I co-built HearGift from zero to $1.5M in sales in 18 months. As a small hearing aid company in a sea of giants, we had to put our most creative hats on to bootstrap the company and gain a loyal client base. Aside from leveraging Facebook advertising and email marketing to generate sales, what we are most proud of is the ability to build a trustworthy and transparent company, with owners who were not afraid to be on camera, offer transparency and candid engagement with our customers. With this, we have a built a reputation of one of the most caring hearing aid companies in the world, changing thousands of lives. Our over 300 5-star reviews show that and it's one of our greatest achievements.

Key achievements:

• $1.27m in sales in the first 18 months, with an advertising spend of $428,302 (Facebook)
• $233,473 in sales with an advertising spend of $32,675 (Google)
• return customer rate of 10% (hearing aids are usually a one-time purchase)
• over 200 - 5 star reviews, dozens of video testimonials

Paid Media Management

Effective paid media management begins with buying market data by running small test campaigns, and then making decisions based on the results. Once an effective ad formula is found (ad hook, image, CTA, congruence with landing page, message that resonates with the audience) leading to a purchase with an acceptable CPP (Cost Per Purchase), that campaign can then be scaled up very quickly. HearGift saw its first real scaling ability after 3 months of testing (our first 4 figure month was month 3 and our first 6 figure month was month 7).

As more advertising dollars were spent, CPP naturally went up and that’s when we found it important to continually be testing new campaigns as well as optimizing the conversion rate in order to gain maximum effectiveness out of each advertising dollar spent.

Another important factor in our success was retargeting/remarketing campaigns. As it takes on average 5-7 touches to make a sale (more for higher-priced products), it’s very important to continually reach out to prospective buyers using a multi-channel strategy (retargeting ads across multiple platforms, regular email and SMS outreach messaging) to stay at top-of-mind and encourage customers to make a purchase.

Effective retargeting is all about knowing at which stage of the customer journey each prospect is, and giving them relevant information that will help move them along their journey with the end result of making a purchase (or repeat purchase).

Our scaling processes included the following:

·      Begin with Facebook, then spread the advertising budget across other, less established advertising platforms. This helped reduce dependency on a single platform (Facebook).

·      Allocated 20% of our advertising budget towards testing new audiences, interests, images/videos and ad hooks and copy which has given give us room to scale when a winning campaign was found.

·      When a winning campaign was found, we scaled hard, fast and as high as possible while keeping the CPP under our ideal threshold

·      Implemented a sequential retargeting campaign to augment the cold traffic campaigns and provide additional ROI on any sales that were not made directly from cold traffic (nurture and warm up the prospects to purchase using a sequence of social proof, increasing trust, and answering any potential objections in advance).