Marketing investment drives milestone H1 results for Create Better Group

The Group’s breakthrough trading performance is due to a number of large-scale initiatives including a refurbishment of group structure, investments in to sales, customer service and key hires into the Marketing team, with four new team members joining since April 2021, across CRM, Marketplaces, Social Media and Design.

Andrew Holland joined the Group in May 2021 as Marketplaces Manager, spearheading Marketplace trading activity across eBay, Amazon and other Marketplaces across the UK and Europe, helping to broaden sales reach of the Group’s full inventory and own brand product lines. Andrew, who has over five years’ experience growing Marketplace sales, has joined from Rinkit Ltd. where he was responsible for managing all aspects of marketplace trading in the UK, EU, USA, Canada, UAE and Australia, helping to place the company on the Sunday Times Fast Track 100 list.

The Group also welcomed Victoria Shipp in May 2021 as Social Media Executive. Victoria, whose experience includes household names soak.com and poundshop.com, has specialized in social media marketing for six years and is focused on driving brand awareness, reach and engagement for Create Better Group’s house-brands across all established and emerging social media platforms.

To leverage the Group’s customer acquisition activity and drive customer lifetime value, Treshawna Beckett has recently joined as CRM Executive with a focus on developing email marketing activity, post-purchase customer engagement and helping to grow the value of the customer database. Treshawna, who has nine years’ experience in marketing and business development, brings a wealth of knowledge to the Group, from event coordination and campaign management to product management.

To support creative development and the content marketing strategy, Chloe Warren joined the Group as Junior Designer in July 2021. Chloe joins from Nottingham based agency, Creative Minds, where she held the position of Content and Video Manager for five years, developing graphic design, web design, social media and video production for a wealth of clients and her skills will be utilised by The Cake Decorating Company, Cake Craft Group, and Cake Stuff, developing creative content for all platforms.

Claire Astbury, Chief Marketing Officer for Create Better Group, commented, “Having a full-funnel, multi-channel marketing strategy is critical to driving growth in any business and adding fresh talent to our fantastic Marketing team is sure to take us to the next level.

Our key areas of focus have been paid search, Google shopping, email and social media. Incremental improvements in these areas has seen traffic increase +70% vs. last year and more than 68k new customers acquired. It’s been really important to us that we retain customers who shopped with us last year so it’s lovely to see our returning visitor numbers are also +78% vs. 2020. Everyone has worked tirelessly to embed new initiatives and new ways of working.”

Along with key hires within Marketing, the team have integrated with the award winning Finch technology platform to enable swifter evolution of paid search activity across Google, Microsoft and Amazon advertising. The team have also enlisted the expert experience of Bournemouth based Facebook Ads specialists, Public Nectar, to scale The Cake Decorating Company brand and reach new audiences with full-funnel campaigns across Facebook and Instagram.

The Cake Decorating Company will be launching a new affiliate programme on the Affiliate Window network in July 2021, kick-starting with an exclusive cashback partnership with Top Cashback and taking advantage of a vast publisher network including some of the world’s most recognised brands.