Paid Growth for Lighthouse Labs
Driving a $6.15 cost per lead using a full-funnel approach to social
13%
Increase in Applications
74%
$6.15
Lighthouse Labs offers part-time and full-time programs specialized in web development and data science.
When they pivoted to online courses during COVID, we were tasked with rebuilding their ad strategy to match their new reality.
We were able to approach it in a way that not only matched, but greatly surpassed their previous performance targets.
“I can’t say enough about Mike and the entire team at Flywheel.
They’re professional, highly communicative, extremely knowledgeable, and proactive in not only bringing ideas to the table, but in driving the entire business forward within the digital realm. It’s a pleasure working with them, and I highly recommend Flywheel as an agency for any business looking to expand their online presence.”
TIM HUEBSCH
Digital Marketing Manager, Lighthouse Labs
Context
Between March and June 2020, COVID-19 sparked a shift in many educational businesses. For Lighthouse Labs, they had to pivot their in-person-based education model online to meet the new needs of prospective students. With the switch to online classes, LHL could no longer rely on their city- and event-based marketing mix.
By going online, LHL’s target audience opened up to students all over Canada. But they had a reduced number of channels, reduced budget, and reduced ability to produce new creative (we were all stuck at home). So we had to maximize the assets we had.
Our mission was to increase applicant volume while maintaining benchmarked acquisition costs on a reduced budget. The pandemic wasn’t going to put a hold on LHL’s classes — so we needed to transform their online ad funnel.
Results
We established KPIs and objectives relevant to the funnel stage associated with each campaign.
In the awareness stage, CTR increased by over 30%, which contributed to an overall 20% increase in link CTR account-wide. Changes in the consideration stage drove content downloads at an increase of over 74.4%, at a highly scalable $6.15 per lead. We saw this large increase in content downloads despite only a 5% change in budget.
At the bottom of the funnel, applications increased by 13.2%, and there was a significant reduction in CPA by 17% compared to the same period in the previous quarter since LHL runs on a quarterly sales cycle. Our overall performance allowed LHL to continue to scale their paid marketing efforts profitably during the pandemic and beyond.
Process
Awareness
Consideration
Pre-COVID-19, LHL’s ads were broken into two stages: awareness and decision. The decision stage focused on urgency and course information. However, we identified a need, especially during COVID-19, to add a consideration stage that focused on providing info around financing and credibility.
In this new stage, we focused our ads (and our KPI) on LHL’s email-gated content downloads. Not only did these content pieces capture new subscribers, but the pieces, including curriculum & financing packages, COVID-19 scholarship opportunities, student outcome reports, and even free coding courses (see below) provided crucial context for prospective students in making a decision.
Decision
Once the consideration phase was created, we were able to make our final decision retargeting drive even more course applications by creating audiences specifically for people who downloaded multiple content pieces or started an application. These audiences were made using the Facebook Pixel and conditional, event-based audiences.
We used the creative to highlight start dates, testimonials, and even more financing information to make sure every possible hurdle to applying that a student had was addressed.
Making changes to your business model? Your marketing should evolve with it. Shoot us a message to see how we can drive results like this for your business.
