Reframing social media as the beginning of an owned-commerce funnel

• The client had become dissatisfied with its previous agency arrangement. According to the client, the agency had focused heavily on e-commerce operations because those activities translated more directly into sales, while the brand's social media accounts received less attention.
• The client did not want social media to become a continuous sales feed. It wanted a balanced approach that could direct audiences toward its products while also publishing editorial and lifestyle content consistent with the brand.
• Social visits to the brand's e-commerce destinations increased, but the sales figures reported back to us did not rise in proportion to the additional traffic.
• Social advertising could bring people to a marketplace or website, but marketplace operations belonged to the incumbent agency and sat outside our direct remit. Sending more traffic into the same system would not necessarily improve sales.

The engagement involved me and a former colleague. I handled the words and the strategy, including copy, content planning, paid-media recommendations, and the broader commercial thinking behind how social connected with the brand's sales channels. My collaborator handled the visual expression, producing graphics, infographics, images, and video.

• Developed a working content mix that separated posts intended to sell from editorial and lifestyle posts intended to build relevance and familiarity with the brand.
• Gave commercial posts a clear route toward purchase while allowing non-commercial content to participate in the audience's interests without turning every interaction into a product pitch.
• Created a paid-media allocation designed to use the available budget more efficiently across Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok.
• Reframed social media as both a brand environment and an acquisition channel rather than treating those purposes as mutually exclusive.
• Proposed treating the first marketplace purchase as customer acquisition, then encouraging a future purchase through the brand's owned store.
• Designed a package-insert concept that thanked the customer, introduced the owned website, and used a QR code to reduce the friction of reaching it.
• Recommended a dedicated discount code as a customer incentive and a way to attribute direct-site orders to the insert. The discount could use part of what the brand would otherwise have paid in marketplace fees while preserving value from the direct transaction.

• The client implemented the package insert and dedicated discount-code recommendation.
• Customers subsequently completed purchases through the owned website using those codes. Because the codes were created specifically for the insert, their redemption provided direct evidence that customers had followed the proposed route to the brand's store.
• As the content and media mix was refined, Meta reporting showed more link clicks, engagement, and video views even as paid spend decreased.
• The engagement began as a request for better social media management and developed into a more connected acquisition and retention system spanning content, paid media, marketplaces, and the brand's owned store.

• Our remit did not include operation of the third-party marketplaces or the client's website. We could identify where traffic and reported sales appeared misaligned, recommend changes, and measure activity visible through our channels, but we could not independently diagnose every step of the purchasing experience.
• Marketplace requirements can change. The package-insert tactic is presented as something the client implemented within that operating environment, not as general guidance for bypassing marketplace rules.
• Exact content ratios, targeting recommendations, budget allocations, discount values, sales figures, and marketplace terms are withheld.