Just Russel

Objective

Just Russel, a fast-growing, DTC pet care brand from Belgium, aims to become the leading provider of personalized, healthy nutrition for dogs and cats in Europe. When the brand sought to expand to Germany, they partnered with TikTok to launch a campaign that would help them to quickly increase brand awareness and drive direct sales among the platform's highly engaged, pet-loving community.

Solution

To realise their ambition, they came up with a strategy focused on quickly launching and scaling their brand in a new market. The campaign innovatively leveraged TikTok's solutions and tools to drive performance objectives, specifically targeting users in Germany. Germany was selected as the ideal market to test the Smart+ campaign due to its combination of an upcoming direct-to-consumer (DTC) landscape and a high TikTok penetration rate. This combination made sure the brand could learn fast and implement the learnings for other countries. The brand used a set of different creatives to test what worked best, ranging from funny, user-generated content to videos focused on pets' health problems.

At the center of the campaign was Smart+, TikTok's AI-powered performance solution that optimizes campaigns based on real-time engagement signals and high-intent user behavior. Smart+ empowered the brand to boost reach, increase engagement, and drive results aligned with its core objective.

To make optimal use of this tool, they made sure to follow the best practices for Smart+ web campaigns: from setting up the TikTok Pixel that enabled them to track conversions, to ensuring creative quality and quantity by refreshing their creatives every two weeks. This avoided creative fatigue and enabled Smart+ to continuously find new, engaged users at an efficient cost.

Results

By trusting Smart+ to automatically deliver content to the most relevant audience segments, Just Russel successfully connected with pet owners across Germany. The campaign achieved a 15% reduction in cost per acquisition (CPA), while also delivering a 30% higher conversion rate (CVR) compared to manually managed campaigns. This led to brand to scale quickly without wasting budget. Smart+ did the heavy lifting by optimizing in real time based on engagement and user intent.

Even more impressively, the value per purchase was 63% higher compared to their manually managed campaigns, indicating that Smart+ not only brought in more customers, but more valuable ones.

Overall, the results of this market expansion campaign far exceeded the brand's expectations, leading to a 10% increase in sales in Germany and inspiring the team to begin using Smart+ in campaigns across their established markets in Belgium and the Netherlands.