How we grew sales by +74% and generated 3.7x ROAS across channels for this skincare brand

If you have read any of our case studies, you know what always comes first. Research. Long, detailed, almost neurotic. To prepare a valid marketing strategy, avoid potential mistakes and supercharge our decision-making process - we need to have a full and objective picture of the market, business structure, historical performance, products, target customers and competitors. We gather and compile data from multiple sources (data from our client, big data research tools, industry reports, ad libraries, historical ad performance, web analytics, our internal data, etc.) to fully understand and benchmark the situation. It allows us to strategize and forecast future improvements.

After a long discussion with our client, we set new business and marketing goals. Our main aim was to increase sales in Q1-Q3 2022 by at least 50% compared to the same period in 2021. As for the marketing - we had to rebuild Meta Business Manager account from scratch, maintain customer acquisition cost at scale, expand demand generation to TikTok, optimize retargeting campaigns and deploy a whole set of Google campaigns, among many other goals. We knew what is coming - lots of hard work. 

The marketing mix we have used consisted of three channels: Meta, TikTok and Google. Nowadays, we commonly use this combination as the main medium for growth. Meta and TikTok, with their respective pros and cons, are both amazing tools for demand generation. We had plenty of vibrant, high-quality creatives delivered by the client. After a quick redesign, we could successfully repurpose them on TikTok. Google is a must for the sake of demand capture.

Just as a formality, we decided to reach out to Meta support and try to regain access to multiple banned BMs. Surprisingly, we got back two of them. After a manual review, the support representative admitted that the bans weren’t justified. This rarely happens - once the account is lost, it is usually lost for good. That is why it is important to gather as many BMs as possible in case some of them got banned. 

After a short celebration, we redesigned the structure of multiple Meta ad accounts. After managing tens of millions of dollars in ad spend - we’ve learned how to build campaigns at scale. Using the right combination of budget optimization, bidding strategies, ad set architecture and creatives - you can rapidly scale and minimize the risk of diminishing returns.

TikTok proved multiple times to be an effective demand generation platform if done right, especially with skincare products. Since the ad format is quite similar to Meta, we could repurpose dozens of creatives (with a small dose of editing) to seamlessly blend into the feed and serve as an effective pattern interrupt. Considering the enormous number of daily users and their level of engagement, it is still a very underutilized platform and a tremendous opportunity to promote your brand. If you know how to use it, you can generate a massive amount of traffic and conversions at a lower price compared to Meta.

To capture the increased demand, we decided to use a holistic mix of Google Ads: Shopping, Search and Display. Since our client hadn’t been using Google, we knew that our effort would significantly increase the overall ROAS of the advertising mix. Generating demand using social media advertising at 2-4x ROAS is of course crucial. However, capturing it using Google can bring returns at 3-8x ROAS. We’ve carefully optimized the feed and built multiple campaigns, with Shopping being the central part (receiving 60-70% of the overall Google ad budget).