Ramping up both scale and performance in a campaign is a tough needle to thread, so we figured it couldn’t hurt to share a few lessons from a summer campaign for a D2C phone accessory brand that did just that (and then some).

The background: the brand approached us in early spring 2024 to take on their paid social (TikTok and Meta) campaigns, with a focus on driving sales of their summertime products.

Here’s what we learned along the way.

1) TikTok can fill a fun event

TikTok’s platform embraces a lot of great marketing themes: fun, adventure, discovery, and seizing the moment. We leveraged all of these in a sponsored TikTok Live event to give away branded swag bags filled with products to users who joined – and it worked so well we began to roll them out weekly, with advertising support building awareness before the events.

2) Awareness and always-on DR campaigns can work wonders together

While we built awareness by advertising the events, we ran always-on campaigns on TikTok and Meta to capture the demand we were building concurrently. Thanks to fresh new users learning about the brand from awareness campaigns, we were building a bigger bottom-of-funnel audience to convert.

3) Targeting algos can thrive with the right creative strategy

Our entire approach to the client’s social campaigns was backboned by an aggressive production-and-testing creative strategy to keep new creative flowing and pre-empt ad fatigue. Testing different themes and formats proved highly effective on TikTok, whose algorithm focuses on analyzing the creative to identify its most relevant audiences. We used these learnings to drive our creative strategy on Meta, where we ran Advantage+ campaigns (with automated bidding and targeting) alongside more manually optimized DR campaigns.

4) You can have it all on Meta – with lots of rigor

Our Meta approach blended automated Advantage+ placements with very high-touch manual campaigns. Because we have implemented MTA platform Triple Whale, user activity isn’t automatically passed back to the Meta platform to help train the bidding algorithms to find and engage the most valuable users – so we roll up our sleeves and feed the data back ourselves.

With the automated nature of Advantage+ using our creative assets to find at-scale customers likely to purchase and our manual DR campaigns capitalizing on the increased user awareness and intent, our Meta campaigns hit new highs for the client in volume and efficiency.

Before the summer officially ended, we’d increased ROAS by 59% for both Meta and TikTok campaigns, with Meta revenue more than doubling and TikTok revenue increasing by more than 20x.