While it was initially started to help fund a weekend beer fund, Spike Brewing has grown into a nationally recognized manufacturer of premium stainless steel home brewing equipment. Headquartered in Milwaukee, the company is made up of a tight-knit group of highly skilled employees who create their products using superior manufacturing methods.

Founded in 2012 by Ben Caya while he was still pursuing his degree in Mechanical Engineering, Spike Brewing is poised for continued growth and market leadership.

Growing but struggling with market awareness

In 2016, Spike Brewing developed and began selling its branded Spike brewing system. The company also purchased a bigger warehouse for product storage and order fulfillment. The Spike team was focusing on building out their line of home equipment as well as breaking into the commercial equipment market.

They realized that they needed to sell more of their current products, and increase brand awareness in order to sell any new equipment they added to their product lines. Their target market is almost exclusively men who spend limited time online.

Spike Brewing made a point to attend all of the industry events and appeared in industry publications, but they needed a way to stay top-of-mind when their potential customers were ready to make a purchase decision online. “Trying to get in front of them as soon as possible with paid search was definitely a tactic and we started exploring that option,” explained Kyle.

Building a performance marketing strategy in an untouched space

Much to their surprise, none of Spike’s competitors were heavily leveraging any performance marketing to drive brand awareness and revenue. This offered a unique opportunity, and Kyle knew that Alpine was just the company to help them develop an effective strategy to take advantage.

“No one, as far as our competitors, was doing anything there,” Kyle said. “We saw the opportunity and we wanted to jump in and do all of the upfront work that needed to be done before anyone else jumped in there as well.” Initially, Alpine consulted with Spike to help them implement data collection practices utilizing Google Analytics and other third-party data suites to unlock valuable marketing insights. With a strong foundation set, Alpine developed low funnel paid search campaigns in hand with Spike, focusing on key search queries that ranked poorly in the organic search results..

Once basic low funnel strategies such as paid search and display remarketing were established and driving strong returns, Alpine worked with Spike to develop a custom attribution model to address their lengthy sales cycle and multi-channel touch points. The custom attribution model provided Spike the insights they needed to judge the value of their marketing budget as their multi-channel digital strategy continued to expand.