In order to address these challenges, we ascertained that most important was narrowing down the audience interests in the current Facebook marketing campaigns, to refine the users that were discovering the brand to relevant users highly likely to convert.

We did this by fuelling the top of the funnel with core interests that targeted well-known skate personalities like Ken Block, Mat Hoffman, Rob Dyrdek and Ryan Scheckler. Additionally, we launched high-quality lookalike audiences, and quickly discovered that the purchase lookalike drove a high, positive ROAS, and were able to use this to inform our strategy further.

Next, we focused on our advert strategy to capitalise on the ad formats that drove the most engagement and sales. We adopted a ‘test and learn’ approach to build on the existing insights available through Supereight’s previous campaigns. In the early stages, the focus was on running multiple ads with a generic approach, with ads in numerous styles and shoe brands being run. However, we discovered that traffic arriving onto the site was not converting, due to having ‘too many options’ as a result of the generic ads, leading to confusion and significant drop-off.

To combat this, we tested single product images to improve conversion rates. The result was that still images and carousel ads achieved higher conversion rates. The conversion journey as a result of showcasing fewer brands and using the Image and Carousel based ads was simplified, and allowed for a higher connection between customer and brand; likes, comments and shares drastically improved on these adverts, which helped us to build social proof and improve the trust in Supereight as a brand.

To further increase our traffic, since the more refined top of the funnel targeting was converting well, we ran a conversion campaign in the lead up to Black Friday to capture email addresses. This campaign offered our prospects an early discount code, and was met with great success. We continued to nurture this audience via email marketing, to drive up our LTV. The result is a ‘primed’ audience to create relevant, highly converting lookalike audiences from and towards which we can drive remarketing campaigns to encourage return and high-spending customers.

Following the improvements that we’d managed to drive for the top of the funnel, we focused next on optimising performance of the bottom of the funnel. We set up remarketing campaigns that consisted of a ‘hot’ website visitor ad set, targeting visitors to the site within 30 days. We also set up a catalogue sales campaign which retargeted customers who had added to cart in the last 7 days but who had not completed their purchase.

By leveraging dynamic ads to personalise the messaging towards these specific customers, we were able to significantly optimise the performance of the bottom of the funnel, driving a ROAS of 5.02 and a healthy CTR of 4.13%.

As a result of strengthening the relevance of the top of the funnel, and introducing new, highly-targeted remarketing campaigns, we were able to drive an 183% increase in sales compared to the previous year.