Squires Kitchen

Based in Farnham, Surrey, Squires Kitchen is a major player in the cake decorating and sugar crafting business for over 30 years, more than 15 of which have been spent trading online.

Before approaching an agency specialising in digital marketing in Surrey, Squires Kitchen managed its paid advertising campaigns internally with an automated managed PPC service that made recommendations on what keywords and bids to make. This method was time consuming and often brought enquiries that were not relevant to the core business products. Initially, Squires Kitchen was spending £2,000 per month on ad spend, which rose over time to £9,000. This meant that every month a huge amount of the ad spend was wasted attracting irrelevant leads.

Squires Kitchen brought Thunderbolt Digital, a full-service digital marketing Surrey agency, on board to reduce its ad spend and increase qualified leads for the business. Thunderbolt Digital’s objective was to provide Squires Kitchen with a month on month return of over 500% return on investment over 24 months.

In the first month of managing Squires Kitchen’s account, Thunderbolt Digital reduced ad spend by 64% and increased return on investment by 105%. By creating new targeted shopping campaigns and optimising current ads, Thunderbolt Digital decreased Squires Kitchen’s ad spend from £9,000 to £3,000 per month while increasing PPC return on investment from 208% to 428% within the first month. The digital agency also reduced the average cost per click by 30% to £0.26 from £0.34 through close monitoring and careful adjusting of keyword bidding strategies.

The Covid-19 lockdown in March 2020 prompted many households to begin baking and also restricted easy access to shopping in person. Thunderbolt Digital saw an opportunity to improve upon Squires Kitchen’s existing well performing PPC campaign to provide even greater revenue for the business.

In May 2020 at the height of the lockdown, Thunderbolt’s PPC campaign for Squires Kitchen delivered a return on investment of over 1,100%.

In 2020, Squires Kitchen’s Farnham based shop suffered from a marked change in shopping habits and purchases have been overtaken by online sales. This has led to a decision to close the physical shop.

In 24 months from April 2019 to March 2021, Squires Kitchen has received over 600% return on investment. Through its successful PPC campaign, Thunderbolt has ensured that Squires Kitchen survives through the UK national lockdowns closures and has transitioned successfully to an online-only store.

Thunderbolt is not only delivering a consistent healthy month-on-month return on investment to Squires Kitchen, but it has restructured the PPC account to take advantage of any future sale spikes in baking and kitchen products from Covid-19 lockdowns and increased trends towards home baking and cooking that have emerged with home working.