Turning a checkout-aisle product into a category TikTok couldn't stop talking about
US Grocery Retailer
The Challenge
This client is one of the biggest names in American grocery.
A member of the Fortune 500 list.
Decades of scale, national advertising, Super Bowl airtime, and category-defining partnerships. On the surface, nothing about the brand looked like it needed help getting noticed.
But their search volumes for gift cards, one of the most valuable parts of their business, were declining. The team's instinct was that their audience was simply shrinking.
That instinct was wrong.
The retailer sells gift cards for practically everything: streaming services, restaurants, travel, gaming, entertainment, even other retailers, alongside fuel points and loyalty rewards attached to every purchase. In the US, this isn't a small display by the tills. It's aisles of products. The category mattered commercially, and it was being left to compete purely on Google.
To grow, the retailer didn't need more visibility in the same place. It needed to understand where the buying journey had actually moved to, and get discoverable there before competitors worked it out.
Turning a checkout-aisle product into a category TikTok couldn't stop talking about
The Insight
The insight was simple: the audience hadn't gone anywhere. The retailer just wasn't looking for them in the right places.
Google showed around 30,000 monthly searches for gift cards. TikTok showed 15 million monthly views on gift card content, before even accounting for hashtag reach. That gap wasn't a content problem. It was a discoverability problem, and it pointed squarely at a younger audience the retailer had never properly targeted.
"One of the things that blew them away when we started talking to them was: we've always focused on Google, that's 30,000 searches a month for gift cards alone. If you look at TikTok, it's 15 million, and that's on top of hashtags," says Laura Smales, Client Services Director at Rise at Seven.
"Your audience isn't declining online. You're just not targeting them in the right areas. You're not following where your audience is going, because they're a bit of an older generation audience."
This also wasn't just about gift cards as a product. It was about budgeting behaviour. A younger, more financially cautious shopper was using gift cards to manage spend and stack rewards, buying one for a coffee run or a streaming subscription and picking up fuel points and bonus offers along the way. That behaviour was happening entirely outside the retailer's own channels.
Google told them demand was falling. TikTok told a different story: 15 million monthly views on gift card content, and none of it was theirs.
The Strategy
Our strategy was to build category ownership of gift cards and gifting, not through the retailer's own branded TikTok (which stuck to recipe content), but through native creator partnerships that could move at the speed the platform demanded.
Rather than one campaign, we built a full strategic playbook covering paid, on-site and organic activity across every quarter, tying content to seasonal spending moments: holiday gifting, back-to-school, Valentine's Day, new game launches, and seasonal food and drink trends like autumn coffee runs. Each quarter, we identified which gift card subcategory (food and drink, travel, gaming, tech, entertainment, cash) had the strongest search and cultural momentum and built creator content around it.
This paired creativity with search data in a way the retailer hadn't seen before. It moved them from long-form, on-site content to short-form, platform-native storytelling, without abandoning the SEO foundations that still mattered.
"I think it was the way we paired creativity with search data," Laura explains. "If you think back to what was being done before, it was content, reams and reams of it on site. Content is king used to be the old quote. Whereas this showed that you can do short-form content, different formats, and different platforms. It was a whole new world to them, and it really helped."
We didn't just build content. We built content into the moments and platforms where the buying journey was already happening.
The How
We partnered with creators to produce content that looked and felt native to TikTok, not like advertising. Early tests proved the concept fast: a trend-led "get ready with me" format tied to gift cards as a way to fund the outfit generated enough traction to justify scaling the whole programme.
From there, we built a repeatable engine:
- Seasonal creator content, briefed against what was culturally relevant each quarter, from Thanksgiving food runs to Valentine's self-care hauls
- A deliberately unbranded approach, letting creators tell real stories about using gift cards for budgeting, rewards and fuel points rather than producing scripted ads
- Full UTM tracking on every piece, so the retailer's team could see exactly how much traffic each creator and each moment drove
- Paid social layered on top of organic, concentrating spend around key promotional windows to extend reach beyond the creator's own following
- Supporting digital PR, securing national coverage (including USA Today) around cultural moments like National Chicken Wing Day
- Proof that presence wasn't a prerequisite for reach: one of the strongest-performing creators was based in a city where the retailer has no physical stores, and his content still ranks for gift card searches today
"He was based in Boston, so he wasn't even in a location where [the retailer] had stores. They don't have any stores in Boston," Laura says. "But because we were driving traffic to the website, where you can buy instant gift cards, you didn't have to go into a store to purchase them. We proved the concept: it's not about where you're physically present. We're growing awareness in areas where you don't have a presence, but still driving purchases, because there are no limitations on buying gift cards online."
The Conclusion
The results
The results speak for themselves:
- 38 creator videos live across 2025, reaching 6.9 million people
- 16,800 likes and 1,392 saves on organic content, alongside consistently positive brand sentiment in the comments
- 115,000 sessions driven from organic and paid social between July and December 2025
- An estimated 920 conversions and $161,000 in revenue from social-driven creator activity in that same window
- 408,000 paid video views and 2.3 million paid reach across the year, at a 1.55% click-through rate, against $56,500 in paid spend
- Creator content ranking organically in Google search results for both branded and competitor gift card terms, including Netflix, DoorDash and McDonald's gift cards
Commercially, this mattered because it proved a category leader doesn't have to rely on Google alone to hold its position. The retailer captured revenue and rewards-programme engagement from a demographic it had been losing to platforms it didn't understand, without needing months of traditional SEO buildup. Content that would have taken three to six months to rank on Google was appearing in search results within a week of going live on TikTok, during the exact seasonal windows when spend was happening.
The takeaway
This is what the search-first strategy does best.
It's not about picking a platform. It's about finding where a category's real search demand is happening and building the content, creators and signals to own it before a competitor does.
For this retailer, the work turned a quiet decline in Google visibility into a fast-moving, multi-platform gift card presence, one that's still compounding: creator content from over a year ago is still ranking and driving traffic today.
"Pairing creativity with search data proves you can add value, and the speed at which you can do it," says Laura. "We identified a gap that even the biggest competitors weren't closing in that space, with that social content. And it was a low investment too, compared to paid. With AI now, and seeing the influence social can have on that, I think it's so important to make sure you've got those bases covered."
