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Oh Crap: the SMB using social media to turn dog poop into sales

Marketer Henry Reith uses Digivizer’s SaaS platform to understand what works and what doesn’t in his digital marketing program – and maximize social and search ROI

‘Where’s there’s muck, there’s brass’ is a saying well-known in England’s northern county of Yorkshire. It means that, wherever there’s rubbish of any kind, there’s usually money to be made.

It springs to mind when talking about Oh Crap, the Australian startup doing something meaningful and practicable about doggy doo-doo.

“We love dogs but we got sick and tired of not being able to do something good for the environment about what they leave behind – even when their owners do the right thing,” explains Oh Crap Marketer Henry Reith. “So we took action. We’ve started a mission to try and reduce the problem one poop at a time!”

Oh Crap’s dog poop bags, made from cornstarch, are an eco-friendly alternative to plastic. They’re designed to contain the 1.2 tonnes of waste produced every day by more than three million Australian dogs. Up to 4% of landfill is poop, in the ground in plastic bags that will take 1,000 years to break down. In comparison, Oh Crap’s corn starch bags are gone in three months.

As a startup, every dollar of Oh Crap’s marketing budget has to count. Henry Reith is using Digivizer’s SaaS platform to understand how his budget is actually performing across multiple social and digital media platforms. Those insights translate directly to improved business performance, because he now knows where he should  direct his precious marketing budget to best effect.

Oh Crap’s Facebook and Instagram engagement increased 25% in six weeks, and impressions in Facebook have doubled over the past 12 months. More-importantly, Henry Reith knows which impressions deliver the best ROI: he has moved beyond simplistic numbers to the insights behind them.

“Even as an analytics geek, it was still difficult to track performance and know what was going on with our digital and social marketing.

“Part of being able to grow our performance has come from being able to see which parts of our program work. It’s great to see all our numbers in one place inside the Digivizer platform, without having to struggle with each social and search channel’s own analytics. I can simply see the numbers that matter to our business,  instantly.”

Henry is already seeing direct links between Oh Crap’s social and digital marketing and sales.

“Along with growing social media, we’ve hired another person because we’ve gone through stock so quickly, with about half our first-time sales now coming from organic social media marketing.  Our first container shipment from our manufacturer arrived in Australia in January – 3 million doggy doo-doo bags, a big step up from our original purchase of just 30,000.

“And I can track sales to social.”

Using Digivizer means Henry Reith is able to track all he needs to in real-time, across platforms, and so create tactical programs that make a real difference to outcomes, as well as letting him take a more-strategic view of his marketing efforts.

Take hashtags as one example: “Digivizer lets me see and track every hashtag that we use, which means they can all be used for our ‘share and win’ competitions. I can see the details of every person who shares one of our hashtags, every month, and ensure I send them a prize – and market to them into the future, of course.”

As to future plans, Henry and the Oh Crap team are gearing up a bigger future: “The Digivizer platform is super-affordable for a startup like ours. I’m now doing the same type of things that huge companies do – and I can see the effects. Now I have access to data and insights that make me competitive, and of course Digivizer is pitched at SMBs to be affordable and easy to use.  Although I’m a digital marketer, not everyone is, and in any case my focus has to be on growing our revenue, not learning complex software tools. There’s a reason why huge companies are huge – and we’re getting there!”


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Henry Reith at Oh Crap

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Henry Reith

Henry Reith

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