How CreditStacks Drives Growth on LinkedIn with Outstanding Cost Efficiency
San Francisco-based CreditStacks is a company that markets a premium credit card for high-potential, new-to-credit applicants who are often rejected by major U.S. card companies due to their lack of history.
Challenge
The challenge for CreditStacks lies in finding this highly specific audience and communicating their unique service. The company viewed targeted advertising through LinkedIn as a good option to reach its potential customers, but as a growing startup, CreditStacks needs to be very deliberate and discerning with ad budgets.
Solution
After some internal back-and-forth, CreditStacks decided to launch its first two LinkedIn campaigns in May of 2019. With a few tweaks and adjustments, the company started to see signups roll in at a steady rate. “LinkedIn is exactly where our target audience spends time, and it enables us to segment them in very specific ways,” says Tal Nissenson, VP of Marketing for CreditStacks.
LinkedIn products used include:
- Video Ads
- Sponsored Content
- Website Retargeting
Results
With a very performance-oriented marketing strategy, CreditStacks prioritizes Cost Per Acquisition (CPA) as a primary key performance indicator (KPI). On this front, LinkedIn has delivered exceptional results, even as CreditStacks’ efforts have scaled up.
“Usually, CPA will increase as you increase reach. As you test new formats and more, you expect to see an initial drop in overall performance,” Nissenson observes. “With CreditStacks’ LinkedIn campaign, however, we managed to increase our number of new customers from June to July of 2019 by 150% — all while keeping the CPA the same. This is every marketer’s dream!”
The big turning point
Nissenson explains that when CreditStacks began running its initial campaigns, the company saw strong results in terms of click-throughs, but it wasn’t receiving a lot of signups. CreditStacks quickly pivoted away from directing traffic to the company’s homepage, instead creating a conversion-optimized landing page with a quick signup form.
“This was a big turning point for us,” she says. “We immediately started seeing signups come in.”
An eye on ad spend efficiency
CreditStacks is in a growth position where scrutinizing every dollar spent is essential, but ad budget efficiency should be a goal for businesses of any size and age. So anyone can take a page from this startup’s proactive strategy for optimization. For example, CreditStacks ran 27 different sets of images and text for their Sponsored Content campaign to test extensively.
“We measure everything,” Nissenson explains. “We are always pausing to review the data, reflect, and make adjustments as needed.”
Boosting results with retargeting
One other ingredient that has helped propel CreditStacks’ LinkedIn strategy is the incorporation of retargeting, which enables the company to serve ads to members who have visited the CreditStacks website in the past.
Capitalizing on brand familiarity in LinkedIn’s contextually relevant environment has been a big win, according to Nissenson. “We are also retargeting users on other channels, but the performance on LinkedIn is markedly superior.”
