How to drive sales by over 190% in a month with a limited marketing budget

Today, pushing your message out on social media channels is the obvious route for brands with relatively tight marketing budgets. But with a quintillion messages bombarding us all every day, does relying on social media alone really deliver sales impact?

With a budget of less than £5k, by exploiting an old urban myth of a crocodile in the River Avon, via a clever combination of a staged ‘crocodile’ appearance in the river, caught on camera by ‘passers’ by for social media and strategically placed ‘official’ warning signs, The Black Arts Co. delivered  2.1m views on Tik Tok, coverage in the Mirror, Daily Mail and ITV and client sales growth of 193% in the first month alone.

We don’t think straight.

The BlackArtsCo’s founder, Ian Cassie, has always believed that any Advertising, Marketing or Brand Awareness Campaign should feature something physical, something that is slightly incongruous. 

Whether it was the world’s first “Pop-up shop’(Peroni) or flying two WW2 Aircraft down the Thames, releasing three Million Poppies (Royal British Legion) drive a Campaign and help create the resultant brand fame and fortune. 

A restaurant in Shoreditch for Lidl did no harm to its growing reputation as it helped make consumers aware of the extraordinary quality the “cheap” supermarket offered. A very “different” thought, for a then tiny UK Vacuum cleaner brand (Vax), both re-introduced it to the market and lead to a rapid seven-fold increase in market share to edge Dyson, at least in sales quantity) 

A film for the “One for the Boys” Charity led by Samuel L Jackson on BBC1s "Graham Norton Show” triggered an instant, dramatic increase in applications for an NHS Cancer Screening.

The World creates some 2.5 quintillions* of data every single day which is effectively a snowstorm, so it becomes almost impossible, across the digital space, to see any messages at all, so relying entirely on exposure through Social and Conventional media only is ill advised. (* A quintillion is one billion, billion)  

Over the years Ian has overseen many, many examples of what is lovingly called “thinking outside the box” but believes it's better to concentrate on "ticking the box” marked “Sales"

But standing out is vital and The Black Arts continues to create these Campaigns by simply “Not Thinking Straight”

A current BlackArtsCo Campaign reveals three current examples of exactly what we mean.

Drop Ian an email at ian@theblackarts.co to talk about how we could ‘Not Think Straight’ for you.

A Crocodile in a Snow Storm.

A Crocodile in the River Avon in Bristol leads to a quadrupling of beer sales.

A sighting some 10 years ago, by a local Bus Driver of what he imagined was a Crocodile in the river was brought to life by the BlackArtsCo and used to create both conventional and digital awareness that included the Mirror, Daily Mail and ITV coverage as well as over 2.5 million hits on a single TikTok post. Watch the “Crocodile in a Snowstorm” Campaign Report here.