Case study: BillieBars

From start-up to truck heavyweight: Raising the bar with digital growth

Challenge

Turn side business into ecommerce powerhouse

Two friends launched BillieBars as a side project. Soon after, they partnered with Quiet Owl to see what a proper digital strategy could achieve. As a self-funded business, marketing budgets were tight and had to be profitable right away.

Scope & Goals

Quiet Owl supported BillieBars in all digital facets – including analytics, website conversion, and SEO.

Scaling Ad Budgets  /   Social Ads  /   Email list growth  /   Google Ads

Rules-based budget scaling: remove emotion from ad spend decisions

Scaling ad budgets is tricky for young companies. Without historical data it’s hard to predict performance. Yet they can’t afford wasteful spend. Plus, there is often a time-lag factor. Spending more doesn’t always generate immediate sales, so results can look worse in the short run. This conundrum plagued BillieBars. Should we advertise more, or less? How do we know if it worked?

Our Solution

Quiet Owl created scaling rules to help BillieBars invest with confidence. Based on performance, ad budgets were systematically adjusted by pre-defined percentages. This led to the fastest profitable growth in company history.

Key Benefits

Flexibility: Quickly adjust spend & strategy based on performance

Profitability: Set a minimum contribution margin

 

Content with substance: social ads that don’t feel like ads

Good social media ads depend on good content. But new brands often don’t know which content to create. BillieBars needed a scrappy approach to test paid social. Quiet Owl knew technical gear requires education – it’s not an impulse purchase.

Our Solution

Quiet Owl edited user reviews into long-form video ads, then guided BillieBars which footage to film on a phone themselves. These ‘explainer’ videos were perfect for their DIY truck enthusiasts. On a shoestring content budget, Facebook and Instagram ads became the biggest growth driver in year one.

Key Benefits

Learning: Content variety facilitates test-and-learn

Substance: UGC & ‘edu-tainment’ drive engagement

User review turned into a video ad Image

List growth: turn expertise into an email capture hook

BillieBars didn’t want to overly rely on paid campaigns for growth. Email marketing had untapped potential, but their list was small since it hadn’t been a focus. What BillieBars did have was expertise: they spoke with thousands of customers and knew how to configure trucks for off-road adventures.

Our Solution

Quiet Owl helped BillieBars compile their know-how as a buyer’s guide to simplify the truck outfitting process. This buyer’s guide was offered as a free download to collect emails via social media.

Key Benefits

7x subscriber growth
8x email revenue 

List growth: turn expertise into an email capture hook Image

Google experiment: how do you turn a loser into a winner?

BillieBars needed a new channel beyond social media to sustain growth. Ramping up Google Ads was the logical move. But they only had mixed success from modest spend. Most companies need ad budgets to show results before they invest more, yet this prove-it-first mindset can stunt progress: It’s hard to evaluate the impact of tiny budgets & algorithms don’t get enough data to optimize.

Our Solution

Rather than play it safe, Quiet Owl proposed a bold experiment which had helped other clients. Triple the Google budget for six weeks to learn if higher volume could improve performance. The strategy paid off. Google generated enough conversions to get its smart bidding algorithms out of learning mode. And BillieBars kept growing, while improving year-over-year efficiency.

Key Benefits

More data

Better efficiency

New growth channel

The Results

BillieBars and Quiet Owl’s partnership illustrates the benefits of omni-channel marketing. Our ability to test quickly, scale winners, kill the duds – without losing sight of the big picture – led to substantial growth.

Year 1
5x

Revenue Growth

Year 1 Revenue Growth Image
Year 2
64%

Greater Efficiency

Year 2 Greater Efficiency Image
Revenue Growth
Revenue Growth Image
Client Approved

“Throughout our journey, Quiet Owl has been the flashlight in the proverbial digital cave, shining light where we need it, and keeping us on path. Love ’em!”

Bill & Nate | Co-owners

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