Jean Ochse is a digital marketing executive at Massmart, one of Africa’s largest retail groups, who owns food, home, and electronics retailer, Makro. Ochse works on Makro’s digital growth by leading the retailer’s digital marketing strategy, performance marketing, lead generation and customer experience.
Grocery retail in South Africa is in an exciting time — it’s also at its most competitive.
At Makro, a countrywide wholesale retailer in South Africa, we’ve seen a particular dynamic play out between stores and consumers: South African shoppers are used to a low promotional cadence, which means local retailers offer promotions on items less often than stores in other regions do. When an item like coffee or butter is on promotion, South Africans will buy in bulk until the next discount arrives.
We’ve observed two consequences of this. First of all, considering how high competition is among retailers, a high-low promotional strategy isn’t sustainable. Secondly, consumers won’t trust that any one retailer will look after their pockets when it comes to the essentials or pantry stocking.
Going into the peak shopping season at the end of 2024, we wanted shoppers to see Makro as their go-to for pantry items, from cereal to toilet paper. This was part of our broader strategy to position our brand as an “everyday low price retailer”, allowing consumers to enjoy lower prices for longer periods of time instead of waiting for the next promotion.
Our usual strategy to reach digital audiences was to repurpose ads made for TV for our online platforms. However, we knew this plan wouldn’t be able to scale our digital channels, nor could it connect with shoppers in both the awareness and consideration phases of the consumer journey.
This is how one lead generation campaign taught us the value of mid-funnel marketing — and its power in driving conversions.
Out with the old, in with the new: Harnessing local talent to attract new customers
For shoppers to see Makro as their “everyday low price” option, we knew that creating original, digital-first video content would be the best way to maximise the awareness and consideration phases of the funnel.
Google’s Partnerships Ads recently launched in sub-Saharan Africa, which gave us the opportunity to promote YouTube creator videos in our ad campaigns. The tool allows us access to audience data and organic performance metrics, which we would not have access to in traditional creator partnerships, and which we can feed into our campaigns for optimisation.
It presented us with the perfect opportunity to work with YouTube creator, Fehmz, who is one of South Africa’s beloved food content creators and entrepreneurs. Her focus on hearty, down-to-earth recipes aligned with our desire to position Makro as the top choice for festive season cooking — and pantry loading at an affordable price.
How do we know we’ve got the right strategy? That’s where experimentation arrives
We wanted to test the theory that our usual strategy of using TV-to-smartphone branded content had hit a ceiling. So, we launched two ads using a Demand Gen campaign to run both arms of the experiment to see how consumers engage with two different ads aimed at awareness and consideration.
1. The first was the Partnership Ads video on YouTube Shorts, which involved one Fehmz’s favourite healthy breakfast recipes using Makro’s in-house products:
2. The second ad included the branded assets originally created for TV, which acted as the control.
It’s clear to see the difference between the two arms of the experiment: the control ad is heavily branded and not made for digital audiences. Meanwhile, in the creator-led campaign, viewers are organically introduced to Makro’s products as Fehmz puts together her breakfast dish. This makes for a stronger brand connection, which moves shoppers down the funnel in a more authentic way.
Full-funnel lessons: The middle is where the magic is
The bonus effect of this campaign, which was aimed at meeting consumers mid-funnel to increase consideration, is that it unexpectedly resulted in conversions.
Even though we didn’t set out to increase conversions, Fehmz’s video achieved 8% higher conversions than the control video. Not only that, but it also got a 20% boost in revenue value; meaning it brought in more profitable conversions than the control. Raising awareness and consideration were our primary goals, and we achieved that too with a 41% increase in video watch time for the creator video.
TV still has a place in our strategy. However, unlike TV, which offers broad reach, we’ve learnt that the combination of Demand Gen and creator-driven content is able to guide potential customers through the funnel from awareness to consideration to conversions. This shows that the middle of the funnel should be well looked after with quality video content and solid funding.
Learn more about our strategy and this campaign:
