The average TikTok user spends 95 minutes per day on the app and opens it 19 times per day — just a few of the reasons that brands like Henry Rose are capitalizing on this engagement opportunity by using TikTok as a primary top-of-funnel marketing channel.
“We have a broad customer base, so we look at TikTok to fill the top of the funnel – it’s about building brand awareness,” said Debi Theis, President of fragrance brand Henry Rose in an interview with Retail TouchPoints. “Our customer is there to discover new products, trends and educate themselves on brands they have heard about. It’s another vehicle for them to learn about brands and search for product information.”
Indeed, consumers are increasingly using TikTok as a search engine — a big reason why the platform recently unveiled Search Ads Toggle, which allows brands to serve ads in TikTok search results. This trend is why Henry Rose partnered with Constellation to optimize its advertising creative and campaign targeting through the platform, and was ultimately able to generate more than 1.9 million impressions.
Constellation helps companies scale advertising using its proprietary creative management platform, which is designed to create personalized, micro-targeted campaigns at scale and across channels. “Because we understand how audiences engage on each channel, we are able to strategize around user behavior journeys specific to each channel and specific to how it applies to the holistic full funnel approach,” said Diana Lee, Co-founder and CEO of Constellation in an interview with Retail TouchPoints. “By staying on top of the data from our dashboards, we can see the response and have the flexibility to pivot if necessary to stay aligned to Henry Rose’s objectives.”
Repurposing and Scaling Powerful Content
Compelling content is the foundation of any brand campaign, and the teams at Constellation and Henry Rose knew the brand needed to lean into third-party validation and authentic moments where the brand was able to shine through.
“With TikTok it’s all about the creative and testing what works and doesn’t work – our method has been to fill the pipeline with a lot of creative assets,” Theis explained. “The assets must be authentic and from the heart – having the influencer speak from their voice and their experience with the brand.”
Constellation’s software helped Henry Rose mass-create ads using its existing content arsenal, which included a combination of:
- Creator-led brand assets that communicated Henry Rose’s brand identity and showcased the fragrances in a compelling way;
- Product placements that highlighted a combination of fragrance discovery sets and full-size fragrances; and
- Content promoting the brand’s online fragrance matching quiz to help audiences find the right scent.
“We took the content [Henry Rose] already had and elevated it using their brand guidelines, including award seals and press mentions,” explained Lee. She noted that creator-driven ad creative has been especially impactful when “allowlisting tactics” are used. This is when an ad is published featuring the creator’s handle versus the brand’s handle, making the content “feel like it’s coming more directly from the influencers we’re working with,” she explained. “It offers another way of diversifying our content and speaking more directly to our customers.”
By repurposing existing content for paid, Constellation was able to help Henry Rose quickly develop, launch and assess the performance of different campaigns. And because the agency is always in tune with TikTok’s algorithm changes as well as user behaviors, Constellation has provided the brand with a framework for tackling “creative fatigue challenges,” by “having iterative creative that is super-relevant to the audiences that we work with because we are so tapped into the different categories of customers we have through Henry Rose,” Lee explained.
Advertisement
Designing Ad Moments that Create Impact
Combining rich content with TikTok tools under the Conversions Objective, Henry Rose has been able to drive more conversions at a lower cost. The brand also has been able to create more efficiencies using Smart Performance Campaign, which allows the brand to input key information on campaign goals, creative and budget, and then allow the TikTok algorithm to do the heavy lifting.
For one campaign, Constellation helped Henry Rose implement In-Feed Ads through Smart Performance Campaign, which allowed the brand to decrease cost per action by 15.4%, increase conversion rates by 26.6% and increase return on ad spend by 32.8%.
The campaign’s results reaffirmed the value of a partnership where Constellation “works as a true extension of our team and are as committed to the success of our business as we are,” Theis said. “Their creative platform and their relentless focus on driving results has been instrumental in helping us grow our business.”
Henry Rose has been able to amplify its success on TikTok by diversifying across different channels and “hitting the audience at every stage and at every app they engage with,” Lee said. Because of its robust experience working across platforms, including Google and Meta, Constellation is able to provide the guidance and best practices needed to help Henry Rose stand out.
“Automation of targeting and following the algorithm is something that’s happening across all advertising channels right now — on Google it’s PMax, on Meta it’s Advantage+ Shopping, and on TikTok it’s called Spark Performance Campaigns,” Lee explained. “It’s really going away from a lot of heavy reliance on segmenting, targeting and pulling levers on objectives and optimizations at the campaign level. Instead, it focuses on what is the content, what is the message, what works the best and how can we automate on platforms having the rate pull for each of these?”
Theis noted that Henry Rose will continue to work with the Constellation team daily to “pivot when needed, understand what is and isn’t working, and adjust our strategies to continue to hit out business goals and KPIs.” That means testing an expanding range of creative methods and new tools being launched through the TikTok platform. “We are going to continue testing content, creative, audiences, TikTok Shop and other beta testing opportunities to continue to evolve and grow with the platform.”
