Here’s the secret that Meta’s advertising pros won’t tell you:
With today’s competitive social feeds, you can’t just throw a couple hundred dollars at the platform and expect transformative results.
But too many small businesses do — and end up burned by inefficient ad strategies that waste their hard-earned cash.
Today’s case study is here to prove that success is possible for brands new to the Meta advertising universe, as long as you have an experienced team by your side, the patience to get through the learning phase, and an unwavering commitment to sustainable, long-term growth strategies.
Keep reading to learn how we helped Meta newcomers The Shelf Shop achieve:
- 83% increase in impressions
- 70% increase in revenue
- 52% increase in ROAS
- And much more
Want similar results for your business? See how our team can help with a free consultation today.
Client Background
The Shelf Shop is an online retailer that sells high-quality custom floating shelves. Its leadership team approached Inflow in late 2023 about taking the business to the next level with strategic digital marketing activities.
Because The Shelf Shop was launched as a family-owned and -operated small business, all previous marketing efforts were conducted in-house. But, given the complexity of today’s advertising ecosystem, the business handed the reins over to our eCommerce experts.
We rolled up our sleeves and got to work in January 2024.
The Challenges of Launching Ad Campaigns from Scratch
When smaller eCommerce brands ask us to scale their growth quickly, we often recommend a combination of paid search advertising and social media advertising. These channels allow for more immediate targeting of highly interested audiences and, when done well, a more direct return on investment.
However, due to The Shelf Shop’s relatively unknown brand status and untested social ad accounts, its existing audience list was too small to deliver the desired results.
This is a common challenge with businesses starting from scratch. And, because platforms like Meta work best with lots of audience data, the learning period for these campaigns is much longer than for established brands — leading to an extended run-up time for a significant return on ad investment.
There’s a silver lining, though: This longer learning period can uncover unique audience purchase trends that can be leveraged for better campaign results later on.
And The Shelf Shop’s launch was no exception.
The Shelf Shop’s 3-Pronged Social Success Strategy
Below, we’ve detailed the three factors that played a crucial role in the success of The Shelf Shop’s freshly launched Meta advertising campaigns.
While Inflow’s social ads team builds strategies based on proven tactics and past performance, every client is different.
Like most digital marketing, social media advertising is not a one-size-fits-all situation. Best practices are a great jumping-off point for most businesses — but to maximize results, you need a hands-on approach from a team that can identify your biggest areas of opportunity and make the unique adjustments needed to take advantage of them.
Here’s what that looked like for The Shelf Shop:
1. Embracing the Longer Purchase Journey
Marketing furniture online is tricky, especially with a handcrafted, high-end product like The Shelf Shop’s. Unlike other eCommerce products like fashion or apparel, furniture products are rarely purchased on a whim.
Instead, customers take a roundabout, longer journey to purchase. After initially seeing an ad for a high-end shelf, their interest may be peaked — but, before they can buy, they have to measure their wall space, plan around potential renovations, ponder what they’ll put on the shelf, talk to their partners, etc.
For Shelf Shop, that can take up to six weeks — an average we identified through detailed analysis of landing page views (associated with heightened promotion) vs. on-site purchase conversions.
Unfortunately, a longer purchase cycle like this doesn’t reflect well in Meta’s reporting.
Meta’s ad platform only tracks a one-day view or seven-day click attribution for ads. With most of The Shelf Shop’s audience taking several weeks to make their final purchase, Meta’s reporting fails to capture those conversions. (That’s why we use an integrated GA4 reporting strategy for the most comprehensive understanding of cross-channel performance.)
Luckily, our team has plenty of experience advertising for longer purchase journeys. With our learnings from high-end furniture brands like Vitrazza and Modern Bungalow, we knew exactly what we needed to do to keep The Shelf Shop’s advertising campaigns productive, despite the delay between first touch and final purchase.
The solution: A highly strategic targeting approach, with a focus on the top of the funnel to maintain steady sales and revenue trends.
2. Investing in Top of Funnel
Many brands new to social advertising make the common mistake of focusing only on purchases at the start.
But, without an equal focus on building an audience from which to draw those sales, advertising costs quickly skyrocket with diminishing returns from a tapped-out customer base.
With a brand like The Shelf Shop, social media is invaluable in attracting new customers to their website. Sure, it doesn’t generate an immediate return on investment (ROI) — but, as explained above, the eventual purchase trends justify the cost, albeit a few weeks delayed.
If we had only chased return on ad spend (ROAS) for these campaigns, we would have overlooked the bigger picture. Instead, by focusing on building an audience of those interested in our products (many of whom had never heard of The Shelf Shop in the first place), we ensured a steady stream of landing page views and eventual purchases from retargeting.
Without that investment in top-of-the-funnel interest, The Shelf Shop’s retargeting audience would have grown too small to perform well (and consistently) over time.
And that is the difference between a short-sighted strategy that chases immediate returns over a full-funnel, strategic approach that drives sustainable growth — the latter of which is our specialty here at Inflow.
Want to learn more about our proven social ad strategy? Schedule your free consultation today.
3. Optimizing Ad Creative
Of course, targeting is just one piece of the social advertising puzzle. In today’s crowded feeds, social media ads need to simultaneously stand out and blend in — attracting browsers’ attention without feeling too out-of-place on the platform.
For a relatively unknown brand like The Shelf Shop, ad creative is even more important. It’s often the first exposure a new customer has to the business. It needs to illustrate exactly what the company is, what products it sells, and why a customer should purchase them.
Fortunately, our marketing team offers design services that help supercharge our clients’ ad creative. Using the best practices developed from decades of working with similar brands, we helped The Shelf Shop step up its ad creative game — changes that almost immediately resulted in higher click-through rates to the business’s website.
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The Results
While social media advertising is often the quickest avenue for business growth, it’s still not a get-rich-quick solution. Like all digital marketing efforts, it requires strategic, consistent investment to build an account that delivers sustainable results over the long term.
Leadership teams who understand that — as The Shelf Shop does — are more prepared to weather the ups and downs experienced during Meta’s learning phase.
You can see those trends in action below. While The Shelf Shop’s average ROAS has fluctuated on a monthly basis, it’s also on an overall steady upward trend — as much a result of our continuous testing, learning, and optimization as of the brand’s commitment to staying the course.
As we build up The Shelf Shop’s audience base and cater to the longer purchase journey of its customers, we expect to see these peaks and valleys flatten into a steadily increasing ROAS.
That’s not to say that The Shelf Shop hasn’t already experienced some significant growth wins. Since launching their campaigns in early 2024, we’ve gradually scaled account revenue and sales with minimal change to ad spend.
With this foundation laid, The Shelf Shop reported a stellar Q3, delivering the following quarter-over-quarter Meta advertising results:
- 83% increase in impressions
- 70% increase in revenue
- 52% increase in ROAS
- 36% increase in purchases
Thanks to committed investment in Meta, The Shelf Shop is now in a great position to take advantage of its new audiences as the busiest shopping season of the year approaches — and our team will be there every step of the way to maximize its performance.
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If you’re struggling to generate a return on your Meta ads investment, remember this: Social media advertising takes time, especially for brands new to the platform. But, with the right team and a consistent strategy, you can see a significant return on your investment and set the foundation for long-term, sustainable growth.
Learn how our team can help by requesting a free consultation with our experts today:
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