How Round Barn Labs Helped Nextdoor Achieve Stellar ROI on LinkedIn

Challenge

While Nextdoor has established itself as a private social media network for neighborhood communities, it wanted to grow awareness of its nascent offering for real estate agents. Working with growth marketing agency Round Barn Labs, there was a directive to increase conversions for the program while cutting advertising costs. In order to reach aggressive goals, the teams needed to identify a channel with rich audience insights and very strong ROI. Results on other platforms simply weren’t adding up to justify the ad spend.

Solution

With an eye on premium lead quality, Round Barn Labs turned to LinkedIn and its robust targeting capabilities. Recognizing that many real estate agents are already active on the platform, forging connections and building relationships, they saw it as an opportunity to reach this key audience in the right context.

“As we were exploring options and additional channels to reach our target demographic, it seemed to make perfect sense to use LinkedIn for this,” says Mike McElhaney, Vice President of Paid Marketing for Round Barn.

To ensure their content would be seen by the right members, the agency focused on the Job Title and Job Interest targeting fields, and used retargeting to engage prospects with some familiarity.

Results

With greater targeting specificity, Nextdoor and Round Barn Labs saw noticeable improvement running LinkedIn campaigns. On other social platforms, McElhaney says they’d get a lot of clicks on pictures of houses, from home-buyers who were not necessarily in their desired audience. On LinkedIn, intent-driven content like testimonials gained much more traction, and this was reflected by superior return on spend. Calculating based on Cost Per Acquisition and Lifetime Customer Value, Nextdoor and Round Barn Labs saw:

For other advertisers on the platform, McElhaney recommends keeping a close eye on CTR and costs. “We were able to change our bidding method to CPM-based bidding because our click-through rate was so high. That simple change in bidding cut our CPA by 25%.”