How Smart Marketing and UGC Took a Small Brand to 600% Revenue Growth
About The Brand
This brand was founded with a strong purpose: to offer a healthier and more transparent alternative for pet food in Sweden.
When this Swedish pet food brand approached us, they were making around $10K a month. Their profit margins were low due to high shipping costs across Sweden, and they wanted to scale the company.
In just 3 months, we managed to scale the monthly revenue to $20K. This success stemmed from media buying strategies and high-performing creatives. We conducted deep research to speak directly to their ideal customer and capture attention with hooks in videos and images, creating viral ads. This report covers the marketing strategy behind this growth and the results it produced.
The Challenges
When the Swedish pet food brand came to us, they had a one-person marketing team who managed to get the brand to about $10K a month.
At that time, their monthly ad spend was around $4K with a ROAS of 1.6. By improving the analytics setup, creatives, and campaign setup in Google Ads and Meta, we almost doubled the ROAS to 2.4. This allowed them to scale store revenue to $20K a month with the same ad budget in 2 months.
With the increased ROAS, the biggest challenge became retention. Only about 10% of buyers subscribed to monthly shipping because the website was not optimized for it. Through the analysis of similar brands in other countries, we realized we could solidify the subscription model and reduce shipping costs by bundling orders.
The Strategy
Strategy #1: UGC Content
The Swedish pet food brand runs a Facebook group where pet owners share their success stories and concerns about their pets’ health. The group is filled with testimonials, pictures, and videos that were invaluable for creating content.
By using user-generated content (UGC), we stayed true to our stance against big corporations and supermarket food, showing that this food was made with pets’ wellbeing in mind. Prospective customers saw how this brand changed the lives of people like them, and the social proof increased conversions.
Instead of focusing solely on product features, we highlighted moving stories from buyers and addressed their pain points and concerns. This approach created an emotional connection to the brand.
However, just using UGC was not enough. We had to organize this content with conversion principles to scale.
Strategy #2: Conversion Principles
When we started, the creatives lacked many conversion principles, such as including a call to action (CTA). We organized all videos according to our proven formula:
- Hook
- Unique Selling Proposition (USP)
- Social Proof Testimonials (User Generated)
- Objection Blocking
- CTA
This collection of high-performing creatives simplified our media buying strategy. We used them in Meta and Google Ads (including YouTube).
Strategy #3: Email Marketing
Having a good brand fan group helped us to create email databases very easily. We created a few automated flows with different targets.
The first was for a relatively cold audience to reassure them about product quality and give them reasons to make their first purchase. The second was for brand fans who were already loyal. We offered them additional products for pet care.
Moreover, we created weekly content with great tips for pet owners. This made a greater impact on retention. We started to see that 60% of our email database made 4 purchases within 5 months.
The Result
As mentioned, when the Swedish pet food brand came to us, they were making around $10K a month. Within just 3 months, we scaled the monthly revenue to $20K. After a 6-month period, we generated $60K a month, representing a 600% increase in monthly revenue.
After the scaling phase, we focused on improving profitability.
The site also experienced a spike in organic traffic from the ‘shadow funnel’, meaning people who did not come directly from ads but googled the brand after seeing ads and hearing recommendations from friends and family.
This increased brand awareness created a strong market presence and will help improve the health of thousands of pets across Sweden.
