How Hill’s Pet Nutrition Boosted Add-to-Carts by 30% with Creator-Led Strategy

Hill’s Pet Nutrition aimed to break through a crowded and emerging market by driving greater awareness and sales for its specialized line of pet food designed for senior pets.

 

“We wanted to test a new strategy of building a social media‑first campaign by partnering with Retirement House creators to co‑develop concepts that helped connect our senior products to senior pets. We developed creative that was humorous and felt authentic to the language of Reels, which drove consideration and incremental sales, and we’ll continue to focus on social‑first creative in 2025.”
- Amanda Owens, Manager, Social Media Strategy, Hill’s Pet Nutrition

Hill’s Pet Nutrition worked with Trevant to execute a brand-new paid social strategy, leveraging senior-aged creators to authentically connect Hill’s products designed for senior pets to their target audience across Meta, TikTok, Pinterest, and Reddit. Trevant strategically combined Traffic and Sales objectives, aligning closely with Hill’s goals of driving qualified site traffic and increasing purchase intent. Leveraging a mix of mid and lower funnel objectives together, we saw a 30% increase in incremental add-to-cart events.

Hill’s Pet Nutrition delivered engaging social-first video ads that were fresh, entertaining, attention-grabbing, easily understood with audio and text overlays, and rewarding for viewers. The ads appeared authentically in a vertical 9:16 aspect ratio, optimized for mobile viewing. The campaign targeted pet parents, leveraging a mix of 1st party data, lookalikes, and keyword and interest targeting. The team then re-engaged with people who visited the website or interacted with the initial ads to drive lower funnel Add-To-Cart actions and purchase intent.

Through Trevant’s strategic execution and measurement, the campaign reached 23 million pet parents who expressed interest in or had an immediate need for the Senior Vitality product set. Measurement results showed statistically significant lift across every platform, with Meta driving the highest consideration (+8.9 pt) and action intent (+5.5pt) lift overall.

30% increase in incremental add-to-cart events. 6 point lift in ad recall on TikTok. 4.6 point lift in brand awareness on Reddit. 8.9 point lift in consideration on Meta.