Crumbl increases sales by 55% after diving into omnichannel strategy

When Crumbl Director of Paid Media Nicole Mackelprang started at the dessert brand two years ago, it was running ads on three channels — Meta, TikTok and Google. Now one of the fast-growing dessert companies in the U.S. is placing ads on 14 channels, from connected TV (CTV) to streaming audio, digital out-of-home (DOOH) and display.

It’s also flipped its marketing strategy by putting 80% of its paid media budget into brand awareness and 20% into conversion, a sharp reversal from a year ago, when the figures were 80% conversion and 20% brand awareness.

That flip is paying big dividends. Crumbl’s sales have gone up 55% since then, according to Mackelprang, with Thanksgiving sales up 140%.

The dessert brand is just one of an emerging number of small and medium brands, along with direct-to-consumer brands, shifting their strategies to gain new audiences by becoming more omnichannel. These companies have historically invested mainly in search and social but are branching out to find consumers beyond those channels. This transition is driven, in part, by easier access to channels such as CTV, which is now courting smaller advertisers.

Crumbl has long been a social media darling, where it cultivated a strong fan base of people sharing weekly cookie creations on its feed. Still, the Crumbl team wanted to build on this success and generate more brand awareness.

“We really had to look into how can we bring life into Crumbl and make people excited about it,” Mackelprang tells The Current. “Shifting our strategy to upper-funnel has helped our business tremendously.”

A report from Polaris Market Research estimates that the programmatic advertising market is projected to grow from $14 billion in 2025 to $117 billion by 2034. According to the report, one of the main drivers of this growth is the fact that more small and medium businesses (SMBs) are investing in programmatic.

Trusting your money where your mouth is

With the help of its agency 85SIXTY, nutritional supplement brand Ascent Protein has seen notable growth in its total online revenue after expanding into CTV, native ads and in-gym DOOH ads, as well as by leveraging retail data through Walmart and Target.

Diving into new channels takes trust between a brand and its agency, especially for SMBs that are working with smaller budgets.

“Budget scarcity is the biggest challenge whenever they want to expand but they don’t know where,” 85SIXTY’s VP of Client Strategy Marie Zanderson tells The Current. 85SIXTY works with brands that have a monthly budget between $50,000 and $500,000.

Zanderson says a big part of her job is translating clients’ goals into actualized media strategies so they can grow their businesses. Getting SMBs onto streaming platforms and in streaming audio has become an emerging go-to within that strategy, as the barriers to entry on those channels have lowered.

Disney, Paramount and Spotify are among the streaming platforms that have opened up more access for more companies to advertise in the past year.

Zanderson says minimum ad spend being dropped to get in the door, which historically was between at least $25,000 to $50,000 for CTV, has been a huge development for smaller brands.

“The ability to expand [creative messaging] across all these different mediums and create that omnichannel journey is where creative is becoming more and more increasingly a big need in order to support that story in those different touchpoints,” Zanderson says.

And while Crumbl has diversified its media spend with 14 more channels, Mackelprang says its media budget hasn’t gone up at all, meaning it’s getting increased engagement at the same price (one could say it’s like eating more cookies without the extra calories).

Measuring brand awareness

Still, elevating past simpler conversion metrics and up the funnel can make measurement and attribution harder for both brands and agencies. The move away from last-click attribution (which many SMBs have solely relied on with search and social) and toward more complex ways of measurement has been a learning period for many SMBs.

Media mix modeling (MMM) is having a renaissance in response. Patrick Van Gorder, president and head of strategic partnerships at ad agency Level, tells The Current that while the strategy behind MMM is decades old, digital natives can add in machine learning on top of its foundational roots to deliver a fuller picture of brand awareness.

Brand search lifts, conversion rates and click-through rates are all pieces of data that Level incorporates into the MMM testing process it built. Those models have helped convince many of its clients, which work mostly in the mid-market, B2B, education and financial services sectors, to spend more on awareness tactics after historically underinvesting there.

“It’s like pouring gasoline on a fire,” Van Gorder says. “It’s a huge advantage to our clients. It consistently delivers the rigor that’s needed to be able to build lift into the performance model in a way that a CFO will understand and will validate.”