Fueling growth for a hair care brand with a mission

“I was looking for an agency that will hear us, feel our  passion, know how to transfer that message to all our future customers and has a plan on how to guide us forward. We had an excellent product and we needed to spread the word.”

NELI ZOVKO,
FOUNDER OF THE ROYAL AFFAIR

About the brand

Hair care brand The Royal Affair emerged from passion and a bit of an obsession for hair care rituals. After a decade of searching and testing hair product formulas the founder, Neli Zovko, discovered a perfect ingredient for her “untamable” hair: Henna. And she wanted every woman to know about its effects and see the results for herself.

The brand soon grew to be a lot more than just a hair product line—it was designed to make you fall in love with yourself and embrace your perfect imperfections through self-care practices. Soon after the product was launched, a strong community of self-care enthusiasts started to form around the brand.

To make her ideas come to life Neli started collaborating with one of the most advanced cosmetic labs, formed an all-female team and embarked on a mission of putting The Royal Affair’s clean and environmentally conscious hair products on every woman’s shower caddy.

We were blown away by Neli’s story, and really enthusiastic about the collaboration, knowing that they did not just look for a performance marketing partner, but also for a team of experts that would help them shape their story, get the word out and establish the brand.

The challenge

The Royal Affair came to us in June 2022, struggling to increase their monthly revenues. They had a great line of products, an inspiring story to tell, and were successful at building community on organic channels with the emphasis on Instagram.

They launched an occasional Facebook ad campaign, but their overall advertising strategy was lacking structure. We assembled a team of experts, rolled up our sleeves and started rebuilding a strategy.

Since this was not our first client from the cosmetics industry, we knew that our top priority should be setting up a multichannel approach and iterative process of producing creatives that reflect the brand and tell the story in the most authentic way.

The biggest challenge for us was how to stand out in the crowd and convey our brand message.”

-Neli Zovko, founder of The Royal Affair

The process

1. Setting up the channels: Google and Facebook Ads

Our refreshed strategy was initiated by a branded Google ads campaign and campaigns for most searched keywords related to common hair problems as well as The Royal Affair’s hair products. These types of campaigns usually work as a foundation for all of our further activities.

At the very start we also set up the Facebook funnel and tested different ad types, such as static images, gifs, videos featuring the founder and brand ambassadors, split-screen videos with product footages, mash up videos and many more.

For the top of the funnel we wanted to attract new customers’ attention and drive traffic to brand’s website by showcasing the brand’s story and values, describing the benefits of the products and displaying a luxurious look and feel of the product. Our best performing ads for prospecting were featuring the founder talking about the brand story and key ingredients in the products.

For the middle of the funnel we focused on the actual product itself, with static lifestyle imagery and gifs, testimonials and user-generated content, featuring brand’s ambassadors. On the bottom of the funnel we encouraged conversions with static ads containing discounts for abandoned carts. Static lifestyle images turned out to be our top performing retargeting creatives.

Since we wanted to increase average order value, we primarily focused our advertising efforts on product bundles; we were also promoting bestselling hair mask to a wider audience.

2. Creating engaging content for ad campaigns

Our mission was to set up a process that would allow us to consistently gather and produce new materials and test different types, styles of ad creatives while being respectful to the established brand image.

We turned to the founder Neli who was willing to put herself in front of the camera and tell the brand story in her own unique way. We prepared scripts and our creative team took charge of video editing that resulted in a set of videos that drove qualified traffic to the site for a lower cost.

The other pillar of our content strategy were influencers and brand ambassadors. We included the ones the brand was already collaborating with in our early marketing activities as well put the effort in finding new ones.

3. Converting lurkers into customers

Apart from creating content that helped drive relevant traffic to the website and increase brand awareness, we dived into tactics to turn lurkers into our loyal customers.

In order to do that we planned monthly sales weeks and free shipping weekends. As a result, the revenue generated in August surpassed the revenue from June and July combined.

The biggest difference was in your approach. You really got to know the brand before starting any marketing activities. I know we are not your biggest clients but you never get that feeling. You are on top of everything, when I think of it you are already solving it. You are aware that our budget is limited; and you are using it as it was yours . In these couple of months working together I have gotten to know and trust you.

– Neli Zovko, founder of The Royal Affair

What the future holds for us

We’re at the moment just at the verge of a product launch campaign that we’re expecting to be one of the major milestones for a brand since their product line will grow for a couple of products addressing common hair issues.

We’re also crafting an email marketing strategy, aimed at boosting customer loyalty and encouraging repeated purchases.

Let’s take on new challenges with The Royal Affair!

The Results

• In the span of 2 months, we increased online sales by 51% compared to the previous period.
• Increased conversion rate for 27%.
• Increased the number of transactions increased by 66%.
• Delivered a ROAS 7.8 campaign that included Facebook and Google advertising and influencer posts.