Base Food: How I Helped Base Food Build Brand Awareness And Generate Traffic For Their US Expansion
Who the heck is Base Food?
Founded in Japan, Base Food is an eCommerce company that sells staple foods… with a twist.
The twist is that their foods are “nutritionally complete”— packed with protein, fiber, 25 vitamins & minerals and less carbs than regular bread and pasta. And the pasta cooks in TWO minutes. Perfect for people who want to eat healthy but don’t have time or can’t really cook. (Where my tech working friends at!)
Nutritionally, they’re kinda like Soylent and Huel— except it’s solid food.
And if hearing Soylent makes you wanna throw up… don’t worry, Base Pasta and Base Bread actually taste pretty damn good!
In fact, they’re good enough that Ramen Nagi, Palette Tea House and 1 Michelin Star restaurant SIO (formerly Restaurant Gris) served it to their customers.
The goal?
TLDR: they wanted to build brand awareness and drive traffic to their site for their US expansion.
I’m a direct response marketer— so building brand awareness isn’t my specialty i’ll admit…
But hey, branding and direct response marketing overlap. So if that’s what the client needs— and i’ve got skills that can help— i’m game.
So what did I do?
Like working at any other startup… I wore a LOT of hats.
FB ads, Reddit ads, Twitter ads, art creation & directing, webpage optimizing & wire-framing, web & email copywriting, funnel creation…
I worked on a bit of all those.
Let’s start with the content creation and branding stuff. And rather than tell you about it… I’ll just show you some of it.
Instagram and Facebook page content:
Event photography:
Product launch assets:
Though I would’ve had a better ROI on my time with a design team…
What’s great about creating some of this content myself is that I made my content work double duty. Yes, I made this content for branding purposes…
But I made sure some of these creatives would work as eyeball grabbers for paid ads too. And it worked.
The 3 ads below averaged a 4.01% link CTR to cold traffic. And our cold traffic campaigns averaged a 2.38% link CTR. (Anywhere between 1-3% is solid on FB ads).
Here’s some other ad creatives I created:
And of course — an e-commerce must — carousel ads:
But generating traffic with paid ads is only one part of the funnel. What happens after the click is just as important.
The product page has to actually convert people into buyers. And that was a problem I noticed…
People clicked, but the product page didn’t convert well. And I had a hunch why: there simply wasn’t enough product info on the page to sell the buyer (especially cold traffic). And it didn’t help that the page focused on features instead of benefits.
Sure, Japanese media was all over Base Food’s products— but it means nothing to the US market if they can’t read it (let alone google it).
I suggested A/B testing their product pages. I also created mockups for them.
Here’s their typical product page design
And here’s one of my many landing page mockups
Unfortunately, although KPIs showed the product page conversion rate sucked and the Base Food US team was onboard with my suggestions…
The tests were never implemented.
Base Food’s US team didn’t have access to edit the website. So the ball was in Base Food Japan’s court. Except they never picked it up.
Oh well. That happens in business.