Partner Spotlight: SMCA Creative's Strategy for Guided Ecommerce Growth with Octane AI

For many growing ecommerce brands, the hardest part isn't building a great product.

It's helping customers understand why it's worth trying in the first place—before they ever click “buy.”

That's where SMCA Creative comes in.

Led by founder and CMO Steve Murray, SMCA Creative works closely with ecommerce brands to improve conversion and grow revenue through practical strategies that drive real performance.

The agency assists both B2C and B2B brands across various industries. They also serve categories like beauty and hair care, where customers cannot physically try products before buying. In such cases, growth relies on more than just advertising. Brands require clear positioning, effective demand generation, and tools to help customers make confident, informed choices.

To address this challenge, SMCA Creative began to lean into a more personalized approach to discovery.

The team introduced quiz-driven experiences that help shoppers understand their needs, clarify intent, and move toward the product that fits them best.

The core problem SMCA Creative helps brands solve

Some of the brands SMCA Creative supports are still in their early growth stages.

They are building recognition and working toward consistent, organic demand to attract customers sustainably.

“The problem is not how you run ads. The problem is how do you stimulate demand and create mass interest for a challenger brand.”

–Steve Murray, Founder & CMO, SMCA Creative

Without that demand, even well-executed campaigns struggle to convert. Customers aren't just deciding where to purchase—they're deciding whether the product is worth trying at all. Trust and clarity are the real starting point for growth, especially for challenger brands introducing a product into a saturated market.

Challenger brands must create belief before conversion

In many emerging categories, visibility alone is not enough. Customers first need to understand what a product does, why it matters, and why it will solve their problem better than other similar products.

Without that clarity, awareness rarely turns into conversion. Helping customers feel confident before purchase becomes the real challenge SMCA Creative is brought in to solve.

Beauty products are harder to sell online

This challenge is especially pronounced in beauty and other sensory categories, where customers cannot physically experience the product before purchase.

“With products that are appealing to your senses that you can’t use online, like smell, touch, or taste, you typically need a way to try that product without having risk.”

–Steve Murray, Founder & CMO, SMCA Creative

Shoppers cannot see texture, smell scent, or immediately judge results through a screen. Without a clear bridge between curiosity and confidence, hesitation becomes the default, and conversion slows before the journey truly begins.

Guided education and discovery, therefore, become essential. They create a path that helps customers understand the problem they are solving and why a product is right for them before purchase.

What changed after SMCA implemented Octane AI

Quizzes didn't replace SMCA Creative's core growth channels. They strengthened them.

Most brands still come to the agency for performance foundations such as Meta ads, Google Ads, and conversion-optimized websites—systems built to drive traffic and turn attention into revenue. But traffic alone isn't enough if customers don't feel confident in what to choose next.

That's where guided discovery becomes essential inside the broader strategy.

Over time, several principles have emerged that consistently shape how quiz-driven strategies perform across the brands SMCA Creative supports.

1. Discovery creates a low-risk starting point

Trying something new, especially in beauty, can feel uncertain. Instead of forcing an immediate purchase, the experience begins with alignment.

“Customers end up getting a free product that’s in alignment with what they want to try, and then if they like it, they pay for it later.”

–Steve Murray, Founder & CMO, SMCA Creative

That early reassurance lowers resistance at the very beginning of the journey and turns hesitation into willingness to engage.

2. Brands gained clearer insight into what each customer needed

Before a recommendation can be helpful, the brand must understand its customers.

Because the quiz captures preferences and likely behaviors upfront, brands can move beyond assumptions and respond to real signals. This allows them to deliver the right product experience from the start, rather than asking the shopper to figure it out on their own.

3. Shoppers no longer felt stuck choosing between products

Sometimes the issue isn't traffic, creative, or even price. It's uncertainty.

“If customers are questioning, will this product work for me? That’s the perfect time to implement a quiz. Customers want to be sure your cleanser will get rid of their acne, or if your moisturizer softens 4C hair… they want to know the result works on their specific problem.”

–Steve Murray, Founder & CMO, SMCA Creative

Guided discovery replaces that uncertainty with direction, helping customers move forward confidently rather than leaving mid-decision.

4. Discovery began supporting long-term revenue, not just first purchases

The value of the quiz doesn't stop at the first interaction. What begins as a qualification becomes the foundation for everything that follows.

From sampling to repeat-purchase behavior, early insight enables brands to build relationships that evolve with the customer, turning a single moment of discovery into long-term growth infrastructure.

Over time, personalization stops being a tactic and becomes part of how the business operates.

Measurable impact for clients

For SMCA Creative, the impact of guided discovery shows up directly in performance, not just strategy.

In its work with Florae Beauty, introducing a quiz-driven entry point helped reduce customer acquisition cost by approximately 43%, creating a more efficient path from first interaction to purchase.

That improvement reflects broader changes across the buying journey.

By qualifying shoppers before they reach checkout and aligning them with the right product earlier, brands gain stronger efficiency throughout the funnel and can better identify high purchase intent shoppers rather than sample hunters.

Key outcomes include:

• More effective new customer acquisition through personalized entry points
• Better qualification before purchase, reducing wasted traffic
• More sustainable revenue growth for challenger brands, still building demand

Rather than relying solely on increased ad spend, the quiz reshapes how conversion happens, turning early discovery into long-term efficiency and creating a stronger foundation for continued growth.

What strong partnerships make possible

“Choose a strategic growth partner rather than a task manager. It’s important to find partners that initiate solutions rather than identify problems.”

–Steve Murray, Founder & CMO, SMCA Creative

For SMCA Creative, results don't come from tools alone. They come from partnerships that make execution faster, simpler, and more aligned from the start.

Clear onboarding, hands-on setup support, and fast troubleshooting shorten the distance between idea and impact—for both the agency and the brands it serves.

That same philosophy shapes how SMCA Creative thinks about agency relationships more broadly.

For brands choosing a partner, real operator experience and genuine investment in outcomes matter more than surface-level credentials.

When that alignment exists, growth becomes easier to sustain, and the work extends far beyond a single campaign or channel.

Turning guided discovery into lasting growth

What SMCA Creative's work ultimately shows is that quizzes aren't just another lead capture tactic.

They reshape how demand is created, how customers discover products, and how brands build trust from the very first interaction.

Instead of treating acquisition and personalization as separate efforts, guided discovery connects the two, turning early questions into meaningful insights that can shape the entire customer journey.

With Octane AI, that insight becomes scalable. Zero-party data collected through quizzes can power more personalized recommendations, smarter acquisition strategies, and lifecycle marketing that adapts to what each customer actually needs.

The result is a shift from short-term performance tactics toward something more durable: customer journeys that learn, respond, and improve over time.

For agencies and brands looking to create that kind of growth, the next step is simple—explore how personalized quiz funnels can clarify discovery, lower acquisition costs, and build stronger relationships from the start.

Book a demo to see Octane AI in action.