Case Study
Wpromote worked with Hibbett to level up their approach to ad creative and better speak to their target audience, stop thumbs on social platforms, and drive full-funnel direct response, resulting in a net profit increase.
Their Story
Since 1945, Hibbett has been on a mission to be the nation’s go-to sporting goods retailer, offering footwear to everyone from long-distance trail runners and professional athletes to casual exercise enthusiasts. Hibbett is now a major hub for sporting goods across 1,100 stores in 36 states, featuring 30+ trusted brands, including Nike, Jordan, Adidas, New Balance, and Puma.
The Challenge
As Hibbett’s online business grew into a significant source of revenue, the retailer partnered with Wpromote to build a performance strategy for social media that wouldn’t just drive awareness but also position the brand as the one-stop shop to buy products from top sporting brands.
In Q2 of 2022, multiple headwinds hit the social media ecosystem, resulting in a perfect storm of marketing issues, including rapid increases in cost-per-acquisition (CPA) and cost-per-click (CPC) as well as dips in social media ad engagement rates on Snapchat, Instagram, and Meta.
Wpromote’s team moved quickly to analyze and identify the cause of the problem, zeroing in on the creative. A one-size-fits-all approach to creative across segments and platforms resulted in audiences seeing the same creative assets again and again, intensifying profit losses in the face of rising platform inefficiencies. Profitability quickly became the central way the team would measure creative success.
The Solution
The Wpromote team worked with Hibbett to put together a brand-new, data-driven creative strategy to get Hibbett’s social performance back on track. The goal was to increase Hibbett’s profitability at a lower cost by deploying net-new creative carefully crafted for specific target audiences featuring unique visuals, personalized messaging, and an updated landing page strategy.
We experimented extensively with new creative assets in both head-to-head and A/B tests. In the upper funnel, top-performing ads introduced new audiences to Hibbett’s value proposition and emphasized best-selling products and established brand names. Down the funnel, visuals featuring one product at a time paired with a simple, repeating message in the creative copy were 200% better at stopping the scroll. We also found product visuals could be amplified with motion graphics to increase clickthrough rates, add-to-carts, and purchases.
Our team discovered that the most effective ads incorporated a mix of branded and ways-to-shop messaging that introduced audiences to Hibbett and focused on delivering a peace-of-mind shopping experience by highlighting features like free shipping, 60-day returns, and package insurance. That mix helped incentivize new customers to make low-risk first purchases and built up trust in the brand.
We also tailored creatives to specific platforms, especially when it came to Snapchat. We deployed content that felt organic to the platform in bottom-funnel campaigns, resulting in gains that contributed significantly to full-funnel ROAS improvements and drove continued expansion of the Snapchat strategy.
Channels + Services
Driving Efficiency and Revenue With Creative
Wpromote partnered with Hibbett to revamp the brand’s creative strategy across the funnel, resulting in significantly higher return on ad spend and increased efficiencies across channels.
