Ace Resin USA

Key Milestones

Budget Distribution

With the campaign set to last around three months, we didn’t have a lot of time to get the ball rolling. Therefore, we made the decision to distribute the budget unevenly on all platforms. This allowed us to front-load the campaigns to ensure that Google, Meta and LinkedIn could carry out the necessary learning phases as quickly and efficiently as possible. We also knew that towards the end of the campaign, we would be remarketing to some of the audience reached during the initial stages, and so a lower spend would be needed to reach them.

All of this meant that we chose to spend around 45% of the budget in January, 30% in February and 25% in March.

Covering All Customer Bases

When attempting to break America, Ace Resin had three distinct customer bases that they wanted to target. These were homeowners, contractors and architects, and we needed to make sure each had its own strategy.

The inclusion of architects meant that simply reaching people via Facebook and Instagram was not going to be enough. We successfully targeted professionals with jobs like Building Designer or Architect, or who work in industries such as Architecture and Planning, by using LinkedIn ads. This also allowed us to reach decision makers at large contractor businesses, partly covering one of the other customer bases.

To target smaller contractors and homeowners, we developed affinity audiences in Meta based on key demographic options and carried out in-depth keyword research to pinpoint exactly what these people would likely be searching for on Google.

Campaign Flexibility

The fluidity and flexibility of the campaign were its key strengths, allowing us to respond to the results of our tests and maximise performance. We chose to let the data lead us, switching budget to other platforms when we saw stronger performance, increasing the spend on specific campaigns when the cost per lead was low and, in the case of LinkedIn Ads, removing entire platforms from the mix when the results were lower than expected.

Remaining On-Message

Messaging played a key role throughout the campaign, and getting it right was an important part of why it turned out to be successful. One of the first things we needed to consider was that Americans don’t refer to surfacing in the same way as we do in the UK, nor do they use the word ‘drive’ as often as we do. Because of this, we made use of terms like ‘hardscaping’ instead of ‘landscaping’ and broadened the appeal of resin surfaces to cover the whole ‘yard’ and not just the driveway.

There was also a need to vary the messaging to appeal to each of the different customer bases mentioned above. Architects, contractors and homeowners are all interested in different aspects of resin surfacing. We therefore made sure to reference things like the ability for contractors to maximise profits, and resin’s permeability and low-maintenance nature for homeowners. Furthermore, to engage different types of customers, ad headlines, descriptions and accompanying copy contained a mixture of messaging that was either informational or aspirational.

Another consideration related to messaging was that there were two main calls to action that we needed to use – one for contractors and another for homeowners. For contractors who were looking to add resin surfacing to their list of services for clients, we wanted to drive them to visit SiteOne hardware stores, a brand with which Ace Resin had struck a partnership. For homeowners, the call to action was for them to contact Ace Resin for a quote and to be matched with a contractor nearby.

Switching The Focus To Lead Generation

As the campaign went on, we knew there was a point at which we needed to switch the majority of the budget from brand awareness to lead generation. Getting this right would not only maximise the number of conversions we could achieve but also ensure the best return on investment by putting the spend into the correct areas.

With the flexibility and fluidity that we had allowed for all the way through, we reversed the ratio of spend between all brand awareness and lead generation activity. This ultimately propelled the campaign to attain 521 primary leads.

The Role of Remarketing

When we created the campaign roadmap before we started, we knew that remarketing would be added into the mix once we had built up a large enough audience with the brand awareness activity. After the first full month, we had successfully reached a substantial audience with the Meta Ads, and it was time to retarget past website viewers.

At this point, we introduced a new lead-focused social media campaign and a remarketing Display campaign on Google Ads, the latter of which became one of the most successful aspects of the entire campaign. The display campaign was responsible for around 50% of all lead conversions from paid search.

Getting The Most From UGC

As part of the aspirational messaging that we weaved throughout the campaign, we knew it would be powerful to make use of user-generated content on social media. As Ace Resin started to complete the first round of jobs in the US, they produced some excellent images and videos by way of customer testimonials.

By repurposing these assets as paid social ads, we were able to reach thousands of other potential customers and show them what they could also look forward to with a new resin-bound surface.