If social media is regarded as its own world, then content reigns supreme as king.
The royal ascription speaks to the supremacy of a content-driven world, which has become the backbone of performance marketing and advertising. However, generating enough content to keep pace with demand is nearly impossible, especially for indie startups like Michelle Pfeiffer’s Henry Rose fragrance brand. To compete, Henry Rose has worked to develop a significant content library for ads on Meta and TikTok and boost its unpaid TikTok presence.
“Creative fatigue seems to be happening quicker and quicker, so brands have to fill that pipeline with creative assets,” said Debi Theis, president at Henry Rose.
To achieve this, Henry Rose tapped Constellation, an automated social content software which makes permutations and iterations of social content. Its clients include automakers Jaguar and BMW, hospitality companies like IHG Hotels & Resorts, and Chase Bank. With Henry Rose, the team looked to increase its brand awareness, find quality customers, lower customer acquisition costs and improve return on ad spend. The brand does not disclose marketing revenue or marketing investments. Henry Rose has worked with Constellation since 2021, with Michelle Scarpato, director of growth at Henry Rose, taking the lead. Constellation can use parameters set by a brand and integrations with data providers to create custom content variations that reach specific audience types and sizes. These videos are then directly published to Meta and TikTok platforms.
Henry Rose uses Constellation’s bread-and-butter tool called Smart Performance Campaign for its TikTok in-feed ads. In doing so, it was able to generate a 15.4% year-over-year decrease in cost per action, a 26.6% increase in conversion rate and a 32.8% increase in return on ad spend. In-feed ads refer to TikTok’s Spark Ads product. Overall, Henry Rose generated over 600 sales conversions and 1.9 million impressions during the 12-month period.
Ad position: web_incontent_pos1
Henry Rose is relatively new to TikTok, debuting on the platform approximately 18 months ago. It publishes every day. Its content is a mix of highly produced videos using earth-tone color schemes, visual product shots that spotlight fragrance notes, and poetic text and voiceovers evocative of the sensuality of perfume product descriptions. The content is created both in-house and with outside agencies. The brand has approximately 28,000 TikTok followers.
“TikTok [requires] newness and creativity all the time. Fragrance is a more emotional product, and we want [influencers] to be authentic with how they experience the brand themselves,” said Theis. “First and foremost, our work with Constellation was testing a lot and determining the right creative assets.”
Smart Performance Campaign allowed the Henry Rose team the automated ability to create multiple creative assets and also bid in ad auctions. Smart Performance is a manually activated option, and once selected, a user can add parameters such as which social platforms or apps to focus on and which countries to target. Then, a user selects a budget for ads and chooses from optimization fields — options include showing ads to people most likely to click on them versus those most likely to purchase. Henry Rose selected audiences interested in high-quality ingredients, premium-priced fragrances and holistic nutrition, and people who shop at Whole Foods. Constellation can access these audience psychographics and behavior through Oracle and IHS data integration. Henry Rose does not have one target age demo; it instead focuses on age brackets of 25-34-year-olds, 35-44-year-olds, and 55-year-olds and beyond. Theis said that the revenue contributions between customers under 18 years old and those above 55 years old are similar, but customers under 18 are converting at a higher rate than any other age bucket.
Ad position: web_incontent_pos2
“You can always find customers who will eventually buy your product, but if you’re only targeting lower-funnel [audiences], you’ll run out of those customers,” said Diana Lee, co-founder and CEO at Constellation. “You always need a feed of upper funnel [potential] customers to come in via brand awareness exposure before they actually convert.”
