Challenge

• Design Pickle is a graphic design company with an innovative model: they offer subscription-based plans where users pay a flat rate for access to professional design services. It’s a handy way for businesses of all sizes to outsource or supplement this need while still maintaining a high standard of quality.
• As a self-funded startup looking to grow its reach and customer base, Design Pickle wanted to increase conversions — especially with its key audience of small- and mid-sized business (SMB) owners — in cost-efficient ways. Driving subscriptions of the premium “Pro” level plan was a top priority.

Solution

• The ability to target audiences based on business size and job title on LinkedIn made it possible for Design Pickle to zero in on the SMB owner persona by filtering functions like CEO, founder, and owner, while placing its Pro offering front-and-center in ad creatives. The campaigns on LinkedIn focused on reaching these individuals via text ads as well as retargeting website visitors via Message Ads.
• One critical component of Design Pickle’s strategy was refining the measurement approach to gain more clarity around purchase influence. “We put conversions in place that were leading indicators of a sale, not just a conversion that was a direct sale,” explains Dave Ball, the company’s Director of Acquisition.

Results

•  In the second half of 2019, Design Pickle’s campaign on LinkedIn drove 463 new signups, including 64 for the Pro plan. This yielded about $1.8 million in estimated revenue, with a cost efficiency that was 19% lower than competing ad platforms.
• This success carried over into the next year. “Our target for Q1 was 150 new signups and we hit that in the first week of March,” Ball says.

Reaching the actual decision maker

• Targeting the owners and founders of growing businesses has been very effective for Design Pickle. Ball observes that the marketing message resonates with these central stakeholders who actively research, evaluate, and shape buying decisions.
• “The owners of smaller companies who are still engaged and still looking to get things done for a low cost are the ones engaging with the ads, doing the demos, they sign up and then hand it off to somebody on their team.”

Staying agile and flexible

• Just as its product is built to help customers stay nimble and adaptive, Design Pickle needs to strive toward this quality as well. They like LinkedIn because it’s easy for them to pivot and change direction as business needs evolve.
• “No other platform gives us that ability to shift so quickly, right?” Ball says. “We’re changing our entire target demographic, right now, this week, and we can just spin up a new campaign with new creative and boom — we’re targeting a whole new business demographic.”

Measuring methodically

• The impact of these efforts came into greater focus when Design Pickle zoomed out to see the big picture. Recognizing that the purchase cycle is nonlinear and sometimes extended, their team tracked checkout initiations and started assigning more value to leading indicators. Sure enough, the eventual revenue began substantiating this valuation.
• “If somebody clicks initiate a checkout, then even if they don’t buy today or 30 days from now, we’ve got somebody that was pretty highly interested so that metric is very important to us,” Ball explains.

About Design Pickle

Design Pickle is the #1 flat-rate graphic design service in the world.  It is a cost-effective, reliable, and easy to use graphic design solution for any entrepreneur, business, and creative team.