Kamaz-master team on VARTA batteries in the Dakar rally in January 2022 we conducted placement of news releases in thematic and news media. In general, 3 thematic and 39 news media published the article based on press release.

B2C marketing strategy

To increase VARTA brand awareness among B2C audience we conducted 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 marketing campaign in social networks, the key emphasis was placed on the seasonal advantages of the product, which were reflected in both the text and the visual component of the advertising posts. In total, placement was carried out in 24 thematic groups in VK.

On the Russian-language VARTA channel there are many videos with useful content that is 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, as well as attract new subscribers to the channel.

Millions of users are looking for information about batteries for their cars 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 in Yandex and Google allows brands to reach a large number of interested audiences and bring the most relevant and high-quality traffic to the site. For VARTA, a large-scale advertising campaign on the search and in Yandex and Google networks was carried out in winter - in peak season.

As a result of the optimization of advertising campaigns in Yandex, Google and YouTube, we managed to significantly reduce CPC and get several times more clicks without increasing the budget.

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

in the car review channel PrivetTachka (1,5 million subscribers)

in the video on the car enthusiast Anton Vorotnikov's channel (1,5 million subscribers)

and in the video on in auto travel theme channel of Bogdan Bulychev (571 thousand subscribers)

Results

For six months of programmatic ads placement we got

• 5.46 million impressions
• 16 thousand clicks

For the three months in Yandex and Google

• the number of impressions amounted to 64.7 million,
• the number of clicks amounted to 518 thousand,
• the number of actual clicks exceeded the planned number by 2.5 times.

For the same period in YouTube (video ads campaign)

• the number of impressions amounted to 2.3 million,
• the number of views amounted to 363 thousand,
• the number of actual views exceeded the planned number by 2 times.

As a result of advertising campaign in VKontakte, we reached

• during b2b campaign - 100.5 thousand users (exceeded the planned number by 2.3 times),
• during b2c campaign - 337 thousand users (exceeded the planned number by 40%).

During the media campaign (not including media placement during the PR campaign) we got

• 2.9 million views,
• 5.5 thousand clicks.