How Likeable Local Decreased Their Cost Per Lead By 75%

Tim: Often as marketers, we focus on increasing our lead flow, increasing sales conversions, etc., etc. Those are obviously good things but there are a few thing we want to decrease that often get overlooked. One of these things is the cost per lead on an ad campaign.

Today’s guest is Nichole Cruz from Likeable Local, a social media marketing tool for businesses. The reason why she’s here is because she and the team from Likable Local had been able to decrease their cost per lead on one particular ad campaign by 400% without sacrificing any other metrics. For your ads to be truly scalable, a high number of quality leads for the lowest price possible is ideal. But how do you make it happen? Stick around to find out.

I’m Tim Page, conversation educator here at LeadPages and this is Conversion Cast.

Hey before we get started here with Nichole from Likeable Local, I want to invite you to join me for this Thursday’s LeadPages webinar. It is absolutely free. It’s live and you’ll be able to ask me all your questions about how to grow your email list without spending all of your time on marketing. It’s a fantastic webinar, one of my favorites that I’ve ever created and you’ll get a chance to join me. All you need to do is text LeadPagesLive all one word LeadPagesLive to 33444, and you’ll be able to join me. Again to register ,text LeadPagesLive to 33444. If you’re outside the US, that won’t work so you can go to LeadPagesWebinar.com, that’s LeadPagesWebinar.com and you’ll be able to join me. Again join me for this Thursday free live webinar called How to Grow Your Email List Without spending all of your time on marketing by texting LeadPagesLive to 33444 or going to LeadPagesWebinar.com.

Alright, let’s talk to Nichole. Hey Nichole, welcome to Conversion Cast.

Nichole: Hi. Thank you so much. I’m happy to be here.

Tim: Absolutely thanks for being here. So we’ve got an interesting, really interesting tactic to talk about today. So I would love it if you could tell us first off what were the results that you were able to get from this case study?

Nichole: Awesome. So we’re talking today you know, about Facebook advertising of ours and ways to be more effective. Some of the results that we got you know, we are looking to get the same number of conversions, you know, a high number that we were getting by reducing our costs significantly. So we actually reduced the cost at one of our campaigns by 400% without actually sacrificing quality or quantity so the number of conversions. You know, and that’s in one particular instance. In another campaign where we took some different methods, it was a little bit more targeted and that you know an audience that was a little bit harder to reach. We are actually able to reduce our cost per conversion by 50% and our conversion rates nearly doubled simultaneously. So two different approaches that both yielded really, really excellent results.

Tim: Nice. That’s great and you know that’s one of the things is that a lot of times when people are looking for case studies they’re looking for split tests, they’re looking for these things, we only get excited by percentage increase. But decreasing the cost can really mean a radical improvement in our business’ efficiency. So that’s kind of the reason why I was so excited to talk about this.

But before we get into it, I would love it if you could tell us a little bit about what Likeable Local is all about and what your role is there.

Nichole: Yeah, absolutely. So Likeable Local we provide a social media software solution called Likable Hub geared towards helping small business owners and entrepreneurs better use social media to scale their business. So our software does all sorts of fun things. We help with content creation and curation and scheduling and posting. We help with automatic Facebook advertising through the software, enhancing your tweets and your LinkedIn posts as well as actually driving conversions through what we call a Likeable Hub site which allows you to drive ad referrals. So generating new business referrals all kind of packaged into one software and also of course the mobile app because on the go is huge.

So that’s Likeable Local and our product Likeable hub and in terms of my role I’m the director of marketing and partnerships. So my team is really focused on lead gen for us, you know, finding that small business owner, that solopreneur or that entrepreneur who you know really could use a social media software to help them scale their efforts. They’re busy, they need a helping hand. So reaching those people, getting them into our CRM, you know, helping them get in touch with our sales team through some smart nurturing and you know, bringing it to the point of sale. On the partnership side, finding strategic partners to provide great content with, to take advantage of each other’s networks and to do fun webinars and that sort of a thing.

