“I always get 500 likes, so why is my sales staying the same?” This was a question asked by the owner of a handmade candle workshop during a consultation. The Instagram account was already solid. The photos were beautiful, and the followers’ reactions were not bad. However, new customers remained stuck in the same spot. Likes and comments were circulating only within the existing followers, unable to take even a single step beyond that.
The owner had never even considered advertising as an option. “I was too scared to even start because I was afraid I’d just waste the advertising money.” He distanced himself further whenever he heard stories from others who had spent hundreds of thousands of won without seeing results. However, upon closer inspection, the problem was not the advertising itself, but the lack of standards regarding who to show what and how. There were clearly things that needed to be sorted out before the budget was spent.
In the first consultation with Mrs. Lauren, questions came before numbers. “Who are the customers who buy the most candles right now?” The owner could not answer clearly. From that point on, the process of redesigning the advertisement from scratch began over two months, and three changes were made in the process.
3 changes made with Mrs. Lauren
Change 1. Redrew the target audience first.
The first thing we did was stop the "Show to Everyone" feature. Previously, the ads were broadly targeted only by age and region, but upon re-examining the purchase data, we found that actual buyers were concentrated among "working women in their 30s who take care of themselves after work." We narrowed the audience by overlapping interest, recent behavior, and lookalike data, and tested three audience groups simultaneously with a limited budget.
The results changed in just one week. While the cost per click for the widely distributed ads remained the same, the cost per click for the narrowed audience dropped noticeably, and the conversion rate to inquiries increased. The owner said, "I just decided who to show it to, and it feels like I'm spending my money differently.".
Change 2. Changed advertising materials to 'language that sells'.
We used the photos as they were, but completely rewrote the text. Instead of descriptions like “It is a candle with a nice scent,” we changed them to sentences that depict the moment the customer would actually experience, such as “10 minutes after work, this single scent brings closure to the day.” We ran two versions of the same photo side-by-side, with only the text changed, to compare which words actually elicited a response.
Ads featuring the new wording saw a significant increase in saves and shares compared to before. The owner cited this as the most significant change, stating, “I used to only try to explain my product, but I never depicted the moments customers wanted.”.
Change 3. Developed a habit of checking performance every week.
The final change was to leave the ads running so I wouldn't forget about them. I established a routine to briefly check clicks, inquiry conversions, and budget depletion rates at the same time every week on the same day. I also created a checklist so that I could immediately replace creatives or adjust the audience if the numbers started to fluctuate.
At first, the boss felt burdened even by the numbers, but after a few weeks, he began to decide on his own, "Saves increased this week, so I should push this creative more." Advertising was no longer a task to "leave alone and feel anxious about," but rather a task to "check and adjust every week.".
After undergoing three transformations, the CEO said, “It wasn’t advertising itself that was scary, but using it without standards.” Rather than teaching grandiose advertising theories, Mrs. Lauren works with clients to find the safest way to start with their current budget and content. Starting small and growing based on data—that is the first step in advertising that we believe in.