The Context & The Challenge

While not the biggest brand in the prestige men’s skincare space, nor a digitally native vertical brand (DNVB) neither, this client was able to build an early DTC business that capitalized on its brand reputation and offline placement of its product via big box retailers.

Following the ecommerce consumer shopping trends of the mid-to-late 2010s, this client began investing in growing its DTC business more aggressively via a mix of in-house and vendor team work. While there was good work being done with its owned media, the client needed help with devising a paid media program to accelerate its growth.

The client came with a challenge: grow its DTC business by 20-30% year over year over year.

So, how did we do?

The Results

Quarterly revenue grew by 208% and annual revenue grew by 155% – results that show revenue growth accelerating. These results exceeded all stakeholders expectations. But, how specifically were we able to accomplish these results?

The How…

While the client had success in building its channel partner strategy, PR, and branding efforts, it wasn’t enough to scale its growth in the digital ecosystem for its DTC business. While the client had a well converting website and had built an effective lifecycle messaging program, it needed help to build out a comprehensive and growth-focused paid media program to serve as the fuel.

So, our team went to work building a paid media program that would leverage the client’s brand reputation, first-rate creative assets, and their willingness to try new strategies.

This resulted in paid media contributing $12.2M in top-line revenue over a two-year period.

As can be seen in the chart above, the mix of quarterly revenue coming in before we got to work compared to the quarterly revenue in a recent quarter shows the impact paid media has had to drive significant revenue growth.

One the of the major question to ask at this point is just how efficient was that paid media investment in contributing the revenue. It’s an important question to ask because if a brand is paying $2 for every $1 it gets in revenue, well that’s not a sustainable business model.

However, there are multiple factors that impact paid media’s return on ad spend (ROAS).

• Paid Media Unit Costs of its Category by Channel
• Average SKU Price Point
• Average # of Items in an Order
• Average Order Value (AOV) of its sales
• Conversion Rates
• Media Mix of Investment
• Funnel Stage Investment Mix

As with any KPI, there is going to be volatility, and the idea is to minimize that volatility while balancing overall growth over time. Our team was able to impact absolute growth of paid media’s revenue contribution while improving the ROAS of our dollars over time. So, how well did we do, exactly?

Not only were we able to drive scale by spending more, but by doing so, along with experimentation, we were able to improve the efficiency of those dollars.

Put another way, we were able to get more from our dollars as we spent more dollars.

The next level to understand is where exactly did we spend those dollars and what did we get for them. In most areas, we expanded our approach to maximize lower funnel demand harvesting (e.g. brand search) while in others, we shifted the approach drive higher quality traffic at a higher price to drive high quality reach (e.g. display).

Across the board, with the combination of great product marketing and agile & aggressive paid media execution, we were able to drive efficiency improvements while scaling by materially improving AOVs in every channel.

Other Thoughts & Factors

Paid media optimization hacks only do so much though. There is also much to be said about the actual product and brand reputation that impacts effectiveness of any marketing campaigns. This client in particular has a very savvy and proactive product development and marketing team. This helped our paid media efforts as it is always easier to make paid media campaigns work hard for a brand when the product is loved by its core target market.