Purpose
The purpose was to increase new customer acquisition while maintaining an efficient cost per acquisition and a sustainable predicted lifetime value. The campaign objective was to acquire 3,000 new customers at a sustainable cost per new customer acquisition cost. The business goals also included incremental reach growth and scaled media investment.
Deliverables
The assignment included the development and execution of a cross-channel customer acquisition strategy across Meta, Google, YouTube, and TikTok. It included reach saturation analysis, use of a predicted lifetime value model, customer insights analysis, implementation of bid multipliers across six audience tiers, budget calibration using MMM, validation through brand and conversion lift studies, and development of three creative concepts: Smart minds read more, All your interests, and Anywhere, anytime. The creative work was executed across motion, static assets, and creator-led collaborations. The concepts were translated into three ad themes: Interactive, Immediate, and Immersive. A workshop was also held with creative strategists from Meta Platforms to support the social-first content approach.
Evaluation of results
The results exceeded expectations. Incremental reach more than doubled, reaching over 8 million users. The marketing budget was scaled by 75% compared to the same campaign the previous year. New customer acquisition increased by 124% year over year, resulting in more than 5,000 new subscribers. This exceeded the stated goal of 3,000 new customers. The campaign also delivered record digital performance for the company.
Strategic reasoning from brief to execution
The strategic challenge was defined as how to reach more users while maintaining an efficient cost per acquisition and a sustainable predicted lifetime value. The team divided this into three strategic challenges: budget, audience, and creative.
- For budget, the team used Multi-Touch Attribution to understand saturating reach in 2024, Marketing Mix Modelling to guide budget split across channels and objectives, and brand and conversion lift studies to validate and calibrate the MMM insights.
- For audience, Readly’s proprietary predicted lifetime value model was used together with customer insights to understand geographic, demographic, and behavioral dimensions of high-value users. This resulted in six audience tiers with different bid multipliers based on predicted lifetime value. The strategy was designed to prioritize high-value users while maintaining a broad audience and preserving volume.
- For creative, customer insights, behavioral analysis, motivators, and barriers were used to guide communication and visual diversification. The strategic reasoning was that unlocking additional incremental reach required more relevant content, both conceptually and visually.
Innovation and new thinking
The approach combined reach saturation analysis, proprietary predicted lifetime value modelling, customer insights, MMM, lift studies, and a diversified cross-channel creative strategy.
The proprietary predicted lifetime value model was trained on first-party data and used to build personas across geographic, demographic, and in-app behavioral attributes. These predictions were used to apply bid multipliers and guide customer acquisition strategy.
The creative strategy translated audience insights into three concepts and three ad themes, implemented across in-house production and external creators. The campaign also included a workshop with Meta creative strategists to develop a social-first content delivery approach.
Deliverables
The assignment included:
- reach saturation analysis
- use of Marketing Mix Modelling
- use of a proprietary predicted lifetime value model
- audience segmentation into six tiers with bid multipliers
- customer insights analysis
- cross-channel activation across Meta, Google, YouTube, and TikTok
- development of three creative concepts
- workshop with Meta creative strategists
- in-house production and use of external content creators
