Retail e-commerce brand, Yarn, has an always-on marketing strategy as an essential part of business success. As ads on social media started becoming less effective, they needed an efficient channel to scale their campaigns. Learn how Yarn reached success by expanding beyond traditional platforms and reaching audiences on the open internet to increase exposure and engagement.

Yarn is not your typical e-commerce marketplace. It’s driven by one mission: to create an inclusive marketplace for and in collaboration with Australia’s first-nation community, to provide a platform for first-nation-owned businesses, ally-friendly businesses and Indigenous artists to share their culture and unique stories with customers near and far.

Yarn isn’t Australian first-nation-owned, but it takes great pride in partnering with incredible artists, community organizations, non-profits, and small Indigenous-owned retail businesses. Over the past three years, Yarn has directed over $1.8 million toward first-nation employment and training, artist compensation and promotion, contracts, and direct community funding.

Yarn is dedicated to promoting Indigenous employment and training across all areas of the business, from development to production, dispatch, and even modeling. Yarn’s marketplace platform offers Indigenous retail businesses the opportunity to grow and connect with new customers. With an audience of over 140k followers and thousands of daily website visitors, Yarn shares their logistic infrastructure and marketing expertise with these Indigenous-owned businesses.

Cultural, Inclusive, Unique, Inspirational

If Adam Benz, leading Yarn’s digital marketing, had to describe Yarn in a few words, he’d choose these four: cultural, inclusive, unique, and inspirational. Adam drives Yarn’s digital marketing, including demand generation, media buying, and campaign management.

For Adam, all of Yarn’s marketing is rooted in storytelling. 

“We try to tell the story of our products through the artist’s eyes. We’re constantly reaching out to new artists in the community, bringing their collections to life through our products. It’s a fine line of obviously positioning products as an e-commerce business, but trying to tell that story in the background and connect with people at that level. There’s a very much an element of awareness first, understanding who Yarn is, what we represent, and how we’re positioned in the community.

“Particularly when you’re dealing with First Nations people, it’s so important to make sure that everything’s culturally appropriate and ethical. These are things we try and weave into our products and collections, every day. And there’s a team of people behind the scenes making sure we stick to that philosophy. A big part of that is that we pay royalties to these artists through our products, so the money is going back into the community. So there’s a good cause behind what we do as well.”

With stunning products, inspiring stories, and an ethically-minded business model, how does Yarn actually promote its products and marketplace?

Yarn uses an always-on approach to an omnichannel digital marketing strategy: paid and organic social media, paid search, and programmatic advertising.

The brand advertises across Instagram, TikTok, Pinterest, Facebook, and Google, and also sometimes invests in influencer marketing for specific campaigns. Adam says that programmatic advertising is a key player in Yarn’s media mix, especially for retargeting e-commerce customers:

“Each platform plays a very unique role in the customer journey funnel. If you look at a campaign from a first-click attribution to a last-click attribution, we want to make sure that we’re putting enough audience in the top of the funnel and that our retargeting programs are converting them over time as they drip into that ecosystem. Programmatic plays a huge role in being able to retarget that audience across the internet, across everywhere that their eyeballs are.”

While retargeting people who are already close to converting leads to campaigns with high return on ad spend (ROAS), Adam says it’s still important to invest in expanding the top of the funnel with fresh audiences.

Growing Yarn’s audience is important because they “can’t retarget people who aren’t there.” The marketing team is also conscientious about not over-retargeting their existing customers. 

Yarn recognized the importance of reaching new, fresh audiences – but also wanted to make sure that their expanded audience still fit the brand’s buying persona. Building brand awareness that eventually converts to a sale is a long game, so prospecting campaigns need to find people who are more likely to become customers.

At this point in 2023, if you talk to an e-commerce business about digital marketing, you’ll hear feedback that can boil down to this: 

• Omnichannel, always-on marketing is usually a must
• Paid ads on social media are more expensive and less effective than a few years ago
• Changes in data privacy have made it harder to prospect and retarget

What lessons can online retailers learn from an e-commerce business like Yarn’s success? As paid social and search marketing has become more difficult and costly, Adam has some clear advice: 

“It should be part of every decent-sized e-commerce business arsenal to have a programmatic strategy as part of their paid campaigns. For example, from a display perspective, it’s critical to not just retarget people on Google Search or Facebook. You also need to reach audiences on the open internet where we know we can get in front of their eyeballs and cross-channel sell.”

Other best practices to implement in your digital marketing strategy include:

• Understanding what KPIs are most important for your business, and then optimizing your campaigns around those KPIs.
• Selecting attribution models that make sense for your campaign. First-touch, last-touch, and multi-touch attribution models all have pros and cons that can impact how you evaluate ROAS.

The Next Chapter

If you haven’t spent much time in Australia, the word “yarn” might just elicit images of knitting and sweaters. But in the great Down Under, “yarn” also refers to stories or storytelling – a concept that’s woven into Yarn’s very name. As a brand, Yarn shares the stories of the people who create the beautiful products on their marketplace. Match2One is proud to help Yarn harness the power of programmatic to tell those inspiring stories. At 100,000 clicks in, we’re just getting started!

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Match2One’s platform makes programmatic advertising simple and accessible for businesses to manage campaigns that find and convert the right customers. In late 2022, Match2One became the first programmatic platform to offer a Shopify app, empowering Shopify merchants to create, manage, and optimize all their campaigns directly within their store.

To learn more about how your ecommerce business can benefit from programmatic advertising, get in touch with our team