Midterm Project- Pre-Campaign

TUESDAY, 18 NOVEMBER 2008

Mid-Term project - Google AdWords
Client Overview:
Client Profile:
http://snowfactory.pixnet.net/blog; http://liyihui.myweb.hinet.net/newstore2.html; Yahoo.tw bid ID: snowfactory100

Snow Factory is a homemade yogurt producer located in downtown Taipei, Taiwan. It was founded in July 2007 by Li Yi-Hui and Su Li-Wen with joint investment of 300,000NT$. Three employees, including the founders, make hand-made yogurt and chewable fruit jam in a working environment much like one’s home. The inspiration of the business came from Li Yi-Hui’s participation in a yoga class taught by an Indian instructor. According to Su: “I couldn’t find a home made, chemical free, not sour yogurt in my local market, so I decided to make one for myself”. Snow factory offers both on/offline purchases. Online marketing and promotion are done through bid.yahoo.tw, personal blog of Li Yi-Hui’s, and a webpage on hinet.net. At the moment, Snow Factory is not using Google AdWords. Their on/offline combined monthly sales revenue averages around 400,000NT$.

Marketing Analysis:
Product, Price
Snow Factory defines its core product as “scoopable”, least sour, artificial chemical free yogurt. The company ensures quality in their products by not using milk powder and artificial additives. Taiwan’s most famous milk brand-Lin Feng Ying’s full-fat, pure cow milk is chosen as the main ingredient. The product is packaged in 168+-5% gram cups and placed in a dozen cup boxes. Each 168g cup of Snow Factory yogurt is priced at 36NT$. To add more flavors to the original taste of sugar-free yogurt, Snow Factory made chewable jams (with fruit flesh) of several flavors (Da Hu strawberry, apple, Tao Yuan mulberry, mango, papaya, litchi-honey, apple + passion fruit, pineapple) are offered. A cup of yogurt with a scoop of home-made jam is 45NT$.
Place, Promotion
Considering the size and scope of the organization, Snow Factory doesn’t offer shop display sales, and takes advantage of “free” marketing channels to promote its product. W.O.M is spread around through social-networking tools like famous local blogs. Yahoo bidding is chosen over other channels due to its reach on the local market. The main webpage is placed on webspace provided by hinet.net. Transaction is made through ATM transfer and land parcel delivery. Customers can receive the yogurt in person at Taipei Gu-Ting MRT station with prior contact.
Competition
We define Snow Factory’s industry as “fresh” food - dessert industry. Under this broad classification, all dessert and yogurt producers, Uni-President being the largest, would be its competitors, but Snow Factory is serving a niche market of home-made yogurt. At the moment, the competitors of the niche are Granny Sara, Osiana, Asenka, and Yoplait. They all make spoonable, home-made yogurt of different taste and package offered in-store. Considering the number of competitors, and their respective market share, this home-made yogurt niche has large segment to be conquered by the incumbents and new entrants, hence the market is competitive, and it is in its early majority position of the S-Curve.

Customers
According to the managers, the original target customers were 20-30 year old, health conscious office females, but along the journey, they observed that mid-age house wives were the largest buyers, and young teenagers through their mothers’ recommendations. We believe that the potential customers will still remain to be adult females, and teenagers, because men who don’t like sour are very common in Taiwan. Among the potential customers, environmentalists (one can get 10NT$ refund on reuse of a Snow Factory yogurt box), vegetarians, alternative therapy supporters (yogurt helps digestion), naturalists (the yogurt can be used as a natural skin whitener) might make up majority of the target segment.

Current Marketing:
Snow Factory’s main online content, all in Traditional Chinese, is placed on Li Yi Hui’s personal blog, a single web-page on hinet’s myweb, and on yahoo bidding platform. The whole information about the business inspiration, the product, complementary fruit jams, links to customers’ comments on different blogs, news reports about the business, product pricing, ordering method, preservation and use of the product are knitted on a single page.
One should download an order form (.xl file), fill it, and send it back to the company’s e-mail address along with money transfer over ATMs. Besides internet communication, telephone orders, fax orders are also acceptable. It's been noted that most of the repeat buyers were 30 years of age, economically stable, married females, who relied less on internet to buy yogurt. Hence, unless Snow Factory offer special and unique content that not only adds to the original value proposed, but also requires only internet to be access, offline promotion and sales seem to be generating most of the profit.

An online marketing for such a young company should focus both on increasing brand awareness and ROI. Snow Factory’s same information is scattered around several platforms (BBS, blogs, its webpage on hinet). From a strategic point of view, information with same images, similar slogans, long web-pages with ordering information on the lower part might serve as solid brand awareness builder, but it may come at higher risk of pushing away customers due to dullness, or “overcrowdedness” of information. We believe that Snow Factory’s web-page contains too much information on a single page (too many words). One should look over everything before reaching the ordering section. Also, payments are made over ATM transfers; hence it is difficult to measure sales dollars made “online”. On the other hand, the page contains several sections that tell the quality certification, comparison of the product to incumbents on several factors, refrigeration, different uses of yogurt, and clear photos of the product with whitish tone that have artistic, sanitary feel to it. Should Snow Factory change their webpage, we have already thought of several key measures to be addressed on the new site.
Incumbents of the niche mentioned above use local celebrities to endorse their products to the mass, but Snow Factory hasn’t engaged in any “real” advertisement campaigns yet. Their brand awareness has been established through PR. The page has several links to news reports about Snow Factory. Bloggers serve as the most effective, free advertisers for their product.
Because Snow Factory is mentioned on so many blogs, only the two Chinese characters for Snow Factory typed on Google search engine brings about 210,000 web results.

