Standing Out in a Crowded Market
Among the many industries that saw a boom during and post-pandemic, the direct-to-consumer beauty and nail care industry thrived, with brands like Maniko Nails riding the wave of increased demand for convenient at-home solutions. But as the D2C nail care market became increasingly crowded, Maniko needed a way to promote their innovative, vegan and cruelty-free UV gel nail strip that allows customers to achieve salon-quality manicures without ever leaving the house.
The Challenge
While Maniko previously saw success with traditional digital channels, they struggled to acquire incremental customers at scale. On top of that, their unique nail product also required detailed, targeted messaging to convey key benefits to its prospective customers.
The Strategy
Maniko teamed up with Kayzen and Unity to harness the power of programmatic mobile marketing and implement a full-funnel attribution solution. They took a two-pronged approach for this: targeting engaged users who play mobile games who matched Maniko's customer profile, as well as implementing mid-funnel retargeting to re-engage interested prospects.
First, Maniko tapped into Unity’s highly engaged mobile gaming audiences. The immersive nature of gaming apps, specifically casual games, provided an opportunity to reach users in an attentive mindset primed for memorable ad experiences. Further, with people spending more time with in-app games than ever before, Maniko recognized mobile games as a promising channel to connect with potential customers in their everyday environments.
Second, Kayzen’s Video+and Smart Ad Sequencing solutions allowed Maniko to reach, segment, and retarget users at different stages of the conversion funnel. By showing full-screen video ads (up to 120 seconds), followed by custom, interactive ad experiences such as quizzes and product galleries (swipeable carousel units that highlight multiple Maniko products), Maniko captured audience attention. They further segmented each audience based on engagement and retargeted users to push them down the marketing funnel, ultimately driving more engagement and conversions.
Unlocking a New Customer Acquisition Channel
The results were striking. Over the course of the campaign, Kayzen and Unity’s programmatic solution generated 13.6M impressions and sent 1.9M unique users to Maniko's e-commerce site. Kayzen’s Video+ ad format (a two-stage ad format that combines the impact and engagement of fullscreen video (= stage 1), with the focus and granular attribution of a traditional performance campaign via an interactive end card (= stage 2), proved to be exceptionally impactful as they yielded 40% higher conversion rates compared to static formats. Furthermore, Maniko found positive improvement in ROAS as well as finding that 19 out of 20 new customers attributed to Kayzen’s Video+ ads were purely incremental, which means they would not have discovered and purchased Maniko’s nail polish if they hadn’t been exposed to these ads via Kayzen.
Kayzen and Unity ultimately unlocked a powerful new customer acquisition channel for Maniko- allowing Maniko to cost-effectively reach and engage almost two million new customers through programmatic experiences.
