A premium virtual digital instruments creator partnered with me to lead paid social creative strategy during their Black Friday sales period, with the objective of improving performance efficiency and driving incremental revenue during a highly competitive trading window.

While the brand had established strong recognition through brand-led creative, their paid social activity had historically lacked differentiation across audience personas and funnel stages. During previous Black Friday campaigns, this resulted in an over-reliance on awareness-focused messaging, limiting the ability to fully convert high-intent demand during the sale period.

The Challenge

In the run-up to Black Friday, the brands paid social campaigns was primarily driven by brand-led creative designed to build affinity and awareness. While effective for top-of-funnel engagement, this approach did not sufficiently support mid- and bottom-of-funnel audiences actively considering a purchase during the sale period.

Key challenges included:

• Limited creative differentiation across funnel stages

• Underutilisation of high-intent audiences during peak trading moments

• Inefficient allocation of budget across personas with varying levels of purchase intent

With Meta as the sole channel for the campaign, creative strategy needed to do more of the heavy lifting, ensuring messaging aligned not just to the audience, but to where users sat within the customer journey.

The Solution

To address this, I introduced a funnel-led creative strategy built around defined audience personas and intent stage.

Rather than treating Black Friday as a single creative moment, the campaign was structured to support top-, mid-, and bottom-of-funnel audiences with tailored messaging and formats designed to meet users at different decision points.

Key elements of the approach included:

• Persona-informed creative allocation
  Budget was allocated more effectively across key personas based on intent and performance, ensuring higher-intent audiences received appropriate creative support during the sale period.

• Mid- and bottom-of-funnel creative development
  Alongside brand-led assets, the strategy introduced social proof-driven formats, reaction-style videos, and credibility-led messaging designed to reduce friction and support conversion.

• Creative variety aligned to funnel stage
  Creative execution was diversified to reflect user mindset at each stage of the funnel, enabling Meta’s delivery system to optimise more effectively based on real audience response.

This structured approach ensured creative was no longer operating in isolation, but as part of a broader system designed to convert demand efficiently during a critical commercial window.

The Results

The Black Friday campaign delivered significantly stronger performance than targets.

• ROAS outperformed targets by 75%

• 26% increase in sales year-on-year, despite a lower overall spend compared to the previous Black Friday period, which had been run by another partner

Beyond short-term performance gains, this funnel-led creative structure has since been adopted as the foundation for the brands ongoing paid social activity and future sales periods.

This work demonstrated the impact of combining persona-led insight with funnel-aware creative strategy, reinforcing the importance of system-level creative thinking when scaling performance during high-intent moments.

Looking for similar results for your brand? Contact me to explore how creative strategy can transform your paid social performance and drive meaningful, measurable results for your business.