Building Social Trust Through User-Generated Content

American Hat Makers needed paid social creative that felt native to the feed without losing the quality and character of its hats.

American Hat Makers

Key Results

Services: eCommerce, Paid Social, Facebook, Instagram

Improvement in Link CTR

21%

Improvement in ROAS

28%

Improvement in CPA

5%

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. The videos were well suited to 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 rather than traditional actors and spokespeople. Our goal was to help American Hat Makers develop UGC that relayed the quality and attractiveness of its hats while building the brand through relatable voices.

Our Solution

Because American Hat Makers had never deployed UGC before, we built the program from scratch. We identified:

  • Outfit styling videos
  • Unboxings
  • Beach lifestyle content
  • Product or online-shopping concepts

We worked with our creative partner network to produce examples for both men and women, then began testing which ads would inspire engagement from American Hat Makers’ audience.

We tested the videos across Facebook and Instagram, with most of the budget devoted to prospecting rather than retargeting. The ads went live to a broad audience to give us the clearest indication of how the creative would perform. Creative that performs well with a wider audience is likely to deliver the same or better results for narrower audiences based on lookalikes, stacked interests, or retargeting.

The Results

Compared with the previous commercial-style content, the UGC-centric ads delivered stronger performance across link click-through rate, cost per acquisition, and return on ad spend:

Better link click-through rate (CTR)

21%

Improvement in cost per acquisition (CPA)

5%

Improvement in return on ad spend (ROAS) over previous media

28%

The ad with the strongest ROAS was an unboxing video featuring two different women’s straw hat styles.

Woman wearing a navy cowboy hat from American Hat Makers

Let’s Work Together

Get in touch with our team today to see how we can take your marketing to the next level.
Need an expert now?  Call 1-866-647-9218

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