How The Entrepreneurship Academy Boosts their ROAS 5x With Paid Advertising
The Challenge
Here's a brain-twister for you: our client was grappling with a lead generation that was as inconsistent as British weather. Imagine trying to hold a seminar on entrepreneurship, and your audience is just tumbleweeds and echoes. Not ideal, right? Plus, they were flying blind without any conversion tracking. It's like trying to hit a piñata blindfolded... in a hurricane.
The Solution
What did we do? Rolled up our sleeves and drafted a plan as sharp as a Hugo Boss suit. This wasn't just any plan—it showed where every penny of the media budget was going, per program. We forecasted, set goals, and—because we’re thorough like that—threw in some fancy automation and conversion tracking to make sure the sales team wasn’t just shooting the breeze.
Step-by-step Implementation
Set-Up & Planning
First off, we mapped out a media buying plan. It’s crucial to know where your treasure is buried, right? The client told us their profit margins per program and their dreams of attendee numbers. Armed with historical data, benchmarks, and marketing experience, I whipped up KPIs and goals that didn’t just aim high—they aimed right.
Strategy & Audience
Persona Identification
We didn’t just make personas; we crafted them in a workshop using 28 dimensions of psychographics, demographics, and habits. This detailed persona mapping provided diverse and compelling angles for crafting ad visuals and copy.
Creative Strategy
Our creative approach was tailored to resonate with the defined personas, maintaining the company’s consistent branding while introducing an innovative design element—making the figures in the ads appear as if cut out. This distinctive style differentiated our ads from competitors', capturing greater audience attention. We developed 8 to 10 creative variants per program in three different formats, each offering unique angles.
Tactics & Flow
The primary tactic involved deploying a lead generation campaign for each program, targeting engagers and website visitors to encourage booking calls in subsequent campaign phases. Leads were directed into a yet-to-be-completed automation flow from the advertising platform to the CRM system.
Optimizations
Here’s where we played digital Darwinism, letting only the fittest ads survive. We paused any ad that didn’t pull its weight in CTR or had a CPL that made our wallets cry. The endgame? Four über-performing ads per campaign that kept the leads coming like an endless conveyor belt.
Challenges
Not everything was a walk in the park. We had to play musical chairs with our audience targeting to reduce overlap, which initially made our CPM climb faster than a caffeinated squirrel. But then, genius struck—we revamped the ad copy based on fresh psychographic insights, dropping our CPA by nearly 30%.
Results
Paid Advertising Overview
After shelling out €35,000, our campaigns netted a cool €148,500 with 953 leads, at a cost per lead that’d make Scrooge McDuck nod in approval. And let's not forget the indirect leads—shy little numbers that don’t show up for roll call but count in the grand scheme of things.
The pièce de résistance? One of the programs had a sales conversion rate that needed a pep talk and a CPA wearing stilts. But, with a bit of elbow grease and a strategic nudge, even that turned around.
The most significant variance across the programs was a lower sales conversion rate and a 40% higher CPA in one due to the overly narrow audience targeting.
Your Turn to Shine
Fancy being the next big success story? Guess what: I’ve got room on my dance card. There’s always space for the ambitious. Let's chat, and maybe your story will be the next one I sprinkle my marketing magic on.