Conclusion
Our goal in this project is to increase sales dollars through more sales leads sent from Google AdWords. The timing of the project has aligned with a recent incidence of poisonous (tainted, melamine) milk powder sent all over Asia from mainland China, which pushed lots of customers away from dairy products in Taiwan. We will turn this threat into an opportunity by emphasizing the use of Taiwan produced pure cow milk, and all hand-made complementary jams. Also, as December approaches, we will utilize the name of the brand – “Snow” Factory in ads related with seasonal themes such as winter, snow, Christmas… In Taiwan, the top three portal sites are Yahoo.tw, Wretch.com, and Google.tw. Studies show that when Taiwanese people search for information on Google, they refer to the search results with informatory, academic, news report seeking mindsets that automatically block advertisements shown around the organic result. Ad agencies believe that banner ads work better than keyword text ads. Therefore, in order to attract more potential customers to the site, we will not only use keywords, but content network tied with most visited Taiwan sites (YouTube, Wretch…). Since customers refer to Google as a serious (academic) search engine, so we’ll focus on the “news worthiness” of our text messages.

Proposed AdWords Strategy
The ad copies will be written in Chinese, but will be connected with few English keywords to increase impressions. Because Snow Factory doesn’t own a store display, hence Geo-targeting ads coupled with Google Maps will not work.
Considering the current trend of the business, the target audience is still all females, and those health conscious males who don’t mind a little sourness in yogurt. The coverage area is all Taiwan.
So far we have come up with 3 ad groups. The corresponding themes are: Winter/Christmas, Beauty/Health, New business/Entrepreneurship. The three text ads with their corresponding keywords are as follows:
1. 雪坊優格　冬季最美的甜點
　　100%林鳳營鮮乳製造雪白優格，搭配繽
　　紛的天然果醬，最時尚的聖誕禮物。
(Keywords: 布丁, 甜食, 下午茶, 聖誕節, 冬天, 冬季, 雪, 爬山, 鮮奶, 鮮乳, 甜點, 果醬, 天然, 時尚, 禮物, 優格, 優酪乳, 奶酪, 乳製品, 林鳳營, 果粒, 果肉,Christmas, x-mas, winter, )
2. 雪坊優格　時尚美容聖品
　　純手工優格，100%天然食材，僅市售1/2
　　的卡路里，享瘦同時，美麗加分。
(Keywords: 手工, 天然, 食材, 卡路里, 熱量, 瘦身, 瑜珈, 美容, 美白, 曬黑, 肌膚, 減肥, 發酵, 代餐, 消化, 零食, 美女, 鮮奶, 鮮乳, 莎拉奶奶, 植物的優, 林志玲, 楊丞琳, 優沛蕾, 大滿足, 才不會忘記你呢, Christmas, x-mas, winter, )
3. 雪坊優格　研究生創業夢想
　　三位台大商研所學生，製作香滑細緻的優
　　格，一同來感受細心與耐心的創業故事。
(Keywords: 商研所, 台大, 台灣大學, EMBA, 大學生了沒, 大學生, 研究生, 蘇立文, 黎懿慧, 周慶麟, 創業, 創新, 微型企業, 創意, 中小企業, 白手起家, 政大法律系, 故事, 感人, Made in Taiwan, Taiwan)
Negative Matches: 鬼, 吃到飽, 樹, 公公, 聖誕帽, 舞會, A片, 肥皂, 資源, 石材,
Although Wretch, the second most visited site in Taiwan, is not listed among Google content network list, but based on our budget performance, we’ll use content network from time to time.
Our three week 2000NTD budget will be distributed as 650NTD, 350NTD, and 1000NTD respectively. After checking each keyword on keywords ideas by Google, we have found out that the keywords we have selected cost around 2NTD per click (dieting, and loosing-weight are around 15NTD). Daily budget will be allocated as 2/3 of the weekly budget over Monday to Friday, and remaining 1/3 over Saturday and Sunday.
Our goal is to increase Snow Factory’s sales and brand awareness by burning all of the 2000NTD over the whole project period. Considering average CPC as 2,5NTD, our projected clicks are 800 clicks. Projected impression is around one million eyeballs.
Keyword advertising is a trial-and-error business. Therefore, we’ll adjust our bidding, and budget maximum daily to filter out the most suitable keywords for the most suitable time.
Because, Snow Factory’s online contents do not offer direct sales online (online credit card payment e.g. PayPal), it is difficult to measure more conversion rate accurately. We’ll take each download (click on .xl file) of the order form of Snow Factory as real buyer, and each clicker on our ad as potential customer.