Marbotic

The Objective

Generating views and increasing engagement

Marie Merouze, an engineer by trade, founded Marbotic in 2012. Her vision was to create a brand new type of educational tool blending the physical and digital. Marbotic is wooden letters and numbers that kids can use with tablets to teach them how to read and count.

Think Montessori-inspired, with a digital twist — a perfect blend of tradition and modernity. Learning tools to educate kids with their hands, hearts and minds in harmony. As the founder of the Montessori movement said “What the hand does, the mind remembers."

Marbotic’s mission is to make reading fun. Most kids will do anything for some screen time. So, they look to make this positive, quality time by turning it into an active learning experience. Passive screen time becomes quality screen time - almost every parent’s dream.

No strangers to social media, the Marbotic team had been posting quality content for some time. But, it didn’t seem to be generating enough views and there was a frustrating lack of engagement.

The Solution

Trialling TikTok’s features to boosts conversions

They'd tried many of the major pay-per-click (PPC) platforms. None of them seemed to produce the desired results. So, they decided to change tack and turned to TikTok. Posting User Generated Content featuring Marbotic they saw that it was a hit with TikTok's audiences.

After seeing some initial success, in October 2022 they started working with a specialist TikTok agency, Add2Ads.

The good folks at Add2Ads are TIkTok specialists and brought to the table their TikTok expertise. Under their stewardship, they started fine-tuning Marbotic's campaigns to deliver better results.

Marbotic’s campaign objective was to boost brand awareness and increase sales on Amazon. Their aim was to reach a Return on Ad Spend (ROAS) of 3. They wanted to reach a US-based iOS user audience with a demographic over 25. The campaign would run for under a week covering the busy Black Friday and Cyber Monday period.

For generating creative content, Marbotic works on a monthly basis with TikTok creators. Sourced using Creator Marketplace and direct search, the creative featured parents their kids interacting with Marbotic.

The blend of beautiful wooden toys, well-crafted tablet apps, and cute kids is an appealing mix when it comes to views. There’s no better way of showing off the products than kids engaging with them.

As Marbotic is localised into many languages they were able to feature a diverse range of parents and kids from all different backgrounds. Fun is fun wherever we're from. It also helped to demonstrate Marbotic's universal appeal the world over.

They also used Interactive Add-Ons, including display card and countdown sticker to the creative and they saw from their stats that this content was the highest performing.

The Results

Advertising on TikTok with Interactive Add-Ons is a game changer

Their campaign was a remarkable success. It was exciting for the team to see it surpass its goals. On TikTok they achieved a Return On Ad Spend of 3 as desired and a Click Through Rate of 1.16%. Seeing their targeted TikTok audience immediately pick up on the content was a happy surprise and extremely gratifying for the team. That and seeing several videos go viral by themselves.

But the biggest impact is what a game-changer advertising on TikTok has been for Marbotic. The campaign resulted in a 3x increase in sales on Amazon. They’d never seen such a positive impact from any of their advertising. It’s now a talking point with potential commercial partners and proof that Marbotic resonates with its audience.

Pivotal to the campaign’s success was a dedicated TikTok point of contact and reactive ad agency Add2Ads. Calls twice a month let them fine-tune strategy and unlock several Beta features. These were vital in helping them to reach their goals, especially deep linking, and interactive add-ons. By collaborating and working together they far surpassed the marketing objectives they set.

The effectiveness of Interactive add-ons is a key campaign insight to take forward. These proved to be a great addition and all their top-performing videos featured them. They'll also be using the Landing page view optimization tool again. This enabled them to see that a lot of the people that clicked on their ads actually then bought the product — invaluable data and insight.