Akt London Paid Social Case Study

Client

Akt London is a brand new, London based, skincare company that makes intelligent deodorant formulations “Born to Perform”.

Akt offers a range of incredibly effective plastic free, aluminium free, cruelty free deodorant for all genders. Created and approved by London's West End performers.

The first prototypes gave way to an upscaled production and in Q1 2020 the company started testing advertising on social and search with uneven results. In Summer 2020, AKT contacted Stand Out Digital to explore an always-on collaboration looking at a sustained profitable direct response activity via paid social.

Strategy

When Stand Out Digital was appointed Akt London’s digital media agency, the followers of this company on Instagram were short of 7,000, preventing directly linking the IG account to Akt’s website and therefore facilitate online sales on its website.

It was clear we had to work on a double workstream: on the one hand, raising awareness of the brand and Instagram account amongst an audience that would be aligned to the product in terms of affinity (interest-based targeting).

While on the other hand, we prompted conversion (sales) amongst a qualitative audience, via a combined prospective targeting and retargeting approach, ultimately conducting to encouraging rolling subscriptions to maximise Life-Time Value per customer.

Prospective audiences were broken down into two segments: an interest-based audience similar to the one used to expand the follower base of Akt’s Instagram account, but with more product-related signals.

And a lookalike combination of previous purchasers (up to 180 days) video-viewers (up to 365 days) and website visitors (up to 180 days). The degree of similarity or ‘lookalikelihood’ was initially set at 1%, increased to 3% and finally to 7% as performance kept strong.

Retargeting audiences were made up of three buckets:

-                      Cart abandoners (up to 180 days) – excluding website visitors and purchasers.

-                      Video viewers (up to 365 days) – excluding website visitors and purchasers.

-                      Website visitors (up to 180 days) – excluding cart abandoners and purchasers.

On a final step, once the campaign had been live for a couple of months and enough customer data had been collected, we retargeted current customers via an uploaded custom audience to prompt a rolling subscription method.

Our strategy aimed at transition Akt’s paid social activity from a tactical and sporadic presence to a sustained profitable one.

To that purpose, we leveraged full funnel approach, raising awareness and consideration on the brand the deodorants towards prospective audiences, retargeting with a more conversion-led message and ultimately up-sell subscriptions amongst existing customers.

Execution

Stand Out Digital took control of Akt’s paid social activity from the 15th of September 2020, launching 2 campaigns on Facebook/Instagram aimed at increasing Instagram followers and generating conversions/sales respectively.

For our Direct Response activation, the bid strategy was set at lowest cost for conversions, attribution was set at 28 days for clicks and 1 day for views, and selected placements were feed, stories and in-stream across desktop and mobile.

Concerning creatives, when targeting prospective audiences, we tested different short videos featuring the deodorant range with a call to action prompting users to ‘learn more’.

While for retargeted audiences, we A/B tested different videos where each deodorant fragrance (with its unique colour) was the protagonist. We pulled in quotes from publishers that had positively reviewed Akt’s deodorants to improve reliability and credibility on the products and adjusted the Call-To-Action to ‘shop now’ to be more compelling in prompting conversion.

During the 2 weeks leading to Black Friday, we run an exclusive promotion offering a 20% discount on every item of Akt’s shop. And from early December 2020 we started running an ad set aimed at retargeting current customers (via custom audience) to encourage them to upgrade to a monthly rolling subscription service.

For our activation to increase Instagram followers, the campaign objective was set at post engagement and the only placement selected was feed on Instagram (mobile logically).

In terms of creativity, for this campaign we used short videos featuring people and lifestyle motives (in line with the organic content posted on the account) to entice people to follow the account.

Results and evaluation

We deployed a winning full funnel strategy, aligning message and creative to each targeted audience, from an upper funnel ‘learn more’ CTA aimed at prospective audiences all the way to a subscription offer targeting current customers.

With one eye put on increasing Akt’s Instagram follower base above the 10,000 figures to unlock direct linkage with their website and thus facilitate conversions; we delivered a strong direct response campaign that helped the business to achieve always-on sustained profitability with an ROAS above target and a monthly purchase value from social 5 times higher than prior to Stand Out Digital’s involvement.

The campaign won Best Direct Response Social Media Campaign at the 2021 Global Social Media Awards