KISTLER RODS
Fueling 33% Year-Over-Year Revenue Growth: How We Scaled Kistler’s Traffic, Social Presence, and Customer Loyalty
Background
As a well respected company, Kistler Rods’ brand had respect from product loyalists across the industry, but revenue never seemed to jump or scale in a reliable manner, stagnating growth and the company’s potential.
Watertree identified a clear opportunity to increase brand trust and desire, as well an opportunity to sell more products. We did this by helping the company through a top-to-bottom rebrand, a transition to Shopify, and an active and strategic approach to marketing Kistler products through social media channels.
Kistler has continued to grow by reaching and acquiring new customers. Watertree’s insight into positioning the brand to reach more inexperienced anglers, as well as bolstering Kistler’s strong loyalist consumer base has propelled Kistler to be an industry leader in fishing rods and reels.
Creative & Brand Strategy
• 35% returning customer growth
• 300% increase in daily website traffic
• 1,200% social media growth
With in-depth user research, and creating clear buyer persona’s, Watertree identified some of the key pain points and desires of Kistler’s target market.
One of the huge areas of success was bolstering Kistler’s identity as a true Direct-to-consumer brand. This way, Kistler was able to offer more value in their products that’s otherwise taken from retail stores. This helped differentiate Kistler from their much larger Big Box retail competitors.
We created content and messaging that drove sales from past customers and new customers who resonated with the experience-amplification of using Kistler products, and identified with the company’s “Built by hand in Texas” product value. With Kistler, we created the tagline “The Way Fishing Should Feel” which perfectly illustrates the brand’s ethos and attraction.
High-Return Digital Ads
• 25x+ Average Return on Ad Spend
Watertree took a ruthless cash-positive ROI approach to digital ads with Kistler. As a reliable and strong source of sales, Meta, Google, and TikTok ads have all been cash-positive, worthy investments into Kistler’s sustained growth and increased market share.
We are always looking at the ad spend, and optimizing or scrapping ads relentlessly until they produce results we want. This approach has given us a consistent positive return on ad spend averaging at 25x, and in some cases going as high as 60x.
Optimized Sales Channels
• 110% increase in conversion rate
• 200%+ increase in time spent on site
We turned the KistlerRods.com website into one of the most user-friendly and optimized E-Commerce sites in the entire industry.
By increasing the site’s speed and optimizing the UI and UX, we were able to over double the conversion rate of the website and increase the time users spend on the website.
Watertree also helped to increase sales from Meta and TikTok sales channels leading to nearly 10% of monthly sales and growing.
Business and Marketing Consulting
• 33% Year Over Year Revenue Growth
Increase in demand isn’t always a good thing if you’re not prepared. With the help of Watertree, Kistler has been able to double the size of its business while implementing automation in customer service - a key component in any direct to consumer brand.
Watertree helped implement customer service software, a refined Warranty program, and site-wide apps and software that encourage user engagement, and make operations easier.
Watertree also helped in product design and research to ensure successful product launches, and a growing demand for Kistler’s next product release.
Analytics & Optimization
Watertree has used real world data to inform decision making for everything from sales, marketing, and product design at Kistler.
We use the latest advancements in AI and other software to not only understand, but optimize what is happening behind the scenes.
Through our use of Google Analytics, Meta’s ad platforms, and many others, Watertree used data-first decision making to help Kistler grow.
