By Jasmine Seagraves: Since January 2019, DB Dynamo has been honored to partner with Sonya Dakar, a skincare brand exploding in an already competitive industry. At the start of the relationship, we were hired to execute a 90 day paid social media test with a goal of a 2.5X Return On Ad Spend (ROAS); a relatively aggressive goal for a new advertiser.
We exceeded that goal by earning $4.17 for every $1 we spent on Facebook during the test period. Fast forward to one year of working together, and the brand had spent more than ever before on Facebook Advertising campaigns, while achieving an average 5-to-1 return over 12 months.
How did we do it? Keep reading.
1. Maximized Retargeting.
In the first month, using a test-level budget, we focused only on retargeting - our campaigns targeted warm audiences at three levels: existing customers, users that visited the website in the last 90 days (but had not purchased), and users that had interacted with Sonya Dakar on Facebook and Instagram.
As campaigns continued, a core foundation of our strategy included spending as much as possible on the retargeting audiences, while keeping an eye on frequency to avoid oversaturation. This helped to buoy the ROAS each month as we began to expand the top of the funnel and launched prospecting campaigns focused on new customer acquisition.
2. Leveraged Lookalike Data.
As retargeting became dialed in and the budget began to grow in months two and three, we added prospecting campaigns into the strategy.
To do this, we modeled our target audience off of existing customer data. Not just all past Sonya Dakar customers though; we created data segments of the existing customers that we knew were most valuable to the brand. In the end, we relied on two data sets the most: customers who purchased more than two times from Sonya Dakar (repeat customers) and customers who purchased more than $450 in a single order (customers with higher average order values and ultimately, lifetime value).
We uploaded those lists to Facebook to create lookalike audiences that matched users that have similar online behaviors to the brand’s most loyal and valuable existing customers.
3. Tracked Attribution Across All Media Channels.
It’s easy to report on a single channel strategy. Facebook spits out numbers in real time and you have instant access to data to help you understand your ad performance through Facebook’s Ads Manager. We could simply look at those numbers and share insights and claim our wins.
However, we know how important it is to understand the larger impact of any paid media strategy on the overall growth of the business, and specifically how our campaigns are interacting with other initiatives being pursued by the brand. It’d be a missed opportunity if we only considered Facebook in relation to the brand’s overall success, as the brand was also running Google Ads, posting on organic social media, amplifying social media with influencers, and building up their email marketing efforts.
In our monthly performance review calls with the client, we consider data from multiple sources, including Facebook Ads, Google Analytics, Shopify and Facebook’s Attribution dashboard, to identify how our campaigns impact the brand’s overall growth.
4. Expanded on Influencer Partnership Successes.
The Facebook Attribution dashboard has a feature that shows a brand’s top consumer journeys to purchase. In Sonya Dakar’s case, many times a customer would interact with the brand on Instagram organically 1-2 times before being served a retargeting ad on Facebook/Instagram and ultimately becoming a customer.
Sonya Dakar’s organic Instagram feed includes masterfully curated content that showcases a variety of products, but — most important — consistently leverages influencer relationships to generate organic buzz for their brand.
The data from the Attribution tool showed us that our Facebook retargeting campaigns were picking up a lot of first time customers who had already become familiar with the brand via the influencer initiatives. Our ads were serving as “the closer” for many new customers — the last touch in their conversion path that started when a person they follow on Instagram told them organically about their love for Sonya Dakar.
Knowing the symbiotic relationship between influencer marketing and our ads, we began to lean more heavily on influencer creative in the Facebook ads to amplify this successful portion of our performance.
Today, we work more collaboratively with the client in syncing our campaigns with their in-house efforts with influencers and it’s become a core component of our overall strategy.
5. Used the DB Dynamo Method to Align on Client Goals, Regularly.
We approach every client relationship as a partnership and aim to adopt their overall business goals as our goals. To do this, we follow an internal methodology that ensures any strategy we create is tailored to impact a client’s bottom line; The DB Dynamo Method™ is a strategic way of doing business to ensure that nothing about a client’s success is left to chance. From the very first point of contact, we establish mutual needs and expectations to ensure total alignment. And then, we get to the work of setting the table for what a client can expect every step of the way. No guesswork. No surprises. Just results.
In addition to the monthly performance review with Sonya Dakar, we also mark time for quarterly conversations on our calendars that go deeper. We aim to learn as much as possible about the state of their business, their overall goals for every quarter and how our campaigns work in relation to everything else they have coming in the near future. We also come to the conversation with proactive thinking that goes beyond our existing scope of work; we propose new ideas and opportunities that will challenge both parties to grow as a team.
6. Adjusted Focus Toward New Customer Acquisition.
As Sonya Dakar became more comfortable with strong returns from their lower funnel retargeting campaigns, we began to make a case for expanding total budget, as well as budget distribution to campaigns that focus purely on new customer acquisition.
At the close of one year of partnership with DBD, Sonya Dakar had allocated 20 percent of its overall budget to new customer acquisition and, on average, generated $2.01 for every $1 spent on Facebook Ad campaigns in just prospecting audiences.
Fast forward to today: we have a renewed focus for our Facebook Ad campaigns. While ROAS is still an important part of the conversation, we’re advocating for the brand to scale by spending more than they ever have (despite the economic trials of 2020) and spending more of that budget proportionately on new customers, even if that means they are sacrificing some of the overall ROAS.
We’re creating strategies that help lower the cost of acquisition for a new customer, while also working to increase lifetime value and average order values for all, which will raise the scale and profitability over time, and not just on a single transaction.
What’s next for Sonya Dakar?
Undoubtedly, long term success. We’re grateful to be a part of the team that will continue to guide them toward it.