Leads up by 453% – CPL down by 80%

The quick version 🏃

• Vistage is the world’s largest executive coaching organisation for SME leaders, offering a peer-mentoring service for CEOs, business owners and executives
• They wanted to increase their UK membership by driving better brand awareness and conversions
• We implemented a full-funnel ads strategy to educate potential members on the benefits of Vistage membership
• In six months we increased leads by 453%, reduced CPL by 80%, and reduced CPC by 56% – all while reducing ad spend by 4%

The long version 🤓

If there’s one thing we’ve learned about ads over the years, it’s that small changes can have a big impact.

The devil really is in the detail – and the more tweaking and testing you’re willing to do, the better your results will be.

This is the story of how we helped Vistage UK to increase their new leads from LinkedIn ads by 453% – while spending 4% less on ads overall – by launching a ‘full funnel’ strategy and relentlessly looking for opportunities to optimise.

Our Client

Vistage is the world’s largest executive coaching organisation for small and medium-sized businesses. They have more than 24,000 members in 20 countries worldwide. For over 60 years they’ve given business leaders a trusted and confidential space to share ideas, look for advice and ask questions.

Challenge

Vistage have learned over the years that brand awareness is central to its growth. Awareness is a key priority for the business over the next few years. That said, their audience – MDs, CEOs and business owners of UK SMEs – is hard to reach and very competitive.

They needed a LinkedIn ads strategy that would cut through and get their audience’s attention – while educating business owners about the benefits of Vistage membership.

Our solution

We designed a classic ToFU, MoFU and BoFU ads strategy that would:

• Increase brand awareness
• Drive high intent website visits
• Convert awareness into leads and signups

For each stage of the funnel, we produced multiple creative assets with different objectives and targeting (including retargeting). These were tested in parallel to find the best-performing.

We also analysed their prior activity to identify the content that delivered the most impact. We then optimised the spend against those assets by improving the targeting. Once we were hitting (or above) benchmarks, we increased the spend against those assets to max out the possible returns.

We continuously monitored the performance of all the campaigns to find new opportunities to optimise or tweak the creative. We also monitored the performance of organic content, jumping on reactive opportunities to ‘boost’ organic posts that were performing well.

Let’s look at a specific example

One of the best-performing assets we identified was was an ebook called, ‘The 7 Laws of Leadership.’

This was already performing well – but we felt it could do better. We created six new versions of the creative to be tested alongside one another. We then iterated the most successful variations to find further gains and keep the content fresh.

Over six months, this process increased the monthly leads from this one asset by 344%, from 45 leads up to 200.

Results

Over just six months, we managed to increase Vistage’s leads by 453%, from 141 leads over the six months prior to us taking over, to 780 in the six months after. We also managed to reduce the CPL by 80% and the the CPC by 56%.

Finally – and perhaps best of all – we did all of this while reducing their total ad spend by 4%.