How Harness Projects Boosted Lead Volume and Cut Costs with a Sharper Audience Strategy
Aperitif used an intent-driven audience strategy to help an established education provider achieve double-digit lead growth in just 8 months.
About the client
Harness Projects was founded in 2017 with the belief that traditional models of tertiary learning no longer give people opportunities in the workforce like they used to.
Founders Chris and Michael created Harness Projects to deliver education in a new way that provides students with the experience and skills they need to prosper in real working environments.
Services Used:
The Challenge
In a competitive market like the online UX/UI course provider space, its difficult to stand out from the crowd whilst also trying to scale. The business relied heavily on performance marketing channels to fill intakes, which had a fixed number of seats and ran periodically throughout the year. The lead quality made it a costly exercise to sift through potential applicants in order to find the most suitable candidates who’d enrol in the course and become a qualified designer.
The cost per lead was unsustainable across Google Ads and Meta Ads, making it difficult to unlock the next level of growth when acquisition costs remained so high. Aperitif was challenged with refining the strategy around targeting and messaging to fill enrolments faster, and at a palatable cost-per-lead that worked in Harness Project’s favour.
Approach
We revised the account structures in both Meta and Google Ads to have greater control of where ad spend was being utilised, so we could be more agile towards reallocating spend towards what was working.
Google Ads was particularly underutilised in terms of budget allocation. Considering this a typically a bottom-of-funnel marketing channel, the budget increases and optimisations made the biggest impact on performance overall.
We prioritised expanding on the audience signals in Performance Max, as only in-market interests and keywords were being used which limited reaching warm potential prospects. We extended targeting to include life events, website retargeting, YouTube viewers, and competitor targeting. We also added more creative variations to Performance Max, as previously not all the available creative options were being used.
On Meta, we moved away from targeting look-a-like audiences, and focused on targeting user interests for prospecting: direct, affinity and vertical.
We turned on audience retargeting for the first time, which proved to be another win for the overall performance given the longer sales cycle of choosing a course provider.
Finally, we moved away from creating new campaigns for each new in-take on Meta & Google, which caused a delay in performance as the campaigns needed to serve out a learning period. By using the existing campaigns each in-take, the platforms were able to draw on previous audience learnings, and achieve results faster than before.
