Background
The company is a small, private label cosmetics manufacturer with a long-standing operational foundation and solid top-line performance. While the business has historically maintained a strong reputation with entrepreneurial beauty clients, it has faced inconsistent bottom-line results in recent years—prompting a renewed focus on marketing effectiveness and return on investment.
With marketing execution outsourced to an offshore performance agency, the brand lacked true visibility into its channel performance. Disconnected systems, underutilized CRM tools, and limited attribution capabilities made it nearly impossible to evaluate ROI or guide optimizations. At the same time, a post-pandemic surge in independent beauty and skincare launches introduced new pressure: competitors were becoming louder, faster, and more digitally aggressive.
Despite ongoing brand and marketing investments, the company was not seeing corresponding gains. Strategic guidance was needed to better connect systems, evaluate performance, and evolve positioning—ensuring that future marketing decisions were grounded in both data and differentiation.
Objectives
- Conduct a comprehensive situation assessment to evaluate performance marketing across all major touchpoints, including paid media, website strategy, and SEO infrastructure
- Analyze emerging and established competitors to understand how newer brands were gaining visibility and share in a resurging category
- Define how the company could reposition itself to better reflect its core strengths—particularly its service orientation, operational quality, and long-standing private label expertise—in order to stand out within an increasingly crowded beauty landscape
Strategic Actions
- Performed a comprehensive audit of paid advertising and SEO activity, identifying fundamental gaps in keyword targeting, blog optimization practices, and campaign-level reporting
- Determined that backend systems—including the CRM—were disconnected from the marketing stack, creating a blind spot for lead attribution, qualification, and conversion tracking
- Conducted a technical assessment of the CRM platform, revealing the company was operating on a legacy version with limited integration capabilities; built a phased roadmap to modernize, decouple from outdated workflows, and enable campaign attribution
- Analyzed end-to-end lead flow and lifecycle touchpoints across new and returning customers, identifying drop-off points and missed re-engagement opportunities
- Evaluated the offshore performance agency’s SEO and blog content execution, coaching the team on modern optimization techniques and ongoing editorial SEO maintenance
- Modeled ROI scenarios across updated paid media plans, revealing that increased click-through and impression volume were masking significant drop-offs in conversion and profitability
- Advised a strategic reallocation of spend—including pausing underperforming campaigns—to prevent further margin erosion and refocus investment on measurable impact
- Conducted in-depth qualitative analysis of the competitive landscape and internal customer experience, identifying a category-wide overemphasis on product variety and underleveraged service support
- Partnered with internal teams to surface the brand’s true differentiator—deep, hands-on support for entrepreneurs—and used those insights to reposition the company around a more customer-centric, loyalty-driven brand platform
Outcomes & Impact
The engagement has resulted in a series of high-impact decisions and directional shifts, designed to reduce waste, clarify differentiation, and build scalable performance infrastructure:
- Strategically scaled back paid ad investment to reduce ongoing losses from non-performing campaigns while maintaining just enough activity to preserve testing continuity during infrastructure upgrades
- Secured approval from senior leadership and ownership for a revised brand positioning platform that centers on the company’s service-first differentiation and long-standing customer loyalty
- Gained investment authorization for backend Martech improvements, enabling attribution visibility, lead tracking, and future campaign measurement — all within a scalable budget envelope aligned to company resources
- Approved and initiated new front-end website build, incorporating improved UX, SEO framework alignment, and campaign integration
- Created and validated a proprietary lead generation experience based on an entrepreneur-focused brand archetype quiz — positioning the company as a partner in customer vision, not just a supplier of products
