Fukang Gin
How I scaled this Brand from 0 to 6 figures within 3 months
Fukang Gin is a French Gin inspired by the story of the story of a rare meteorite which was found in the Fukang Region of China.
The meteorite belonged to a rare family of meteorites known as pallasites. Thought to have been in existence since the start of the universe. The meteorite was infused with dark gold fragments that had never been witness before.
The brand is no doubt exciting, with a fantastic story and I must admit a fantastic tasting Gin!
Even with these strengths there is still a lot of marketing work which goes into bringing a brand into such a competitive market and having such booming success in a short period of time.
Here’s my story on how we built the brand.
Whats covered here
Where we started from
Identifying our target customer through testing
How I created the right content and assets needed for scaling
Scaling the brand using Facebook Ads
Implementing retention strategies and moving into other channels
Where we started from
So here we were, with a great product that hadn’t been tested and a vision for the business. The spirits industry is notoriously competitive and it was going to take something new and exciting to break into it.
It was time to take the product to the market and do so in the most exciting way.
I built out a nice website using the little content we had at the time, which I’ve continued to tweak over time.
Fukang-Gin.com
I knew there was some really important questions I needed the answers to before we could even think about trying to scale…
First of all we needed to know more about our customers.
Identifying our target customer
As I always speak about, its so important to have your targeting right if you want to have success in marketing. I knew this was the single biggest differentiator that would determine success. As I needed to create the right kind of content that would speak to our target customers and I had to know where to find them and target them.
So… how did I find the target market?
I started off with doing some market research and trying to build a picture of who our target customer was and what they might look like. This was important so that I could answer these important questions:
Who is going to want this product the most?
Where can I find them and target them?
How can I create content that these people will love and engage them to buy?
I started by created customer avatars for who I thought might be interested in the brand based on market research I had done on Instagram Gin pages, Gin facebook groups even a couple of gin blogs.
Going through the pages and reading the comments understanding which kind of people had positive things to say and which people had negative things to say.
We had 2 kinds of customer avatars to start off with based on this research which were quite different kinds of people. One belonged to a younger demographic (aged 18-35) and one an older demographic (35-60) This was interesting because these are different kinds of people that behave in different ways.
Younger demographics can be found on Instagram. Whereas an older demographic can be found on Facebook.
Testing our target customers
The younger demographic
So the younger demographics were on Instagram… Based on my research they likely wanted to see some influencers with the product and associate the brand with a cool, dark, indie vibe.
We thought it would be a good idea to try and position our brand as the night time gin and move away from the classic Gin in the garden kind of atmosphere.
I arranged for Instagram influencers of a primarily young demographic to post pictures of their “Fukang Cocktails” which would catch their attention and give the brand a bit of social proof.
The influencers had links to the site and drove traffic to the product page which I had designed. This was a great way to test our market and also get a lot of content for the brand as well
.We went live with the influencers and it was clear that the younger demographic weren’t our target market, there were so many positive comments and people loved the brand, but it seemed to be a bit out of the younger markets price range.
So we had ran the influencer campaigns and now had a bank of content which we could use, we also had some data from our influencer campaign that the younger demographic wasn’t right, however I still wanted to do more testing using Facebook ads so that I had rock solid data to back it up before I completely ruled them out.
The Older Demographic
From the research I’d done and my knowledge on marketing I knew I wouldn’t find them on Instagram as this demographic are more active on Facebook.
However we were now in a position to test this demographic now with some fresh User Generated content which I knew would be incredibly valuable.
Testing our Ad Angles & Demographic
I wanted to test a few different angles (desires) before I started to dig deeper and on to the next phase of testing. I started off with:
The gift angle
The sharing with friends angle
What I mean by testing our angles is creating ads which are focused around one specific benefit of the product and honing in on that part of it.
I used a combination of images and unboxing videos and made some creatives which were designed to talk about the benefits of each angle - i.e
What a unique gift the product made.
What a great gin it would be to buy and share with your friends.
I kept the age demographic open in my targeting for the time being. As this would let me acquire and compare data on who was buying the product.
Some of the creatives which I tested
Bright Eye-Catching Images That Get Attention
I loved this image because of the bright orange background which contrasted so much with Facebook and was guaranteed to make people stop scrolling… Which it did.
The Unboxing Video
This was the creative that really gave us some juice… It was exciting and our influencer done such a great job of talking about our product.
This creative told me so much about the Brand
I knew that our customers wanted to see more about the gift box.
I knew we needed more video ads.
It also generated enough purchases for me to get some good data on who our ideal customer was (Aged 35+).
Scaling the brand using Facebook Ads
Momentum was hot with the new creative and I knew it was a good opportunity to scale. Given that I had now got an idea of who my customer was, some creative people liked as well as some interests to use.
I duplicated our hottest interest into a new CBO 3 times and tripled our budget. This is a more risky scaling strategy and only a play I’d make when things were running really hot, but it did work.
The ROAS on the ads was even higher now since Facebook had more budget to learn and the CBO was able to get out of the learning phase.
I’ve never seen such good performance on a campaign before since it was so consistent. It really opened my eyes up to how important it is to ride your momentum whilst you have it and also understand the learning phase.
I continued to scale that campaign and tested more angles and ad ideas so that my audience didn’t become fatigued by seeing the same ads all of the time.
Getting into lookalike audiences shortly after was great as well bringing some great results in and allowing us to scale horizontally by reaching more audiences and bringing new kinds of people into our funnel.
It was a really exciting time for us here at the brand and I had a lot of fun inside the ads manager at that point in time whilst the brand was getting off the ground and all of these customers were loving our products.
Retention
Retention was an important part of our puzzle which would help us get more room for growth. I knew that we couldn’t constantly search for new customers as eventually we would have run out of new customers.
I built out our Klaviyo flows and retargeted our past customers to make sure that they didn’t forget about our brand.
Always remember that business is competitive. If you are not continuing to deliver value to your customers then someone else will and you will lose customers.
The right kind of creative and content for this was important to make sure that we could keep giving value.
I arranged for content based around cocktail recipes so that our customers were inspired by our brand and craved another one of our drinks.
This was a perfect way to excite our customers and give them something new to look forward to when they got our product.
This part is all part of the fun and building a brand with a community as well. Its so satisfying to see customers come back 4, 5 & 6 times to buy your product. Knowing you are delivering so much value to them and that they are enjoying the brand.
Other Channels
It was awesome how well our campaigns had been going and in order to keep scaling our brand we had to look into other channels.
Amazon was an obvious one which we decided would be good. We got the products listed on there and seen success very quickly. All of the attention and reach we had been getting on Facebook turned into sales on Amazon.
Turns out customers had been looking for us on there for a while and when we finally showed up they were very happy about it.
This was an important lesson for me because although I was a Facebook expert I needed to expand my knowledge to take full advantage of this.
Learning how Amazon worked was a bit of a different ballgame as I know how much it takes to realise your potential on marketing channels. I knew straight away I needed to learn more.
I spoke to a consultant Lawrence King and learned the tricks and the trades of Amazon and after making the right tweaks and adjustments our performance on that market has really picked up.
Amazon also allow us to scale into European countries with a lot more ease as well so we have decided to focus in on that channel now which has gave us more room for scaling.