AMERICAN HAT MAKERS
Building Social Trust Through User-Generated Content
21%
Improvement in Link CTR
28%
Improvement in ROAS
5%
Improvement in CPA
Services
21%
Improvement in Link CTR
28%
Improvement in ROAS
5%
Improvement in CPA
Services
The Challenge
For 50 years, American Hat Makers has been a leading maker of high-quality, iconic hats. But even with a great product, it isn’t always easy to deliver a compelling sales message through paid social media ads.
Much of American Hat Makers’ existing social video ad inventory was professional and well-polished—perfectly suited for platforms like YouTube, but likely to look out of place on social media. Social users expect to see user-generated content (UGC), which uses real (or real-seeming) customers to deliver their message rather than traditional actors and spokespeople. Our goal was to help AHM develop and deliver UGC that both relayed the quality and attractiveness of their hats and built brand by featuring relatable voices.
Our Solution
Because American Hat Makers had never deployed UGC before, ADM had to build a program from scratch. We identified a few key video formats, including: outfit styling videos, unboxings, beach lifestyle content, and product or online-shopping focuses. We leveraged our creative partner network to create examples unique to both men and women. From there, we began testing to determine which ads would inspire engagement from American Hat Makers’ audience.
ADM tested the different sets of videos across both Facebook and Instagram, with the majority of the budget devoted to prospecting rather than retargeting. We pushed the different ads live to a broad audience to get the best indication of how the creative would perform. When creative performs well with a wider audience, it is likely to deliver the same or better results when eventually delivered to more narrow audiences based on lookalikes, stacked interests, or retargeting.
The Results
- Compared to the previous commercial-style content, the UGC-centric ads delivered a 21% better link click-through-rate (CTR).
- Cost-per-acquisition (CPA) improved by 5%.
- Ads featuring this new content style improved return on ad spend (ROAS) by 28% over previous media.
- The ad that delivered the best ROAS was an unboxing video that focused on two different women’s straw hat styles.
Let’s work together.
Get in touch with our team today to see how we can take your marketing to the next level.
