Case Study
Kenra Professional uses STV through Amazon DSP and AMC to reach new audiences
Goals
- Expand audience to include home users as well as professionals
- Grow overall brand awareness
- Maximize reach of STV ads
- Increase product sales
Approach
- Crafted new home user–focused creatives and tested them for their effects on sales
- Deployed upper-funnel STV campaigns
- Used audience segmentation to promote products to new customers only
- Created a custom STV remarketing audience that excluded subscribed customers
Results
- 1,963% increase in Amazon DSP brand searches
- 274% more new-to-brand purchases
- 46% growth in revenue in 2023 compared with 2022
- 30% more glance views compared with previous period
Hair care products represent a significant demand among both hair care professionals and everyday consumers. Hair care company Kenra Professional wanted to expand beyond their long-standing professional reputation to drive awareness and grow overall product sales among general shoppers. However, to successfully shift from professional-focused marketing to including nonprofessional users required new creatives and a data-driven strategy.
The brand worked with Acadia, a digital marketing agency and Amazon Ads Advanced partner, to develop new creatives and launch Streaming TV (STV) ads. After testing user personas and combinations of ad types, Kenra Professional launched their new strategy, boosting revenue and significantly increasing brand awareness.
Expanding to a new customer base
Kenra Professional has sold their products on Amazon since 2004, but they primarily focused on reaching professional stylists. To increase awareness and sales among everyday consumers, the brand needed a fresh approach.
They began working with Acadia to craft home user–focused creatives and display them as STV ads, which Kenra Professional hadn’t used before. The brand provided six original creatives that catered to six different home-user personas. Then, Acadia and Kenra Professional tested these creatives to learn which ads achieved the best results.
After confirming that an STV ad was an effective first touch in a longer acquisition path, Acadia used the test results to show Kenra Professional’s leadership the incremental impact of STV ads and unlock additional budget for the campaign. Kenra Professional launched their new STV campaign in June 2023, and it ran through December 2023.
Creating ad campaigns to boost NTB purchases
To put the new home user–focused creative assets in front of as many potential customers as possible, Acadia used Amazon DSP to deploy the campaign. The partner excluded past Kenra Professional customers in their audiences to promote products to new customers. The partner also used Amazon Marketing Cloud (AMC) to create a custom STV remarketing audience that excluded customers who had already subscribed to the brand’s products. With the companies’ full-funnel strategy, customers who had already seen upper-funnel campaigns continued to see other ads. Acadia also continued to run the brand’s evergreen sponsored ads strategy to capture demand and attention among shoppers browsing on Amazon.
To understand the effectiveness of the new Amazon DSP ads on driving traffic, Acadia measured glance views and tracked detail page views and brand search metrics. They also used a brand lift study to measure the ads’ impact on awareness.
Overall, Acadia increased STV reach for audiences who had seen ads but hadn’t converted. The partner tracked new-to-brand (NTB) purchases across all Amazon DSP campaigns to see how the upper-funnel STV campaigns improved NTB sales. They also measured shipped revenue to track the overall lift to the business from running the upper-funnel STV campaigns. Finally, they used AMC to generate a path-to-conversion report and measure how STV impressions impacted multistep conversions.
Growing NTB purchases by 274%
After running the new campaigns for six months, Acadia saw that STV ads through Amazon DSP outperformed the brand’s other streaming investments. DSP brand searches grew by 1,963% compared with the previous period, and the brand saw 274% more NTB purchases.1
Acadia and Kenra Professional also found that STV ads were most effective when followed by a full-funnel ad campaign, with a 5.48% purchase rate compared with 0.01% for shoppers who saw only an STV ad. 2
Kenra Professional grew their revenue from their shipped products by 46% in 2023 compared with 2022. 3 They also achieved 30% more glance views during the test period than the previous period. 4
For brands that haven’t tested upper-funnel investments before, we found a lot of value using Amazon Streaming TV. We were effectively able to get Kenra Professional’s message to their target audience, and we saw significant lift to our awareness goals.
— Ross Walker, media team lead, Acadia
Enhancing reporting and analysis
Acadia plans to continue using this upper-funnel STV strategy for their clients, and they’ll work with Kenra Professional again in Q4 2024. They’ve also developed AMC reporting templates to query the data for deeper analysis.
The professional stylist is and will always be at the core of Kenra Professional’s identity. Amazon Streaming TV offered a cost-effective method to introduce new clients to our brand with high-end, focused content. Acadia’s support managing the campaign was critical to its success.
— Carter Sharp, director of specialty retail and e-commerce, Kenra Professional
1–4 Acadia, US, 2023