At the start of our collaboration, the project had nothing: essentially it was a startup with an idea and a physical product, but without branding, social media, a website, experience or a full team.
The client's main goal and request was to build a client base and get the first sales.
To achieve this goal, we chose Meta as the ad channel, because it allowed us to get the first leads without a website or strong social media, and to understand demand for the product overall. For this, of course, we used lead forms and quizzes from third-party services.
Ineffective lead forms
In the first lead form launches, we got no results. After relaunching them several times with different messaging and creatives, we decided to test lead generation through conversations in parallel, reasoning that our target audience might find it more convenient to start interacting with us this way. By this point, the first posts had appeared on social media, so the account wasn't empty, and this decision really did start bringing us our first results.
Lead handling
The client's team lacked trained managers with experience in this niche. Because of this, incoming leads had to be passed on to engineers (technical specialists on the client's team) or to the startup's owner. This led to delays in communicating with leads and, ultimately, to losing them.
Because of this, we paused all advertising several times so the client could replace the manager with a new one and give them basic training.
Lead quality across platforms
Lead generation always involves a certain share of unqualified leads — contacts who either can't be reached or whose request doesn't match our field or services. In this project, while analyzing unqualified leads, we noticed that a much larger share came from Instagram, so we moved most of the budget to Facebook, thereby increasing the share of quality leads.
This kind of analysis should be done for each niche: sometimes there's no difference at all, and sometimes it's so significant that you have to not just reallocate budgets but switch off one of the placements entirely.
No website and difficulty giving leads well-packaged information
Potential clients kept asking: “Send us your website.” Not having one made it hard to provide complete information and move negotiations forward. Some information had to be developed and packaged from scratch, such as a product catalog, which took time — and after such a pause, leads weren't very eager to return to the conversation.
Despite the difficulty of launching a startup, together with the client we achieved some positive results:
Building a client base and relevant leads: after switching the strategy to conversations and splitting placements and budgets between Facebook and Instagram, the project built a client base large enough to keep managers fully busy and, along the way, started making its first sales.
The handling and negotiation process in this niche is quite complex and long, and it's important to understand that marketing spend in such projects doesn't pay off in the first month — you need a budget reserve for that.
