Over the past 18 months we have successfully scaled our sustainable children’s wear client by 7,555% in annual revenue. We did this by utilising Facebook ads for ecommerce and a number of other platforms and strategies.

After doing the hard work of launching the brand to market, the client was tirelessly working to grow awareness and acquisition without results.

During our first call, they explained they were running Facebook advertising at a loss and making a small volume of sales with a return on ad spend of just 0.5. Knowing they had a great product, they wanted to scale hard and fast, nationally and internationally. To do that, they knew they needed the help of a specialist marketing partner.

Our brief was to help increase their sales revenue through multiple touchpoints via prospecting and retargeting campaigns that could deliver the client’s dream of global growth. Our challenge was building these from the ground up without successful historical results to support early data assessments.

We have summarised our key insights from this time below.

Product drops are essential marketing activity

New product launches, back in stock announcements and launching into new product sectors are key to consistently increase revenue from new and existing customers. 

These events will generate new creative and ads, which on their own can improve performance of paid ads, as the platforms can reward you for finding new pockets of audiences with a creative refresh. Keeping ads fresh is seen as a positive in the eyes of the platform, they want to keep users interested so they continue to engage and old or boring ads will negatively. This will help performance at top of funnel.

These events are also key to generating revenue from previous customers and this is where you want to make as much profit as possible from each sale. You have already bought the customer, potentially at a break-even point if it plays into your lifetime-value goal. With the new product drops you can look to recoup more profit from their second, third or even fourth purchase. The majority of this revenue will come from segmented email campaigns to your customer lists, this will remove any cost per acquisition fees and enable you to maximise profit. Paid ads can be utilised with previous customers as long as frequency is managed, we do not want to over-serve these users during such a small time frame. Our retention campaign would likely be at a small ad spend and paused when not required unless retention from ads is part of our strategy.

Your brand content can be as powerful as user-generated content

For the last few years user generated content has been spouted as a key to generating solid performance on paid ads. Users engage well with content that doesn’t feel like an ad (Tik Tok’s latest ad campaign pushes media buyers to make Tik Toks, not ads). Users are also more likely to engage with content that feels like a user testimonial or review, what’s better than a brand claiming how great their product is? Someone else saying how great it is!

However, this doesn’t mean every brand needs to run out and contract users or influencers to create natural looking content. You, as the brand can do this yourself, feeling the benefits of real content in your ad campaigns, whilst still having full control of the creative. 

• Photo shoots can be styled and produced in a way that feels like it’s user-generated: AirBNB’s are a great way to keep studio costs down and give your content a cosy/homely feel. Having fun on the photo shoot can also give your content a relaxed atmosphere.
• Unboxings provide the user with the experience of receiving your product and gives sustainable brands a great opportunity to flaunt how sustainable and low waste your packing is.
• Product boxings are the reverse of unboxing and give you the opportunity to show behind-the-scenes in your fulfilment process: what did this customer buy, what products did they pair together (AOV 📈).

When brands take advantage of creating this content in-house it gives you a much quicker roadmap to getting the creative into your ad account and receive learnings on what’s working and what needs more development. You can then take these insights and create user/influencer briefs to take your content game to the next level.

Utilising your best customers to find more of the same

You’ve started scaling, your months spend and revenue is up, you’re acquiring more customers than ever before, but you need to keep the hamster wheel turning and consistently find new high-quality customers. Solution: average order value and lifetime value based lookalike audiences .🔥

Use case: your AOV is consistently $50, you have some customers who spend less and some spend more, you want to find more customers who are willing to spend more than $50. You create lookalike audiences based on your customers who have spent more than $75 or $100 (depending on your audience size). Facebook will then use these lookalikes to find more higher-paying audiences and your AOV will increase even further, fuelling your scale and consistently increasing AOV, win win!

AOV and LTV lookalikes can be created in Facebook Ads Manager and Klaviyo (by creating a segment and then sending it to FB Audiences). 

We’ve found this is consistently one of our top performing audiences, in Q4 we spent over $50k on AOV based lookalikes alone at an above target ROAS.

Don’t try to appeal to everyone

You’re spending more on ads and getting more comments, however it’s likely some of those comments won’t sit favourably with your brand, especially if you’re a brand on a mission! You have a sustainable product, you’re trying to change buying habits, your product may be more expensive than cheaper (less sustainable) alternatives. 

You may start to think that your ads aren’t good enough if they are generating negative comments. However every time Facebook serves your ad to someone who doesn’t convert it learns more about who your audience is and is not. 

Stay true to your brand and mission, maintain your product positioning and price point and soon Facebook will find your audience on autopilot. At a certain point of scale you will be able to utilise large lookalikes, very big interest audiences and totally broaden targeting (zero interest/lookalikes used). Facebook will then position your ad in front of your target audience by utilising the thousands of buying signals it has collected to date from people who love your product. In Q4 we spent over $90k on broad targeting, this is possible because their product speaks to a specific and defined audience.

Achieving (and surpassing) your targets is possible

Our experience with growing a sustainable children’s wear brand by over 7,555% has proven that reaching new revenue and ad spend heights is possible. Striving for product, audience and creative quality, will put you in a strong position to scale month on month. To summarise;

• Take advantage of product drops and back in stock announcements to increase revenue from new and current customers.
• You are in the best position to produce natural content, use this to inform the content you request from users/influencers.
• Utilise customer data to reach new audiences and increase AOV.
• Stay true to your mission, even in the face of negative comments.