Prior experience, not Traffiy client work
I delivered this as part of my previous employment at a European digital agency. It was that agency’s client under its own contract, not a Traffiy engagement.
Apparel · Ireland · 2022 · Senior Paid Marketing Strategist
Rebuilding a niche apparel account weeks before its biggest trading period.
An Irish apparel brand built around regional humour.
+260%
Revenue YoY, all paid channels
+50%
ROAS YoY
+38%
Conversion rate YoY
My role
Senior Paid Marketing Strategist
2022, at a European digital agency
The situation
The brand sells clothing printed with Irish sayings and in jokes. Its audience is narrow on purpose, defined less by age or income than by a shared sense of humour. They had brought paid media in house after leaving a local agency, watched results slide, and came to the agency I worked at to take it back over. We picked it up with their heaviest trading months already close.
The constraint
Two pressures at once. Peak season was already close, so there was no room for a long discovery phase and any mistake would land at exactly the wrong moment. The harder problem was voice. For this brand the humour is the product, and ads written in flat ecommerce language read as an outsider explaining the joke. That audience notices immediately. Search had also never produced anything for them, so there was no baseline to build on.
What I did
- Took over both the Google Ads and the Meta account outright rather than optimising around the structure we inherited.
- Started the research again from nothing, on the words people search and on who else was turning up for them, which surfaced territory nobody had been bidding on.
- Built search out properly for the first time in the account’s history.
- Built the personas around the cultural references the products quote rather than around demographics, and went and watched the source material so the copy sounded like it came from inside the joke instead of about it.
- Tested creative and copy in that voice, and judged it on cost per conversion and return rather than on the engagement numbers that flatter a brand like this one.
The outcome
Revenue across all paid channels rose 260 percent year on year, with ROAS up 50 percent and conversion rate up 38 percent. Through the November and December peak, revenue rose 500 percent. Search produced meaningful results for the brand for the first time.
What I took from it
What I took out of it is that audience research is not a demographic exercise. For a brand whose product is its voice, the research that mattered was cultural, and no bidding strategy substitutes for it.
All work on this page was delivered during previous employment at another agency, as part of that agency’s teams and under its client relationships. It is not Traffiy client work. Brands are described rather than named, and every figure comes from an article published at the time.
Every figure above is quoted from the article published about this project at the time, and is recorded against its archived source. Happy to share the reference on request.