by Laurie Sullivan, Staff Writer @lauriesullivan, March 15, 2017

Yoobi marketers identified an interesting trend that started about two years ago, but really picked up in 2016. Search volume for its school supplies seemed to increase at the end of the school year in May and into June. And as the new school year approached toward the end of summer, “near me” searches on mobile devices also increased. Some of those near-me search queries came from voice search.

Yoobi has a unique one-to-one social giving business model. For every school supply sold, one is donated to an underfunded classroom. Since the company’s start in 2014, more than 2 million classrooms in the United States received help.

Some of that help came from building brand awareness through Google AdWords campaigns. By applying 2015 learnings to its 2016 search campaign, Yoobi shifted its budget in advance of the school buying season to meet the upcoming demand. The move resulted in a 93% increase across all its back-to-school campaigns year-over-year, which doubled revenue and increased ad spend by 63%.

During the holidays, specifically in December, orders rose 42% and the return on investment increased by 33%. The company attributed the uptick to brand awareness that resulted in 40% more searches for Yoobi products on google.com.

The marketing team used Google Analytics to discover the shift in the back-to-school season buying trend.

Shaiyanne Dar, ecommerce manager at Yoobi, said the company also sees opportunities in mobile campaigns. “Mobile is an area where we see a mass increase in traffic and softer conversion rates at Yoobi.com,” she said, alluding to possibly creating a custom app or text message campaigns to support its ecommerce site.

In addition to selling products from its ecommerce site, the company has an exclusive partnership with Target stores, Kris Hutchinson, founder and CEO at digital agency Magnifi Online, said.

Yoobi offers more than school supplies. The company began selling office supplies, using AdWords to promote the new line of merchandise. It is also testing lead generation AdWords campaigns, in addition to ecommerce and has a small budget to run ads on Bing.

MediaPost.com: Search Marketing Daily

(30)