How elk Engineered a 44% Lift in New Customers for Bruce Bolt During BFCM
- Paid Media, Paid Social
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Results
+44%
New Customer Purchases on Google
8.7x
ROAS with 65% New Customers on Meta
101%
of Revenue Goal
Overview
Bruce Bolt is a premium sports equipment brand known for its exceptionally high-quality leather products across several athletic verticals. While the brand is best known for its presence in baseball and softball, it has also expanded into golf and other categories. The company has built a strong reputation for craftsmanship, durability, and performance, which positions it as a premium choice for competitive athletes.
Bruce Bolt partnered with elk Marketing to support long-term and sustainable growth. The goal was to move beyond revenue plateaus caused by relying heavily on existing customers and create meaningful year-over-year expansion through stronger paid media, audience development, and acquisition-focused strategies.
Challenge
Despite its strong product reputation and loyal repeat purchasers, Bruce Bolt struggled to grow its new customer base. Most revenue was coming from returning customers, which created a natural limit to year-over-year growth. Prior to partnering with ELK, the brand did not have a scalable or efficient acquisition engine. As a result, they faced several challenges including:
- Limited top-of-funnel reach
- Slower new customer acquisition
- Over-reliance on repeat buyers
- Higher acquisition costs during key promotional periods.
Heading into the Black Friday and Cyber Monday season, the brand needed a more strategic approach that could strengthen seasonal performance and also address the larger need for expanding the customer base.
Solution
Meta Strategy: Acquisition-First Redesign
- Audience Restructuring: Segmented new, engaged, and existing audiences to track incrementality accurately.
- True Prospecting Campaigns: Built around excluding all prior customers to isolate net-new demand.
- Creative Depth for Scale: High volume of concepts and variations to avoid fatigue and enable spend scaling.
BFCM Meta Highlights
Achieved an in-platform ROAS of 8.7x
65% of attributed conversions were from new customers
Acquisition cost remained low despite increased competition
Supported by robust attribution reporting (Triple Whale, Linear Payback, Meta)
- Account Restructure: Created clear separation between brand and non-brand across Search, Shopping, and PMax.
- Prospecting Campaigns: Non-brand efforts focused on demand generation, not capture.
- Sustained Investment: Maintained always-on prospecting to build retargeting pools pre-BFCM.
- Scalable Growth: Investment increased 122%, while efficiency remained strong even with broader audience reach.
Performance Highlights
New customer purchases increased 43.8% from summer to fall
ROAS normalized from 24.84x → 13.63x due to shift toward prospecting
Google Ads attributed to strong BFCM performance across models (in-platform + Triple Whale)
Results
Bruce Bolt entered BFCM with a loyal customer base but limited acquisition infrastructure. Through elk’s strategic overhaul of Meta and Google Ads, the brand successfully transitioned from a retention-heavy model to a scalable, acquisition-focused engine. The results validated the shift toward incrementality, audience precision, and full-funnel coordination.
By using attribution models beyond platform ROAS—such as Triple Whale and Linear Payback—ELK ensured that the growth wasn’t just surface-level performance, but true incremental lift. The campaigns were able to scale spend intelligently, maintain efficiency, and—most importantly—generate high-value first-time customers during the most competitive shopping period of the year.
Key Outcomes
43.8%
increase in new customer purchases
122%
increase in Google Ads investment
65%
of Meta revenue during BFCM
Paid media
surpassed BFCM revenue targets
