Fabric Social’s ‘Big Bus Tours’ campaign won Gold in Social Paid Social at The Drum Awards, achieving £503K+ revenue with £40K spend in one month, leveraging platform-native, creator-led UGC across 5 cities to drive high-intent traffic.
Fabric Social was challenged to build a cost-efficient global paid social campaign that would drive brand consideration and deliver high-intent traffic to the Big Bus Tours website.
The measurable target: Deliver £400,000 of revenue with £40,000 of spend in one month.
The campaign strategy centered on platform-native, creator-led UGC that highlighted authentic Big Bus Tours experiences across five key cities including London, New York, Paris, Rome, and Chicago. We then ran a lower-funnel retargeting campaign, with 10 assets of repurposed UGC to drive revenue and sales of tickets. The campaign ran on both Instagram and Facebook Meta platforms.
Audience targeting was based on a key insight: 75% of Big Bus Tours tickets are purchased within 48 hours of boarding. This shaped our strategy to focus on geo-targeting audiences in-market or planning travel to specific cities.
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Rather than narrowing by interests or behaviors, we deployed broad, geo-specific targeting to maximize reach while maintaining hyper-relevance. Audiences were served content based on their proximity to tour cities, with creative localized for language, tone, and cultural references.
Timing was a major lever. We worked closely with the client, using historic purchase and travel data to strategically sequence our campaign to align with peak periods of travel demand, local events, and seasonal spikes.
This approach enabled us to:
Our campaign was built around authenticity and creative flexibility. We sourced nano and micro UGC creators from each city to deliver short-form videos in platform-native styles.
Each piece was designed to feel like organic content—not ads. We prioritized relatability, humor, and city-specific details to boost engagement.
Distribution was carefully phased:
Multi-market creator management: Working with creators across time zones and languages posed operational challenges. We addressed this through multilingual creative briefs, structured onboarding, and extra buffer time for revisions and approvals.
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Time-sensitive delivery: Since geo-targeting was scheduled around peak travel moments, late content delivery could have derailed efficiency. We built in redundancies by onboarding more creators than needed and pre-scheduling staggered content drops.
Maximizing impact on a limited budget: Achieving scale and precision on £20k required sharp optimization. We continuously monitored and adjusted campaigns based on real-time CPC/CTR trends, city-level performance, and creative fatigue.
The campaign significantly outperformed expectations:
Our strategy proved not only efficient but scalable. With a hypothetical £100,000 media budget, we could confidently project 1.4M+ clicks at the same CPC.
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This campaign is a masterclass in efficient, effective paid social. With just £40,000 in media, we generated over half a million in revenue and a CPA of just £3.02.
What sets it apart:
We took a modest budget and delivered big brand results, proving that smart strategy and creator-led storytelling can elevate paid social far beyond expectations.
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Fabric Social
We're a world class social creative agency working with brands including Currys, Ocado, Subway, Andrex, Kleenex, Mars, Britvic, Nando's, Big Bus Tours, Mountain...