Summit Brands

Armed with a portfolio of innovative household cleaning products, Summit Brands sought out Leap Group to develop a robust marketing strategy that would scale its business. By leveraging paid media, creative, analytics, and influencer partnerships, we positioned Dryel and Glisten as premium alternatives to traditional cleaning solutions and significantly boosted sales.

The Results

Increase

In foot traffic to retailers in Q1 2024

0 %

Increase

In unique visitors to Summit Brands website

A Clean and Clear Win: How we drove category growth and in-store sales for Summit Brand products through strategic influencer campaigns.

When the family-owned Summit Brands was ready to scale new heights, President and CEO Joel Harter partnered with Leap Group to develop a robust marketing and creative strategy for its portfolio of innovative and sustainable household cleaning products.

Through consulting, paid media, creative, analytics and SEO strategy, we helped drive growth through in-store sales of Summit Brand products by positioning them as category leaders well worth the higher price tag compared to generic products.

Repositioning Dryel as a premium product on retail shelves.

We began our work with the innovative company with an integrated, multi-channel campaign for Dryel, a product launched by P&G in the late 90s that had recently evolved to optimize the At-Home Dry Cleaning category.

Based on findings from our in-house research department, we focused on Dryel’s new Rapid Refresh Technology, positioning the product as a gentler alternative to dry cleaning or traditional washing — transforming it into a premium offering on retail shelves. We determined our target audience was consumers seeking an alternative to traditional water-based laundry methods, with competitors being professional dry-cleaning services and hand-washing.

With that foundation, we devised a multi-faceted campaign that leveraged engaging social trends and educational content to inform both experienced laundry-doers and newcomers about the convenience, cost savings, and time-efficiency of Dryel versus dry cleaning. We employed a simulated map search to emphasize the accessibility of Dryel, positioning it as a convenient, in-home dry-cleaning solution. After capturing video viewers in the awareness campaign, we retargeted engaged users with brand-focused ads, driving them to the Dryel product page for further information and purchase.

By utilizing Google, Facebook, and Instagram ads, we effectively primed key markets for the New & Improved Dryel release in Walmart stores for Fall 2023. The campaign achieved impressive results, with an online $26.18 Cost Per Lead, a remarkable 56.18% lower than benchmark, demonstrating efficient use of the client’s marketing budget.

Building on our success with a robust by simple marketing strategy.

Thanks to the highly successful Dryel campaign, we had a rich database of performance analytics to draw on for successive marketing efforts. Based on our experience, we developed a strategic approach to drive category consideration for Dryel and Glisten (another premium product) through tactics that captured consumers at every point in the funnel:

First, by increasing awareness and online engagement and optimizing the website to educate consumers and drive SEO.

Then, by focusing spend on top items during key seasons and driving consumers to key retailers in alignment with a sales promotion plan; supported by collaboration with sales to fill the voids (including SMART Team support to improve selling stories and sample kits).

And finally by leaning heavily on Walmart Connect and Amazon Advertising with key season and strategic items.

To accomplish this, we developed a simple but robust marketing and creative strategy that leveraged paid influencers with both organic and paid content. We knew that Summit Brands was trailing in the content wars — one of its main competitors, Pink Stuff, was averaging 35 posts a month on TikTok (compared to Glisten’s 7 posts and Dryel’s 5 posts). Leveraging influencers would allow us to rise to the challenge, utilizing their fan bases and boosting content creation, while also building brand trust and recognition among an engaged audience and increasing visibility of Summit products and posting cadence.

Developing a more effective approach to influencer partnerships.

While influencer marketing has skyrocketed in importance in recent years, many companies still struggle with the right approach to take for their brands. That’s why we crafted an influencer marketing recruitment strategy that helped us identify the influencers that most aligned with Summit Brands’ values and audience, offer them a compelling compensation package, and create clear content guidelines specifying deliverables and usage rights. We even created our own platform that analyzed each profile in-depth, reviewing demographics, engagement metrics, content styles, brands that they’ve worked with, and other key factors. This enabled us to work with influencers that had at least a 5% engagement rate (influencer benchmark) and did not have affiliation with competitors, but had similar interests to the product.

Once approved, our influencers began creating content and submitting to the platform, which ensured that all assets were properly reviewed and approved, and included all required brand hashtags and mandatories, prior to posting. Then, we implemented a detailed analytics process to gauge content efficacy, including clear KPIs, continual performance monitoring, testing influencer content against co-branded content, and adjusting strategies based on performance. This was followed by product-focused ads that targeted users who had engaged with the influencers and shoppable pages that promoted retail stories, driving consumers further down the funnel.

To ensure our client teams could stay informed of key metrics and creative for individual products, we delivered sales and marketing reports in a simple statistical format every week, and also uploaded creative examples to a shared Dropbox folder that sales teams could use in retail buyer conversations. Plus, by implementing PriceSpider link tracking, all our influencer posts and social ads had unique campaign identifiers that allowed us (and the client teams) to evaluate their effectiveness and pivot when needed, ensuring maximum return on every media dollar.

Celebrating big category wins for our premium CPG products.

Though we took a rigorous approach to influencers, our efforts demonstrated early and sustained success in driving category consideration and website traffic. In just over two months, the Dryel campaign had achieved 6.4 million impressions, 2.2 million video views and a 33.2% engagement rate (over a 12.6% benchmark!) and made significant strides in landing page visits. Plus, its newly created TikTok account gained more than 700 new followers in the first month alone.

Our Glisten campaign demonstrated similarly impressive results, achieving 7.1 million impressions, 1.7 million video views, a 22.7% engagement rate and a consistently high number of clicks — 26.3K in just the first two months! This has resulted in more shoppable landing page engagements for retailers, especially for Publix, which was added to the page in February.

The Results

Increase

In foot traffic to retailers in Q1 2024

0 %

Increase

In unique visitors to Summit Brands website