Bekdash

Expanding the audience without losing the identity

One of the most important parts of the strategy was broadening Bekdash's customer base without watering down what made it special.

Rather than assuming people already understood items like Arabic ice cream or kunafa, the content leaned into what makes them genuinely exciting to someone seeing them for the first time: the texture, the preparation, the craftsmanship, the atmosphere of trying something new.

The objective was simple. Make someone who had never heard of the product want to try it immediately.

Over time, Bekdash became less dependent on a single core demographic and increasingly positioned itself as a destination for dessert lovers across Tampa Bay.

Paid advertising built around geography

Paid media played a major role in the growth, and it served two different objectives at once rather than running as one generic campaign.

For Bekdash's consumer-facing presence, advertising targeted people in Tampa Bay and the surrounding area, supporting brand awareness, new products, promotions, events, and customer acquisition.

Bekdash also had ambitions beyond Tampa. As the company began exploring franchise expansion, we built separate campaigns targeting the specific cities where Bekdash wanted to attract franchise partners — local campaigns drove store traffic, expansion campaigns built awareness in new markets, and the targeting and creative changed based on which job the advertising was actually doing.

Content was the foundation

SHTROM Creative handled recurring professional content production for the brand: product photography, short-form video, campaign concepts, and a continuous search for new ways to make traditional desserts visually understandable to people who had never seen them before.

For a concept like Bekdash, this mattered more than it might for a typical restaurant. Someone unfamiliar with Middle Eastern desserts may not know a product's name, but they understand stretching cheese, melted chocolate, pistachio, crispy pastry, ice cream being pounded by hand, syrup pouring, dramatic texture, and beautiful presentation. The content sold the experience before the customer ever learned the terminology.

Influencer marketing with the right people

Influencer marketing here was never about sending free product to large accounts. The goal was finding creators whose audience genuinely overlapped with Bekdash's target market, and coordinating collaborations that stayed authentic to each creator's own voice rather than reading like a script.

That approach exposed traditional products to entirely new groups of customers, working as one system alongside paid advertising, organic content, and product launches rather than as a standalone tactic.

We didn't stop at marketing

This is one of the clearest differences between this project and typical agency work. Because we were constantly reading what customers responded to, which products performed, and what content created real demand, we were able to contribute directly to the business rather than only to its marketing.

One of the clearest examples is the Dubai Baklava Ice Cream. SHTROM Creative helped develop and introduce a new product combining Bekdash's ice cream with the rapidly growing demand around Dubai-style desserts. What started as a marketing and product idea became one of Bekdash's strongest sellers — the item has remained a bestseller for nearly two years and continues to be one of the brand's top-performing products today.

Sometimes the best campaign isn't a new advertisement. Sometimes it's helping create something customers genuinely want to buy.

Marketing, operations, and product development together

The work eventually touched multiple sides of the business at once: social media strategy and day-to-day management, professional content production, highly localized paid advertising alongside market-specific franchise campaigns, influencer selection and outreach, brand positioning that moved Bekdash from demographic-specific recognition toward a premium international dessert destination, and product development including the Dubai Baklava Ice Cream.

The number is easy to show — 11,000 to more than 50,000 followers. The more important change happened behind that number. Bekdash evolved from a business known primarily by customers already familiar with Middle Eastern desserts into a brand capable of introducing those products to a far wider market: more recognizable, more approachable, more visually distinctive, and more scalable.