Pier City Custom - Paid Media Strategy
Pier City Custom were fast emerging as a standout brand within the custom motorbike scene, but revenue growth wasn't in line with the growth in their cultural standing. I've now been working with them for two years, and have seen consistent improvement in new business acquisition via my paid media strategy. 2022 saw a 40% uptick in e-comm takings, with around 20% of the total revenue attributable to my activity.
Pier City Custom has gone from a side hustle, to full time gig, to established tastemakers of the custom bike scene. Occupying a very specific niche has served them well, and they operate with quite limited competition. This is particularly true of their e-commerce arm: most retailers have outdated sites and a poor UX. PCC are upfront and clear with information, accessible if customers need further help, and curate their product range based on their experiences in the workshop. As a result, once a customer has come across Pier City they are pretty unlikely to shift allegiance to someone else.
This all sounds pretty perfect, but growth was stalling. The in-house team were up to their armpits in bike builds and while they had a few automations and quick-fix apps running in the background, something wasn’t right. Ahead of a bumper year for events and exposure, I took a look at how things were set up in their Google Ads, and initiated META ads.
The visual nature of Instagram made the ideal vehicle for top-of-funnel acquisition. PCC isn’t short of a little bike porn, so their bank of images made it straightforward to herd people onto the site. This traffic is cheap – very cheap – but unrefined. Luckily those without the right bike soon drift away, and those who stay engaged can be encouraged towards conversion.
Over on the Google Ads side, I cut all spending on brand-based keywords. These were a significant source of traffic and sales, however I had a theory that anybody using these terms were already aware of the brand and would show up organically. The data backed this theory up, with average figures simply transferring from paid to organic search traffic. I also examined the performance of the extensive keyword list, whittling this down to broader terms more likely to be used by the uninitiated. These users are more easily swayed to a brand they weren’t necessarily looking for.
Close monitoring of the cost per click and per acquisition meant a swift reaction to increased ad spend by competitors with deeper pockets (there was a brief period where BMW were throwing their weight around a bit). Capping the maximum cost per click and reducing the budget kept funds available for later, when the quieter voice of PCC would cut through more efficiently. Careful use of the limited budget, plus consistent monitoring and adjustment, saw the peak season (May - Oct 2022) deliver 5650% return on ad spend. The average cost per acquisition was just £5.83 for an average order value of £335, despite targeting exclusively new users and the average time between first visit and conversion coming in at around 2 weeks. With a returning customer rate of nearly 35%, PCC will quickly see that investment back in subsequent purchases by those users.
While paid media campaigns are – without question – about the numbers, words have their part to play too. Anything you’re paying to put in front of people needs to represent the brand correctly. Rory and Stu are firmly part of the new school of moto. Attracting like-minded folk to the business doesn’t just mean dealing with people they get on with, but they tend to be younger too. Customers for life, potentially. The copy style incorporated irreverent humour and a total lack of machismo. This runs the risk of pushing away the…let’s say ‘traditional’ biker, but that was a-okay with Pier City. Investing in a customer base with longevity, and loyalty to a stand-out brand, has set them up perfectly to kick off the next 24 months of their business strategy.
