PrimeStox

The Business

Launched in December 2016, PrimeStox offers an opportunity for investors and food lovers to support artisan food producers and their products over an online platform. Producers receive the finance to purchase their raw materials and investors make their return when the product is sold, typically within three to four months. Investors hold legal title to the goods until this outcome is achieved in full.

The Objectives

The primary task was to launch the proposition to the market and attract investors to the platform. PrimeStox had, at that time, only friends and family supporters and needed a critical mass of external investors to fill the projects being offered.

Why Us?

Founder of PrimeStox, Joseph Cherrez, approached The Marketing Eye following an online search for specialist support and because he had learned of the team’s success with other Alternative Finance platforms, such as ArchOver and Platform Black. The ability to be quick to market with a proven approach was a decisive factor.

“The Marketing Eye team has a great deal of knowledge about the alternative investment marketplace and their strategic and tactical advice was always valuable. From the outset, everybody showed a level of understanding and personal commitment to PrimeStox that made them integral to our success.”

Our Approach

To fulfil the objectives, The Marketing Eye created two campaigns: one directed at food ‘evangelists’ - people with a passion for supporting producers of natural and organic foods - and the other at investors simply looking for good returns.

We mapped out the expected return on activities using the benchmarking data we have built up across multiple campaigns and used the forecasts as our performance KPIs.

The initial responses were closely analysed and the campaign was refined for optimum results. The analysis revealed that desktop access was superior to that of mobile devices and that registrations typically occurred during late afternoons and evenings, mostly coming from investors hunting for high yields.

A number of recommendations were made to improve the performance of both the desktop and mobile websites in response to this data.

Emails containing details of the latest offers were sent out on a Saturday morning as this was shown to be the best time to achieve engagement.

As a result of these fast-turnaround activities, the number of PrimeStox registrations grew week-on-week and the deals available on the platform funded increasingly quickly.

The Results

By the end of the first-phase campaign, which ran for two months, the number of PrimeStox registrations had more than trebled to over 400. More importantly, the cost per sign-up had dropped from £75 to £5.14, while the rate of conversion had risen from 1% to 5.4%. The weekly media spend had reduced from £550 to £250, or by 54%.

Our campaign was so successful that PrimeStox had reached the stage where there were sufficient investors in the pool to enable new offers to be taken up within 2-3 hours.

Key Achievements

• The Marketing Eye devised paid search, social media and lead nurturing campaigns that reduced the average cost of investor acquisition from £75 to £5.14 and increased conversion rates over a 2-month period from 1% to 5.4%.
• The initial campaign resulted in over 300 full investor registrations, creating an investor pool that now funds deals within 2 – 3 hours of going live on the platform.
• The weekly social media spend was reduced by more than 50% over the 2-month life of the campaign, whilst increasing the number of investor registrations by 640%.

“I wouldn’t hesitate to recommend The Marketing Eye to anybody considering launching a new business in the alternative finance and investment space.”

The Future

PrimeStox continues to utilise the marketing framework we have set up for the company. This includes SharpSpring, our favoured marketing automation software tool, which nurtures and manages investors and allows Joseph Cherrez and his colleagues to closely monitor what campaigns and channels are delivering the best results.

With such a strong level of investor demand, attention is now to turn to increasing the pipeline of new investment opportunities. This will include more deals of the type that have already proved popular and new commodity finance transactions, which will allow investors to participate in financing commodities for import and then on-sale into the wholesale market.