Tokopedia Combines Influencer Marketing with Direct Response

Ramadan Sale

Tokopedia planned campaigns for two of its biggest shopping seasons - Ramadan Sale and their 9th Birthday Extravaganza.

They sought the help of Smartly.io's Creative Studio to customize their creatives at scale on a short time frame. The ask: develop ads for a three-day flash promo campaign while leveraging content from a popular local influencer, Tasya Farasya - a combination that was new to them, especially at this scale.

Ninth Birthday Extravaganza

Following earlier success during Ramadan, we decided to expand beyond images by incorporating videos into the creative mix. For this, we created two types of videos: one highlighting the actual birthday promotion, the other to test out an influencer-based DR marketing campaign.

Design Templates unique to Tokopedia

Our Creative Studio was tasked to design templates that highlighted the ongoing promotions before and during the actual sale period. Additionally, we wanted to create designs unique to Tokopedia that helped their brand stand out amongst the other brands during this peak shopping season in Indonesia.

The objectives of the Ramadan campaigns were to scale new users and app installs at an efficient cost. Prior to this, their Dynamic Ads only had images extracted from their feed to be used as creatives and were not able to customize all of them at scale as it would require too much time and effort. Hence, we wanted to see if improving creatives would bring a significant impact to performance and scalability. Turns out, it did.

Incorporate Videos into the Marketing Mix

This was a three-day teaser campaign leading up to the birthday,  promoting products from their extensive online marketplace. We produced several static and video creatives using our creative automation tools. 

The tight deadline also meant we had to provide several iterations with quick turnaround, but the results spoke for themselves.

For our Influencer based DR Campaign,  we suggested combining influencer footage with a cosmetics product feed. By adding quick cuts of footage to one of our existing video template presets, we were able to quickly and seamlessly produce a video ad that combined influencer content and DR - a first for Tokopedia - that was engaging and effective.

As the initial vertical format video was performing very well, we then suggested exploring other video ad formats, in this case, the 4:5 video format for Facebook and Instagram feeds to further expand the reach of the campaign. That effort did not go to waste as seen in the results below:

Ramadan Sale - CTR increased by 157%

CTR increased by 157% and Tokopedia was able to scale up the number of app installs at a much lower cost per install than before.

Ninth Birthday Extravaganza - Captured traffic from female audience 

One notable improvement was that mixing influencer elements into a Direct Response marketing campaign helped Tokopedia gain more traffic from female audience - a target audience that was known to be more difficult to acquire and convert.