Altai Sibiri: selling an unfamiliar product through an O2O model

The parent company, Altai Sibiri Manufacturing and Trading, had long been a wholesaler of raw material — Russian antler and horn — to pharmacies and traditional medicine circles. When Altai Sibiri JSC was set up to move into distributing finished supplements, I joined in the first days.

The task was to open a retail market for a product whose buyers were used to purchasing the raw ingredient and steeping it in wine, cooking it into porridge or boiling it down to a glue at home. No online channel existed. Every part of the finished-product distribution system had to be built from nothing.

• Every number started at zero: no online revenue for the finished line, no customer base, and a brand consumers had simply never met
• Brutal ad review: this landed in the middle of the harshest platform crackdown, with supplements under a microscope. Creative was rejected easily and accounts died in batches over a single sensitive phrase about health benefits
• Nobody searches for what they have never heard of: search volume for the packaged product was tiny, so Google Search could not carry the top of the funnel
• High ticket, sceptical buyers: the target group was older, with little habit of buying online. Well-written copy on a screen was never going to be enough to get their money

Instead of racing to out-trick the ad policies, I restructured the system around O2O — online to offline — moving people from the feed to a physical touchpoint.

• Facebook, 80% of budget: the channel that educated the market, leading on the Russian origin and on how much easier the finished product is than preparing raw material yourself. Its real job was to build audiences and get people to the events
• Google, 15% of budget: catch the small niche that already knew the product name, plus traditional medicine groups sourcing antler and horn
• Marketplaces, 5% of budget: an online shelf, there for existing customers who already trusted the brand and wanted to reorder
• Trade fairs and commercial events: where people could handle the real product, see it, taste it and put their questions straight to the specialists

• Split the content by audience: two lines running in parallel. The B2B line spoke to traditional medicine groups, leading on genuine Russian antler and horn for boiling down. The B2C line spoke to affluent and older buyers, leading on the convenience of a packaged product with none of the fiddly preparation
• Ads that drove footfall: Facebook Ads targeted by radius around each fair or exhibition venue, pulling real traffic to the stand. Key events included Vietnam Expo, the National Traditional Medicine Congress, and a run of trade promotion exhibitions across Hanoi
• Mining the floor for insight: every question, every doubt and every phrase customers used at the stand was written down, then fed back as the ad copy for the following month

01 · Not everything can be sold through a screen

When scepticism runs high, the product is unfamiliar and the platforms are banning accounts, one afternoon where a customer can hold the real thing does the work of months of advertising.

02 · The insight goldmine is at the stand, not in Ads Manager

The questions customers ask at an event are the sharpest ad script you will have next month. No keyword tool gives you that.

03 · Respect how people actually search

Do not pour money into Google Search for something nobody knows the name of. When a market only knows the raw ingredient, marketing's job is to walk people through it with display content first, before expecting them to go looking on their own.