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So really the most basic level is you know, driving awareness of Likeable and bringing needs.

Tim: Awesome. very cool. Good. So why don’t you kind of tell us the kind of how you got into this case study and just tell us a little bit about what you did that got these results?

Nichole: Yeah great. So a huge piece of my team’s the way that we drive leads is through Facebook advertising. We like to use the phrase eat our own dog food so we’re a social media marketing solution and of course we want to use social media marketing to drive these for ourselves as well. So you know just to give you some numbers, we budget to drive between 600M at the minimum and maybe a thousand leads per month from Facebook ads, qualified leads for our sales team. But we do of course have a budget that we need to stick like most marketing departments do particularly for these Facebook ads.

So you know, our budget is between $3500 and $4500 a month to drive these you know, [[0:06:08]] [indiscernible]   a thousand leads. It’s sort of variability there depends on what kind of lead we’re looking to drive. It’s going to cost us a little bit more to drive a demo request or something like that versus maybe a free eBook that doesn’t require quite as many fields on the forms [[0:06:24]] [indiscernible]  that and that sort of thing. So you know, in some particular, you know, in a particular case of the demo requests, you know, a specific tactic that we’ve used is with retargeting. You know using the people who are already familiar with us to nurture them towards a demo. That’s been way more effective than trying to go out there and reach the person who has no clue what Likeable Local is and get them to request the demo of our software.

So we’ve used some specific tracking pixels in our website and specifically on certain pages that we feel like indicate purchasing behavior. Maybe someone who’s already converted and downloaded an eBook or something like that that hasn’t’ had a chance to request a demo yet. We’re retargeting those people on Facebook and an important part of the strategy of course is not doubling up right. So we have actually and exclusion list for the Facebook targeting of people who are already that desired type of contact that a hand raiser if you will.

So in doing the smart retargeting and really just focusing the efforts on the demo request we reduced our cost on that campaign by 400%. And didn’t sacrifice quality or number of conversions there. So that was a really, really important learning and really a great way for us to drive demo requests on social is not to go after those who have no clue who we are but to really only ask for a demo from the people and targeted people for a demo who have converted with us before or at least have been looking at our website on the what we do page or something like that.

So that was one of the first tactic. I don’t know if you want to talk more about that Tim or kind of dive into the second one.

Tim: Yeah. Let’s talk about that one first. So really the idea here was that you kept the top of the funnel, the top of the funnel and the you focused on you know, you focused your demo, your demo request on folks that were already interested in you based on the fact that they maybe were a little bit further along in your funnel. Maybe they’ve already opted in. They’ve gone to your website. You know that they have some level of intrigue at least in what you’re doing and then you use the Facebook ads to try to get them to sign up for a demo, is that right?

Nichole: Absolutely, yeah and so you know with the audience that’s retargeting people on your website, when you place that pixel from Facebook on your website or on a landing page or something, you know you’re able to – it kind of updates itself right? So that’s nice. You don’t have to keep updating that audience. But you know for something like a lookalike audience or a custom audience based off of contacts who are maybe a subscriber to your blog only or maybe just the lead only. If you want to be using those lists effectively to do the retargeting it is something that you need to be updating continuously  and that is an important part of our strategy on a biweekly and monthly basis updating the list that we’re excluding.

So we’re not paying money targeting someone who’s already converted the way we want them to. So you know, we’re frequently updating our list that we’re excluding from the targeting to make sure that we’re really honing in on those we want and not spending money on impressions of someone who’s already requested a demo and they already became a customer.

Tim: So when you say you’re updating that list, are you saying in Facebook you’re updating that list or how are you updating that?

Nichole: Yeah exactly. So with the custom audiences and the lookalike audiences in Facebook, you upload a CSV file. You can create a customer lookalike audience that you either use as the targeting in itself or use in the exclusion part of  the targeting. So you’re excluding that group of contacts.

