Pivot Cycles

Background

Pivot Cycles is a high-end boutique mountain bike company based out of Tempe, AZ. The Pivot journey began In 2007 when they saw an opportunity to build better bikes for those passionate about the sport. Jump ahead 13 years and Pivot is a global company with presence in the US, Europe and Asia, benchmarked against some of the world’s most influential cycling brands.

Marketing

Digital media has not been a priority of Pivot Cycles as they have been able to grow by focusing almost exclusively on engineering superiority, and by building strong dealer relationships, without spending in digital media. Coming into 2020, there was a growing appetite to test in paid media, specifically paid search and social with the goal of identifying key audiences with brand affinity and driving them to retailers.

Online to Offline

Online to offline can be a challenge, especially when you are selling a product at independent retailers. Without having a sophisticated way to collect the data and track users all the way to purchase, we had to look at correlating data between the campaigns and sales. To our advantage, without running any digital media in the past we could look at baseline numbers for bike sales and then look for jumps when in market with media. Also, Pivot was not marketing every bike, but only specific bikes. This way we could isolate the bike model and see if there was a spike in sales vs other models not being actively marketed digitally.

The Campaign

eBikes are growing in popularity and acceptance across the world, but the Pivot Shuttle has seen less growth relative to other bikes in the Pivot line-up. In April we launched a campaign to help increase Pivot’s e-bike presence in the market and drive sales.

Our Approach

With minimal budgets, we had to focus on lower hanging fruit and ran our campaign across Google and Facebook. Within Google our focus was paid search with a small amount of retargeting display. On Facebook we targeted mountain bike enthusiasts, those that are active in the outdoors, and lookalikes of our website traffic to find those most likely to be in market for a bike.

Across all channels we drove consumers to the Shuttle bike page, but measured activity on the site, specifically whether they made it to the Demo or Find a Dealer pages. The campaign KPI was around Demo/Dealer page visits, although we concurrently analyzed overall sales data at the retailers, including sell-through numbers, and compared it to previous months.

Creative

On Facebook, creative was key. We ran 5 different assets consisting of single images, carousels, and video. This allowed us to optimize towards the best assets and test our assumptions. Additionally, our creative strategy tackled the juxtaposition of technology – one of Pivot’s areas of greatest strength – with the inherently emotional conversation about e-mountain bikes in the U.S. market.

Results

With just over $10,000 in budget we were able to serve over 2.7MM impressions and drive 32,881 clicks to the site. From that traffic, there was 3,695 visits to either the Demo or Dealer pages. This activity showed a greater interest in Pivot, and more specifically the Shuttle eBike.

While the campaign might have been called a success based solely on just the digital numbers, we reviewed Pivot Shuttle sales data for a corresponding lift. The numbers that came back are overwhelming. While performed ‘at goal’ across the product line during the campaign period, the Shuttle specifically saw a 286% increase in MoM sales.

Highlights

· $10,000 spend

· 33k clicks

· 3.7k visits to a Demo or Dealer page

· 286% increase in sales MoM

· Pivot hit their monthly sales goals due to increased sales on Shuttle