New paid media strategy, who dis?

The secret sauce behind subscriptions

Ever wonder how big companies like Paramount+, FabFitFun, and TIME keep up with their millions of subscribers and recurring billing? Well, in these companies’ cases, the answer is Recurly, a B2B subscription management software company.

This platform offers numerous features that not only boosts recurring revenue, but also helps improve the customer experience of everyone who loathes adding yet another subscription to their monthly bills. Recurly’s software is easy to customize and is flexible for the end-user, making things like automated payments, plans, and even subscription pauses incredibly easy.

“High Standards” is our middle name

Recurly was in search of a paid media partner to optimize their campaigns in order to achieve 500% ROAS, lower their cost-per-lead (CPL), and reach their stage 2 opportunity revenue pipeline goals from paid ads each quarter. Recurly’s goals set the bar high—and we love a chance to exceed expectations. And so, our partnership began.

Paid media overhaul

Our paid media strategy has evolved frequently during the time we’ve worked together, but fast-paced work is where we agency folk thrive.

Google Search

When we started working with Recurly, they had a brand-heavy approach to paid search and hadn’t had anyone who was truly dedicated to its management. We came in and initiated immediate keyword research to improve non-brand campaigns that would allow us to start gathering the data we needed to expand and optimize. While we had these initial campaigns in place, we worked with the Recurly team on a more robust list of keywords and outline of campaigns, considering the industry, competitors, and what terms were actually driving the pipeline. We then updated campaigns based on this. From there, we continued to optimize and pivot based on performance.

Currently, we focus on the lower-funnel consideration and intent keyword searches, part of which has been establishing competitor conquest campaigns.

Of course, Recurly isn’t the only platform of its kind. We knew we had to be strategic in order to stay top of mind. They identified their competitors—most of which are aggressive in the ad space—and we identified our top targets by looking at impression shares for our key search terms as well as feedback from the Recurly sales team. After we compiled this information, we designed campaigns for the top four competitors that allowed Recurly to show up on Google for brand searches plus comparative and alternative searches. We continue to tweak and hone these campaigns to address consumer pain points.

Key Highlights:

• 17x total potential ROAS
• 13x stage 2 ROAS
• -18% in CPL
• +11% in leads

LinkedIn

LinkedIn is totally different in approach from a search campaign. Instead of consumers looking for us, we’re now looking for them.

To begin a LinkedIn campaign, we really needed to understand who we’re targeting and how. We started by breaking our audiences up by persona and geo, with layers for industry and company revenue. This was a lot of segments—too many. Over time, we realized we had been splitting our audiences to the point of detriment. We pivoted to combine our geos, but keep our personas separate. We’ve gone through rounds of ad testing with creative, copy, and ad type (single image ads, document ads, you name it), analyzing effectiveness for each audience. We ultimately discovered that only two of our four personas were really working on this platform, so we focused on those.

LinkedIn has been a great lead generator, though not so great as an opportunity generator. With an already long lead cycle, we needed to rethink how to more effectively increase pipeline. We started partnering on some strategic pivots to move away from lead acquisition and to sales funnel retargeting. Where we see opportunity, we go.

Key Highlights:

• -30% in CPL
• +129% in leads

But that’s not all!

Two of our core values at KPS3 are to challenge everything and never settle. It makes sense then why we’re all down for brainstorming and plenty of iteration. Recurly is similar in that way. In addition to our DMM retainer, they asked us to help with a couple web projects, including their A/B homepage tests.

The strategy was simple: Optimize conversion rate and generate more leads, period.

As discussed with their ads, they leaned heavily into branded language. We tested a full-page revamp of homepage copy that led with product positioning; each section spoke to what Recurly’s software did and how it helped prospective users. This variation saw a 244% improvement in engagement over nine days, which is why it was implemented permanently.

Long story short

In order to expand your business and online presence, it’s important to look at the big picture. This includes assessing opportunity and analyzing revenue data, not just in-platform leads and CPL. A holistic approach helps drive better decisions—and make happier clients. Recurly is a great example of this.

But good things take time. Even when looking at all of the data and changing our strategy as we go, iteration is always the expectation. We are unafraid to explore other options as we learn more, making it easy for us to pivot in each project. We will continue to collaborate on campaign optimizations that perform well and ultimately boost revenue.

Together, we blew their goal of 500% ROAS out of the water. Let’s keep this good thing growing!