Australian-based online wine retailer, Vinomofo, that recently secured an injection of private equity funds, has announced its deployment of Kenshoo’s agile marketing technology to increase its global visibility as it prepares for international expansion.

The online wine retailer, formed in Adelaide, South Australia in 2011, recently raised A$25 million from Queensland-based Blue Sky Venture Capital to bolster rapid domestic growth and international expansion.

The company’s membership-based community enables it to sell premium wine at a competitive price. Vinomofo boasts more than 400,000 members and more than 6.5 million bottles of wine sold.

Kip McMillan, head of marketing at Vinomofo said the company’s expansion outside of Australia played a big part in the desire to automate and optimise its digital marketing program, and prepare for launch in New Zealand, Singapore, UK, USA, Hong Kong and China.

Social advertising plays a large part in their growth strategy with the brand directing nearly a third of its digital marketing budget to social advertising, which includes Instagram, where Vinomofo is experimenting with different creative content.

By leveraging Kenshoo, the wine retailer is also able to fix its cost per acquisition (CPA), for its Instagram ads, and be certain that it’s not over budget.”

“Social is our most important channel,” said McMillan. “Thirty to forty percent of our digital budget is allocated to the channel.

“We believe the right social advertising strategy will augment our brand messaging and performance, further promoting our ease of delivery, great service, and a money-back guarantee.”

“We are running all of our paid advertising through the Kenshoo platform,” McMillan said. “Buying wine is a highly subjective and personal experience and it’s important to deliver the right brand messaging at the right time and in the right place. Kenshoo helps us achieve that through optimising Social and Search advertising, making the creative relevant to the audience that we are targeting at any particular time across publishers.

“We knew we wanted a bid management platform that could handle the increasing scale of our search and social advertising campaigns, including our Facebook and Instagram initiatives.

“We looked around the market and decided to implement Kenshoo Portfolio Optimisation technology, as we wanted to move away from a time-consuming manual process and adopt the latest in performance optimisation.”

“Kenshoo technology allows us to spread promotional messages in bulk format, consolidate our campaign performance via easy reporting, and also reach the right audience subsets and geographical locations. The technology will enable us to run a global scale campaign with ease.”

Vinomofo plans to undertake soft launches in its chosen new markets, in the form of “pop-up” digital wine sale events, thus making it important to experiment and be flexible with its digital marketing campaigns.