In order to first address the lack of advertising campaigns and begin driving relevant users to the website, to also then facilitate retargeting opportunities later down the line, our initial approach was to consider top of the funnel targeting, given that this was going to be a 6 month campaign only.

We identified potential demographics that would put our ads in front of students finishing their university studies, and relevant interest-based audiences for young people who could be open and receptive to educational training. Considering that Career Accelerator also specifically support members of the LBGTQ+ community looking for guidance after leaving university, we targeted relevant groups and interest-based audiences which were relevant to this, such as: Pride, the LGBT Community and Same Sex Marriage.

Tailoring our messaging to deliver impactful but approachable ad copy also meant considering the specific contexts and nuances of these younger audiences, which we would test as the campaigns began delivering, in order to refine our adverts to those that performed the best.

Despite the consequences of Facebook removing key LGBT Groups as a targetable interest in March 2022, we were still able to actively scale Career Accelerator’s visibility and drive strong results from our top of the funnel campaigns. We did this by specifically tailoring our ad copy and associated creative assets towards the LGBTQ audiences, effectively detering any audiences that were not relevant, such as cis het community members, from seeing our ads, in order not to waste spend on those unlikely to convert conosidering the desired focus of Career Accelerator was to provide educational programs for young people and the LGBTQ community specifically. This helped us stake their claim in this segment of the education industry.

We also ensured that the landing page for Career Accelerator was tailored towards the LGTBQ+ community, implementing a tone of voice that would resonate, and ensuring the language was approachable and inclusive to generate trust with the brand.

By refining our ad copy, creative assets and the landing page associated with the campaigns to ensure all elements were as relevant to our desired audience as possible, we were able to improve the overall effectiveness of the campaign, both from a targeting and engagement perspective. This successfully brought down the CPL on Facebook, driving results for a cheaper cost.

As the top of the funnel campaigns began to deliver consistent results and we further refined them over time, we found that testimonial-based messages performed the best, driving high engagement and leads from relevant users. This prompted us to leverage more social proof in our creative, and in our copy, in order to capitalise on this angle.

By refining our approach and investing in high-performing messaging, we were able to massively reduce the CPA of our top of the funnel campaigns. Optimising our targeting for the highest performing audiences also helped to bring down the overall cost per lead, which dramatically improved the efficiency of the campaigns whilst also delivering on the main KPI which was to increase leads coming through, and implement converting social media advertising.

We also implemented a landing page specifically for our Facebook marketing, optimising this for lead-based conversions in order to simplify the lead submission process. This generated noticeably more leads, as users were able to quickly gather relevant information and then convert rather than the unoptimised page that was previously being used, which did not push customers along the conversion journey effectively.