Facebook/Instagram Advertising

Identifying that the main goal for Scents @ No3 was to improve their overall return, we decided that our key objective was to achieve an average ROAS of 2 across our digital marketing efforts. This would make advertising on these platforms minimally profitable, taking into consideration advertising costs, while the real return came from repeat customers.

We approached this objective by setting up Paid Social retargeting campaigns as this was something that was not being capitalised on, in order to secure an instantaneous high return. Then, we focused on expanding the top of the funnel targeting, allocating the majority of the budget to this in order to reach a wider variety of broad but relevant audiences.

To inform our strategy, we conducted in-depth audience research, exploring what targeting and messaging had worked well in the past for Scents @ No3 and which were the highest performing demographics. As there were already Facebook campaigns live we adopted the client’s existing tone of voice, noting how they spoke to customers and which ads had received the most success, and we combined this with best practices for Facebook ad copy to ensure we were curating impactful ads. Initially we used the existing creatives that Scents @ No3 had in order to launch the campaigns rather than keep them paused; however given our understanding of the e-commerce market, we knew that high quality creatives were imperative so we created new, more compelling images which were segmented with the differing funnel stages in mind to differentiate them to audiences.

As Scents @ No3 wanted to remain active in their social accounts, we adopted a collaborative partnership, combining their instincts for the brand and audience with our marketing and industry knowledge, and expertise in Paid Social strategy. This helped us maximise our results significantly.

Once the campaigns had been live for 3 months, we began widening out our top of the funnel targeting with auxiliary interests – which though were objectively ‘irrelevant’ to wax melts, allowed us to reach into less directly linked audience pools through interests that were relevant to the lifestyle that high performing customers would have. This allowed us to horizontally scale our top of the funnel campaigns in a sustainable way, ensuring our ad spend was not wasted on ‘high risk’ targeting that might not bring ROI back to Scents @ No3.

The optimised Facebook retargeting campaign performed incredibly well, quickly delivering a 2+ ROAS once it went live. Once the retargeting campaign was delivering results, we focused on generating high quantities of relevant top of the funnel traffic to continually build out the funnel and ensure that our retargeting campaigns were filled with users.

Google Advertising

Adopting a very similar approach to our PPC campaigns as with Facebook – focusing on expanding the targeting in a cost-effective, relevant way to maximise return – we set up varying Search campaigns in order to attract higher volumes of traffic and encourage conversions.

Considering that repeat custom was something that needed to be maximised, we set up retargeting campaigns that made use of the brands high reach and the traffic associated to brand keywords. We set up a branded Search campaign which also targeted misspellings of the brand name, and off-shoots of the brand name that we had identified that competitors were ranking for. We also set up a Search campaign targeting relevant product keywords in order to reach new audiences and break into the competitive industry; focusing on keywords that were high volume but within our budget to target, to ensure the campaigns would be sustainable.

As PPC advertising had not been previously used, we were mindful of our tone of voice and conducted audience and competitor research to identify which were the most successful within the industry. Combining this with Scents @ No3’s approachable tone of voice and compelling USPs ensured we curated impactful Search ads.

Within the first few months of being live, while the top of the funnel Search campaign was yet to deliver a high ROAS, it secured high volumes of traffic which assisted our high-performing Facebook retargeting campaign. Using an integrated approach across these channels ensured that we were delivering a cohesive strategy, with Paid Social and PPC equally supported by streams of traffic from these two sources.

We saw mixed results from the PPC retargeting campaign, with data suggesting that website visitors after 7 days became disengaged and did not purchase, and abandoned cart users after 28 days also did not purchase. We levered these insights by scaling back the time period in which we retargeted users in order to focus on this smaller window of higher activity. Our brand Search campaign was achieving high conversion numbers – and while this looked brilliant in terms of reporting, we understood that these conversions would have likely been achieved regardless through organic searching. Therefore we added exclusions that ensured we only ranked for misspellings of the brand name and the search terms that our competitors were ranking for, to focus on missed opportunities that organic searches would not capture.

During the first 6 months of working with Scents @ No3 our cohesive, multi-channel marketing strategy assisted them in generating an overall Shopify revenue of £256K and a ROAS of 3.56 as a brand.