Tapping Into Smaller Audiences to Drive Big Results for Dickies
Written by Matt Vermeyen, Paid Social Manager; Maddie Martin, Social Media Strategist; and Meg Papanastassiou, Associate Director of Marketing & Growth
Holiday is crowded. Rather than brute-force spend, Dickies leaned into creator content that felt authentic and used paid amplification to drive product conversions and build brand affinity. The result: Dickies’ top-performing boosted campaign of 2025, even with a shortened flight.
Approach
1) Develop a relationship-led influencer network to cast creators
Backbone has put in the work to curate a network of more than 1,000 creator and influencer partners, which means for brand campaigns, we’re not starting from scratch on brand alignment, workflow, or content expectations. This consistency helps us move fast, negotiate efficiently, and keep quality high.
For this campaign, we worked with six creators, five of which were already a part of our network.
2) Prioritize brand alignment, not audience size
We hand selected creators who could tell a story and integrate product seamlessly into their lives because the best-performing holiday ads don’t look like ads. The strongest results were driven by creators with the smallest organic audiences, reinforcing the creative did the heavy lifting, not audience size.
3) Use paid as a multiplier
We boosted top creator assets across Meta and TikTok and weighted spend toward Meta (60/40 Meta/TikTok) to maximize conversion performance while still leveraging TikTok’s efficiency and traffic-driving strength.
4) Leverage campaign moments to curate a library for organic social
In addition to the paid influencer campaign, we used this holiday initiative to develop Dickies’ organic social presence by contracting content creators to provide assets for owned channels.
Results
Despite being paused early after 13 days with a $17K spend, the campaign was Dickies’ strongest conversion performance and efficiency of any boosted campaign in 2025
- 8% Effectiveness Rate (total engagements / reach)
- 6.9M Views
- 391K Engagements
