Curate Beauty -
Facebook Ads Strategy -
B2B BEAUTY
Increased leads for an indie beauty wholesale marketplace through Facebook Ads.
The Brief
Curate Beauty is a UK-based, innovative wholesale marketplace. It is generally difficult for retailers to buy independent beauty brands, since they need to discover new brands, curate a product selection, and coordinate contracts and delivery. So Curate Beauty streamlines this process.
By December 2020, Curate Beauty accumulated a fairly large selection of independent brands, but they did not have enough retailers on their platform. They had never run ads for their business before, so we needed to start from scratch. Careful Feet Digital’s (CFD) primary goal was to find an efficient way to attract retailers using Facebook Ads. Our secondary goal was to increase revenue by attracting purchases from these retailers.
Approach
Since it was the first time Curate Beauty was using paid advertising, our initial run was all about testing. We focused our attention in two directions:
- Finding the right audience.
- Finding the right offer/appeal.
For audiences, our approach was to try job titles/occupations related to retail and beauty, as well as interest and behavior-based categories related to only retail.
To find the right offer, we tested ads leading straight to the registration form, a free sample pack offer, and a free report working as a lead magnet.
Starting in January, we added a lookalike-based audience. This audience performed on par with ones from December.
In March and April, to combat ad fatigue and potentially increase results, CFD also tested two different offers: a 10% discount for new purchases and a gift pack for larger purchases.
Results
After our first month of running ads, the results were inconclusive regarding which audience was more valuable as all of them performed more or less equally. With the offers, however, it was easy to see that the free report was a clear winner. In some instances, the report generated leads at a 3 times lower price compared to the other two approaches.
Since we started running ads, we managed to attract new registrations at less than £10 – a great result for the B2B market.
Moreover, CFD succeeded at generating secondary sales, especially in February, when sales exceeded £14,000 with ad spend less than £500. That’s a ROAS of 34.12!
