GROWTH BEYOND THE COVEN | KILLSTAR

Killstar has historically been a brand that’s grown organically, placing a lot of focus on organic social media content and staying at the forefront of their existing customer base. But as their ranges evolved, so did the opportunity to reach a new audience, which could be effectively targeted through paid media strategies. 

Acting as an extension of Killstar’s team, our challenge was to recruit new customers and incrementally grow the brand by initiating a new audience, which we’d achieve through performance marketing and bolstering their paid social channels. 

Two Distinct Audiences

We started our journey by siloing Killstar’s two main audiences - existing “diehard” customers, and a broader alternative audience who may add Killstar products to their wardrobe, but buy from a wider pool of brands.

These two audiences don't respond to the same message, aren’t drawn to the same products, and react differently to different creatives. Therefore, treating both personas as a single group would have meant diluted creative and wasted spend. So with every launch,  we run two distinct funnels independently, with distinct messaging and creative across Google, Meta, and TikTok. 

Over time, the data did the work for us, as the more we learned about how the two audiences responded to different products, the sharper our lookalike audiences became across Meta and TikTok. It meant that every campaign had more precise targeting than the one before. This also gave us a clearer picture of who our new customers were, and this broader alternative audience emerged as a key growth driver due to them typically spending more than existing customers. 

Building the Funnel

Despite their focus being on organic social media growth, Killstar had been running conversion-focused ad campaigns that were performing well. But without a broader funnel in place, they were working with a limited audience, which put a ceiling on how far conversion activity could scale. Our job as an ecommerce marketing partner was to build on that foundation and give each account more room to grow.

We introduced brand awareness campaign to sit above the existing conversion campaigns, generating warm audiences that would feed into the more conversion-focused ads with better quality signals and at a greater scale, too. Alongside this, we introduced Meta Catalog ads to colder audiences - letting the Killstar product library sell itself.

Throughout, the focus was on incremental growth rather than just account growth. We ensured that we were always getting net new value for the brand, rather than getting existing customers to come back, as Killstar themselves were already set up to succeed here. 

Balancing Territories

A strategic priority throughout our partnership has been growing Killstar's presence in the EU. With revenue in the US being subject to external pressures -  from shifting market conditions to tariff uncertainty - building a more balanced international revenue split was important to the long-term stability of the business. That meant being deliberate about where and how we spent across platforms.

What became clear early on was that Meta, TikTok, and Google weren't interchangeable, but they served different markets in different ways. Meta proved to be the stronger driver of EU growth, while TikTok consistently over-indexed in the US, with the home UK market sitting somewhere in between. Rather than running a uniform strategy across both platforms, we leaned into those differences - prioritising Meta spend in EU territories and using TikTok's reach-focused Smart Performance campaigns where they had the most traction. Managing that split carefully has been central to how we've helped Killstar grow internationally without simply chasing volume in markets that were already performing.