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So you know, every other week and on a biweekly basis we’re reupdating, re uploading a CSV of the context we want to exclude from the targeting. Because they already requested a demo. They already become an opportunity or they already became a customer. That’s a really important piece of keeping things effective.

On the flipside you know we’re reuploading the list of people we want to retarget. You know, people who maybe download an EBook but did nothing else in a two-week time span or something like that. So we’re keeping the audiences fresh. So the ones that are not automatically repopulating sort of like just website visitors are continuing to stay fresh so we don’t saturate with the same audience.

Tim: Got you okay and so that’s kind of the first part of this. Now the second part, the second kind of tactic does it go hand in hand with the first or was it just kind of another thing you’ve done to lower your cost per lead?

Nichole: It’s actually kind of both. So something that we found to be a really, really effective targeting piece on Facebook has been behaviors. So when you do the targeting on Facebook there’s all sorts of options you can choose from and behaviors is one of the ones that we have found to be most applicable to us. I think I know a lot of you guys out there might find it to be applicable to you as well. So I’m absolutely a believer in the custom audiences, and in the lookalike audiences that uploading of a list and creating a customer lookalike audience. That is so, so effective.

But the more that you can layer interest targeting on top of that or behavior targeting which I’m going to speak about on top of that, the more you can just create your perfect audience. And that’s really what it’s about the right message at the right time to the right people. So with the behavior audience, we layer in the behavior of “small business owner” for our specific use case and we’ve seen that really help our lookalike audiences in making them more specific.

So Facebook has data from all sorts of third party resources that purchases and native to itself that is able to indicate if a user is a small business owner as well.

So when we create a lookalike audience or a custom audience, it’s possible that there are people who are in our system or our lookalikes of contacts in our system who are not actually small business owners and are not as applicable to us. But by layering in that targeting, and making our audiences more specific, we are actually able to reduce our cost per conversion and you know, a particular eBook campaign by 50% and actually the conversion rates doubled simultaneously with that ad campaign.

So that has been a really effective way for us to make a lookalike and custom audiences even better.

Tim: Using these two kind of strategies together, you’ve been able to really save yourself a ton of money in terms of you know, ad budget and then of course that can be reallocated to other things, the new campaigns to instead of driving folks to a demo request you can drive them to the top of your funnel and start growing your list that way. So somebody whether they’re bootstrapping or they’re spending a ton of money on ad spend, this is a really great way to leverage the strategies you’re already using but put people at the right place in the funnel.

Nichole: Uh-hum. Absolutely. And you know, I think that the best phrase that I can use to describe this is finding a way to scale smarter. So once we find what we know is working, we can double down on that and then by reducing costs it actually allows us a little bit more room for experimentation so we can make our next big discovery of the next thing that’s going to reduce our cost per lead by 50%. And then start to scale that even smarter. So it is sort of a continuous cycle of gaining intelligence and having the bandwidth to sort of experiment with it because we reduced our cost so much. Staying within budget.

Tim: Yeah that’s great. I love that. well Nichole this has been really helpful Thank you so much for sharing this with us and looking forward to having everybody here in this episode.

Nichole: Yeah, awesome. Thank you so much Tim.

Tim: That’s going to do it for this episode of Conversion Cast. But don’t forget, you can text LeadPagesLive to 33444 that’s LeadPagesLive to 33444 and you’ll be registered for this week’s live LeadPages webinar called 4 Steps to Quickly Grow Your Email List without Spending All of Your Time on Marketing. If you’re outside the US, you can also go to LeadPagesWebinar.com, that’s LeadPagesWebinar.com, and you’ll be able to register for that webinar.

One more time I’ve got to say it, text LeadPagesLive to 33444 or go to LeadPagesWebinar.com and I will see you there this Thursday at 3 p.m. Eastern for 4 Steps to Quickly Grow Your Email List without Spending All of Your Time on Marketing. That will do it for this week. We’ll see you next week on Conversion Cast.