CASE STUDY:

How We Profitably Scaled a College Consulting Firm and Lowered Their Cost-Per-Call by 50%

Consulting Firm Case Study
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50%

Decrease

50% Decrease in Cost-Per-Call

About The Client

Our client is a college consulting firm that helps students get into top universities in and around the United States. This California-based firm is nationally-recognised for its college acceptance track record to some of the biggest and most renowned universities including Harvard, Brown, and MIT among others. 

This client’s funnel structure is no different from other brands in the info-product space—that is: customers are sent to a landing page where they get to access a free webinar, then prompted to book a call with the firm’s sales team. 

The Task at Hand

While our client manages to get a decent number of booked calls, they aren't able to make high profit margins on their YouTube ad campaigns because their cost per call is too high—and with averages between $700 to $800 per booked call CPA, it would be impossible to scale up

Understanding that establishing what works in a YouTube video ads campaign is critical to solving this problem, our client sought out (and evaluated) a number of agencies that specialize in YouTube Ads before ultimately deciding to work with us. 

So…

Why Linx?

We were chosen to do the job because we are subject matter experts at everything that’s to do with scaling profitably with YouTube Ads; and our client’s problem isn’t particularly new to us. We know exactly what works and what doesn’t in the consulting firm niche

Our Process

By standard, we start every account by doing an in-depth audit and discovery process where we analyze their existing marketing funnel. We also evaluate the client’s existing creatives to see if it has the correct messaging (among other things) to attract the ‘right’ audience and make it into a high-converting video ad. 

With everything else considered, we then build an ad strategy around facts that were established during our audit, and finally set up tracking.

The Strategy

A high cost per call is an excellent indicator that something isn’t right in a campaign—and after conducting a deep-dive into their campaign analytics, we were able to pinpoint that the culprit to their skyrocketing cost per call is none other than ad fatigue

Ad fatigue occurs when your ads are seen too much by your audience to a point where they stop paying attention—preventing them from moving down the sales funnel and ultimately, hurts your company’s bottom line. 

To resolve this, we implemented the following changes:

Conducted various tests on the creatives 

We’ve said it before: when it comes to advertising, the name of the game is Test. Test. Test. 

This was pivotal in turning this client’s YouTube ad campaigns around from returning a very high booked call CPA. 

By performing an extensive creative testing, we were able to distinguish which ads worked consistently across different audiences time and time again. This exercise included: 

Doing a variety of audience research

Along with the creative testing, we also implemented several changes into how it was run. Instead of targeting multiple audiences, we opted for one (1) audience type per campaign to really narrow down which personas respond best to our video ads. 

Created different variations to the existing creative

Just because ‘it’ worked on other social media platforms, doesn’t mean it will too on YouTube. 

Because our client used the same creative across all other social media platforms, it is imperative we put a stop to that ASAP! 

Some of the changes included changing the video ad format from long-form to short (from 4-minutes down to two), added multiple CTAs, and revamped the messaging to fit their personas viewing behavior on YouTube. 

As part of our creative process, we are continuously coming up with various video ad creatives, testing them on a variety of audiences, and tracking the results. The above screenshot is a spreadsheet that outlines our creative queue for this consulting firm client.

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The Results

Booked Call CPA

We were able to see results in as little as two weeks since taking over the account. From what used to be a $700 cost per call, we lowered it to even less than half:

Within 2 weeks of taking over this account, we were able to lower the cost-per-call by half, from $700 to under $300.

By the sixth month, numbers have really transformed. 

By maintaining the cost per call at bay, we were able to scale this account— what started out as $8k-spend per week became $8k-spend per day:

The results for this client: maintaining an acceptable cost-per-call, while increasing ad spend from $8000/week to $8000 a day on YouTube.

In the video below, we go over this entire case study.

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