Spike Brewing

Niche Ecommerce Company Earns 13x Revenue for Every $1 Spent on Ads

While it was initially started to help fund a weekend beer fund, Spike Brewing has grown into a nationally recognized manufacturer of premium stainless steel home brewing equipment. Headquartered in Milwaukee, the company is made up of a tight-knit group of highly skilled employees who create their products using superior manufacturing methods.

Founded in 2012 by Ben Caya while he was still pursuing his degree in Mechanical Engineering, Spike Brewing is poised for continued growth and market leadership.

Growing but struggling with market awareness

In 2016, Spike Brewing developed and began selling its branded Spike brewing system. The company also purchased a bigger warehouse for product storage and order fulfillment. The Spike team was focusing on building out their line of home equipment as well as breaking into the commercial equipment market.

They realized that they needed to sell more of their current products, and increase brand awareness in order to sell any new equipment they added to their product lines. Their target market is almost exclusively men who spend limited time online.

Spike Brewing made a point to attend all of the industry events and appeared in industry publications, but they needed a way to stay top-of-mind when their potential customers were ready to make a purchase decision online. “Trying to get in front of them as soon as possible with paid search was definitely a tactic and we started exploring that option,” explained Kyle.

We struggled to see how people still weren’t aware of us. It’s kind of a different audience that trends a bit older, and is like 98% male.

Kyle Hamilton
Former Head of Marketing at Spike Brewing

Building a performance marketing strategy in an untouched space

Much to their surprise, none of Spike’s competitors were heavily leveraging any performance marketing to drive brand awareness and revenue. This offered a unique opportunity, and Kyle knew that Alpine was just the company to help them develop an effective strategy to take advantage.

“No one, as far as our competitors, was doing anything there,” Kyle said. “We saw the opportunity and we wanted to jump in and do all of the upfront work that needed to be done before anyone else jumped in there as well.” Initially, Alpine consulted with Spike to help them implement data collection practices utilizing Google Analytics and other third-party data suites to unlock valuable marketing insights. With a strong foundation set, Alpine developed low funnel paid search campaigns in hand with Spike, focusing on key search queries that ranked poorly in the organic search results.

Once basic low funnel strategies such as paid search and display remarketing were established and driving strong returns, Alpine worked with Spike to develop a custom attribution model to address their lengthy sales cycle and multi-channel touch points. The custom attribution model provided Spike the insights they needed to judge the value of their marketing budget as their multi-channel digital strategy continued to expand.

Doubled ROAS highlights strategy’s shift to efficiency

Once baseline benchmarks were set for different product lines and marketing channels the strategy shifted from growth focused to efficiency-focused. Alpine explored additional low funnel strategies and launched query sculpted Google Shopping ads. Query sculpting is an advanced Google Shopping strategy that involves routing and scaling bids for higher value queries.

“What we ultimately focused our spend on was Shopping ads. This industry is really visual. People can compare our products visually with a price right next to it. So we definitely found the most traction with those and ended up focusing our ad spend towards those shopping ads.” Kyle elaborated.

2019 Performance Marketing Impact

Decrease in Advertising Costs

36. 2%

Increase in Return on Ad Spend

75 %

Increase in Revenue

12. 5%

Return on Ad Spend (ROAS)

13. 3x

Poised for
Continued Growth

Despite Spike’s competitors entering into paid advertising as part of their own marketing strategies, Alpine has managed to double the ROAS realized in 2018. At 1330% ROAS, Spike’s campaigns are bringing in $13.30 of revenue for every dollar spent on online advertising.

With steady growth on all fronts, Spike Brewing is well poised to continue by expanding product offerings to enter new markets. In partnership, Spike Brewing and Alpine Digital Group are set up for a strong 2020.

I would recommend them to anyone that it made sense for. A company that cares about its clients wins out in my eyes every time. So when you’re taking your clients and digging into what they’re offering and really being the outlet of their marketing team, that’s what really counts to me.

Kyle Hamilton
Former Head of Marketing at Spike Brewing

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Ready to have a conversation? We’re happy to speak with you to evaluate your pain points and determine if we’d be a great fit. We’ll provide our straightforward honest advice, even if we don’t end up working together.