Forget pop culture. Pup culture, anyone?
Halo Collar, a brand founded in 2018 with direct-to-consumer origins, went to market with its high-tech dog collars during the COVID-19 pandemic, when pet adoptions spiked nationwide.
The brand’s collars track a dog’s location and movements with GPS technology. Dog owners can also calibrate “virtual fences” on the collars that attempt to limit how far a dog can venture from an area before the collar creates a physical sensation meant to mimic a tap on the shoulder. (No, these aren’t shock collars.) Dog owners who purchase a collar also buy a subscription plan for access to the mobile app, where they can personalize the settings.
Halo Collar has grown between 35 and 40% over the past few years in terms of annual revenue and is spending nearly 30% of its revenue on marketing, CMO Seth Solomons told AdExchanger. “We think [growth] will accelerate with retail expansion,” he said.
Currently, the brand’s products are in Scheels store locations and 50 PetSmart locations. Next year, Halo Collar expects to have products in more than 2,000 stores.
In the meantime, the company is honing its marketing approach with a focus on first-party data and incrementality measurement.
Solomons spoke with AdExchanger about how Halo Collar is monetizing its consumer data while preparing for its retail expansion.
AdExchanger: How is Halo Collar’s marketing strategy evolving ahead of the brand’s retail expansion?
SETH SOLOMONS: We position Halo Collar as a premium lifestyle brand to capture the essence of the brand mission to help dog owners give their pets freedom and safety in their day-to-day lives.
Our collars also use advanced technology that makes them expensive. The average cost of our collars hovers around $500, so we expected that most of our customers would be particularly affluent. But in reality, we found that the average annual household income of our consumer base is around $86,000. This tells us that everyday customers are using their discretionary income to keep their dogs safe. And we’re able to use a rich database of first-party data to better understand and market to the wide range of consumers who we see buying our products.
Can you elaborate on how Halo Collar is using first-party data to target ads to new and prospective customers?
We have a lot of first-party data from our customers and the collars, including dogs’ motions and movements, whether they’re sleeping or barking and other information about their health, including signs of anxiety or discomfort. And when customers sign up for a subscription plan to access the mobile app, we also get information, such as the dog’s age and geographical location.
We keep this information in one database via Snowflake, and we connect this data to third parties to get a better understanding of the types of customers we have. For example, linking this data to third-party partners like Equifax helps give us a deeper understanding of our customers beyond the data that we have, such as household income. This comprehensive view helps us strategize our marketing to bring new dog owners into the fold with relevant ads tailored to whichever channels or platforms we’re investing in.
How does the brand approach investment and marketing differently across channels?
Having a channel-specific media approach helps us broaden our audience base.
We work with Amazon to help us understand what else our audiences are buying so we can determine when to reach them. For example, if someone buys a crate for their dog on Amazon, we know that within six to nine weeks, that person will develop a more regimented routine for bringing their dog outdoors and is likely to be receptive to advertising for a collar.
Meta helps us make the best use of data we have about our customers’ lifestyles, such as whether they live in suburban or rural areas, whether their homes have large or small plots of land and whether they travel frequently. This understanding helps us choose which among roughly 100 creatives we have in Meta’s platform to serve someone. For example, we might choose to serve a creative featuring an RV to people who often go camping and a creative featuring a beach or a lake for people who we know live near water.
We also advertise on other social platforms, including YouTube and TikTok. Our social strategy is focused more on people-led storytelling because authenticity performs very well. We recently launched a new initiative called Halo Besties on social, dedicated to showcasing real people and their bond with their dogs via man-on-the-street-style interviews.
Overall, we are looking to get a reliable sense of what each media channel and creative is contributing to our business from a revenue and growth perspective. At Halo Collar, we focus very heavily on measuring customer acquisition cost and return on ad spend as our main metrics of success.
Speaking of success metrics, how does Halo Collar measure incrementality for this diversified channel approach?
With an extensive cross-channel approach and a purchase window between 30 and 45 days on average, it’s very important that we understand which platforms deserve credit for which purchases. Many customers purchase products from sponsored search ads, but we also want to understand what else may have swayed purchase intent, including social videos. This understanding helps us figure out how to balance upper- and lower-funnel advertising efforts. We work with a partner called Northbeam that helps us better understand the joint effect of multiple channels, geographies and creative assets using a unique form of marketing mix modeling, which also helps us factor in seasonality while measuring incremental sales.
Overall, we want to drive brand awareness, not just sales, especially as we pursue retail channel expansion. When a new customer walks into a store like PetSmart, we want that customer to walk in those doors knowing something about Halo Collar. High brand awareness helps us increase the odds that in-market consumers will look for Halo Collar on shelves when they’re out shopping.
Right now, Halo Collar has roughly 17% unaided brand awareness, which we think is good considering we are about four and a half years into spending significantly on marketing. Our goal is to get ourselves to somewhere between 25% and 30% unaided brand awareness to drive a significant amount of people into physical stores looking for our products as we expand our retail footprint.
Going forward, what is next on Halo Collar’s marketing road map beyond retail expansion?
We’re highly focused on ramping up brand awareness as we get our products on store shelves.
One way we are working to raise brand awareness is focusing more on sports. Going forward, we plan to make significant investments toward advertising within live sports, such as college football games and NASCAR events. For example, we know that roughly 70% of people who attend live NASCAR races have dogs, and so we are looking for a way to align ourselves with NASCAR in an authentic way.
Speaking of authenticity, we also prioritize working with online influencers. We have about 100 creators per month on average making content for our brand, and we expect to double that number by next year. Moving forward, creators will play a very big role in telling stories on behalf of the Halo Collar brand.
This interview has been edited and condensed.
For more articles featuring Seth Solomons, click here.
