Digital Media Strategy of the Most Winning Tire of 2023: Corsa PRO Launch

1. Goals 

Vittoria Tires has developed a road cycling tire specifically for World Tour athletes and, for the first time, is making this product available to a wider audience, both offline and online. This tire was previously only available to professional cyclists.

A digital advertising strategy with an upper funnel goal was planned for the launch. The strategy aimed to:

• Maximize the visibility and awareness of the product through upper funnel channels in specific countries and carefully studied and categorized audience segments.
• Educate the user about the unique characteristics of the product through a series of technical contents during the period of maximum seasonality for the cycling industry.
• Build a strong reputation for the product in the user and guide them towards a consideration phase by sponsoring content relating to the numerous victories of professional World Tour cyclists who used Vittoria Corsa PRO tires.

2. Our Approach

We began with a highly-tailored definition of the target audience (high-spending road cyclists who are practitioners of the discipline, and not merely fans of professional sport) and an analysis of the visual content developed by the brand for the launch of the product. We then proceeded to:

• Define the most suitable channels for each specific piece of content
• Structure a Communication Plan that would allow awareness content to be sequentially ordered in the first phase and consideration/reputation content throughout the cycling season
• Allocate the budget strategically, in a way that would respond to both the need to guarantee considerable awareness during the initial stages of the launch and the opportunity to exploit the visibility afforded by major world cycling events, such as the Giro d’Italia, Tour de France, and the World Championship. Furthermore, the allocation was country-relevance-oriented, with different percentages depending on the commercial needs of the brand in each of the countries involved in the launch campaign.

The result was a Digital Advertising Media Plan which placed the following at the center of the strategy:

• The implementation of various types of YouTube Video campaigns, which guaranteed high exposure of the launch hero content in the first phase and a series of hero content cuts in the second phase, to convey different facets of the product and reinforce the message to users throughout the season.
• The sponsorship of content through upper funnel Meta campaigns, which guaranteed large volumes of exposure in that carefully defined cluster of users, and then led to a consideration phase, by sponsoring the celebratory contents of professionals who mounted the tire, certifying the nature of a product designed for high performance.

3. Key Wins

By analyzing the digital performance of the launch media plan, the following results were obtained:

• An average 25% higher Engagement Rate on content relating to athletes’ victories compared to more technical content
• A CTR 4 times higher from the audience of cycling app users than the average, demonstrating the concrete interest in the product from actual practitioners of the sport
• A 34% higher memory of Vittoria compared to competing brands by users exposed to the ads compared to users not exposed to the ads, calculated by activating the Brand Lift study on YouTube
• 27% of overall ecommerce revenue during the campaign activation period was generated by the new Corsa PRO product.

This product launch allowed us to derive valuable insights, such as the fact that a new product requires a decidedly lengthy period to achieve a sufficient level of awareness, leading a potential customer from the initial phase of product discovery to one of active consideration.
To accomplish this, it is essential to allocate a budget that will allow for the support of an upper funnel advertising plan over time.

Furthermore, it was discovered that in the sports industry, the creation of content is particularly necessary:

• Of a Technical nature, which illustrates the marginal gains that a new product can offer to an athlete’s performance
• Of a Sporting nature, which associates the brand and the product with the primary professional ambassadors of a given sporting discipline, in order to encourage engagement with the brand’s content and build a reputation that, in a new product, is entirely absent.