Decrease in Subscriber Acquisition Cost

SUMMARY

A B2B Media Organization in the healthcare space was looking to grow a publication vertical that had a small initial audience - an audience not large enough to sell advertising campaigns against - as well as promote for industry events. Previous efforts to use paid media channels to acquire subscribers netted an average subscriber acquisition cost of $40.

The challenge was to scale acquisition efforts by beating a target acquisition of $30 per subscriber.

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THE PROBLEM

• New publication vertical with a limited audience
• Current acquisition efforts were expensive with little brand recognition
• Reliance on 3rd party targeting made it difficult to target their primary audience

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THE CHALLENGE

• Using existing paid media strategies without completely reinventing the wheel
• Being in the B2B space left platforms without robust B2B targeting such as Facebook difficult to get in front of the right audience
• The vertical needed a reliable acquisition strategy that could scale in order to create a profitable audience

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LEVERAGE LAB SOLUTION

At Leverage Lab, we take an audience-first approach with our Infinite Customer Journey model when it comes to audience acquisition.

Before we defined the creative or the messaging, we looked at the audience we had access to and the audience we needed to get in front of and then determined how to reach that specific audience given the platform we were promoting.

In this situation, the two platforms we were working with were Facebook and LinkedIn.

Linkedin

LinkedIn is regarded as the best social media platform for B2B targeting and it’s where a lot of B2B media companies gravitate to for audience development efforts.

We worked with our data partners to curate an account-based marketing (ABM) list of users who held a position of director or higher at target companies that matched specific SIC codes.

The firmographic targeting LinkedIn provides simply isn’t enough. You can only target companies of certain audience and follower sizes Job titles and seniority targeting are either incomplete, inaccurate, or outdated

With the current number of subscribers of that vertical only around 1,000, we were able to create a target list of over 3,000 companies. Of those over 3,000 companies, we extracted over 50,000 names and emails of employees and owners who had seniority of a director or higher.

Instead of only generating a list of users based on LinkedIn’s targeting criteria, we supplied our own carefully curated list of prospects to LinkedIn to target. We combined this with LinkedIn’s native ability to target relevant groups and their own lookalike modeling for the current 1,000 subscribers.

Doing so resulted in subscriber acquisition costs of under $15 per subscriber

Facebook

Facebook produced even more of a challenge. Most B2B advertisers skip Facebook as the platform doesn’t have very good B2B targeting criteria.

Facebook lookalike audiences are generally not helpful as well since lookalike models in Facebook are rooted in demographics and interests rather than firmographics and job experience like LinkedIn.

However, at Leverage Lab, we believe in the power of using audiences and being where the audience is regardless of the platform. Facebook’s active audience is 3.5x the size of LinkedIn’s and the majority of LinkedIn users also have and use Facebook more often.

Being on Facebook is paramount.

In order to ensure we were targeting the right audience, we first used the same audience we used on LinkedIn. That generated a portion of the targetable users but our total audience size was significantly smaller than that of LinkedIn.

We couldn’t create a lookalike model in Facebook based off of the existing 1,000 subscribers because Facebook won’t prioritize firmographic information in its lookalike model.

Instead, we used our data partner and created a firmographic lookalike model from the 1,000 users for a total targetable lookalike audience of 30,000 additional users.

With both audiences added to Facebook and the combination of using first-party web audiences from matched first-party cookies on the website for retargeting, we were able to...

hyper-target over 100,000 highly relevant users on Facebook resulting in an incredibly low subscriber acquisition cost of $5 per subscriber

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RESULTS & OUTCOMES

Our client had an expectation that a B2B media company’s primary paid acquisition channel would be LinkedIn. They also had a goal of substantially growing their new vertical’s audience size to a profitable number. Working with us, we were able to not only crush the expected subscriber acquisition costs, but also prove the viability of an omni- channel acquisition approach.

Problem: New publication vertical with limited audience

Solution: Leverage the ideal top-of-funnel audience criteria and our data partners to curate a hyper-targeted list of valuable subscriber prospects.

Problem: Current acquisition efforts were expensive with little brand recognition

Solution: Understanding that value is relative to the targeted audience. High value to a broad audience produces mediocre results but high value to a niche and highly targeted audience produces exceptional results.

Problem: Reliance on 3rd party targeting made it difficult to target their primary audience

Solution: We utilized platforms’ targeting strengths and recognized where targeting options were limited to combine our own audiences with what the platform offers to secure a total subscriber acquisition cost of $7.50/subscriber, beating the previous acquisition costs by 80% less.