AdArcade is a disruptive technology startup in the digital ad space. They help brands reach the 2.2 billion consumers who play mobile games with a patented, playable ad experience.
"We partnered with Hello Outbound to help us find our first paying customers. Their team did an in depth messaging workshop and set up cld outreach campaigns to test our different buyer personas. I booked a meeting with a major brand on our very first day of sending, and continue to have great meetings months later." - Bobby Wells, CEO
Profile
The AdArcade team is a small group of entrepreneurs who developed and patented a new advertising technology. With a solid product and a few beta customers, they came to us to build brand awareness and prove product market fit.
Challenge #1
Identify buyer personas and build tests to target them.
Solution: Identify Data Signals
Think of Data Signals as the event or "trigger" that indicates a prospect would be in need of a product / service. We use these signals to build lists that not only fit an ideal customer profile, but also show some indication of intent or stage.
AdArcade has to potential avenues for finding new business.
1) Brands: We searched for heads of marketing at consumer brands who were hired within the last 6 months. These decision makers are more likely to be open to new ideas and looking to make a big impact at their company.
2) Marketing Agencies Partnerships: AdArcade can also team up with marketing agencies to provide a new kind of advertisement for their clients, so we scraped job posting boards for agencies looking to hire for Digital positions. This indicates they have budget and could be searching for new strategies.
After establishing our relevant Signals, we went through multiple review sessions with AdArcade to narrow down the specific types and sizes of brands and agencies they wanted to target. For example, fast-serve restaurants and pet brands make for much better gaming ads than complex technology or medical products. And digital marketing agencies are a much stronger fit for a partnership than strictly branding agencies.
Challenge #2
Develop some of their first ever marketing content with unique pitches for each buyer persona.
Solution: Copy & Positioning Workshop
We started out with an in-depth discovery session, and learned that a lot of education is required for this new ad technology. Most marketers aren't aware of how many people actually play mobile games, or that they are mostly female heads of household.
After crafting language around the huge opportunity that exists with the gaming demographic, we pulled conversion data from Beta campaigns that would drive home our pitch.
At the end of our copy workshop, ended up with 2 unique angles for brands versus agencies, then customized our messaging further depending on the industry and position seniority we were contacting. Messages were ultimately delivered over email and LinkedIn.
Challenge #3
Test and scale up.
Solution: Quickly iterate and manage domain reputation
Testing is at the core of our process. In their first month of outreach, we launched 2 different scripts targeted at sub-verticals within the consumer category, and 2 variations of our pitch to marketing agencies.
We also tracked Qualified/Unqualified meetings as they happened to make sure the calls were relevant, worthwhile and would lead to real business.
Taking learnings from the campaign results, we ramped up automated sending volume, which also meant jumping in to manage the reputation of their new domain, and purchasing a fresh one on their behalf.
Campaigns
One of the core campaigns we developed was targeted at Heads of Marketing who were recently hired, at consumer brands >500 employees. This included touch points on both email and LinkedIn. Here are the campaign results:
| Contacted | Open Rate | Reply Rate | Meetings |
|---|---|---|---|
| 285 | 55% | 8% | 6 |
Another successful campaign was targeted at CEOS of mid sized digital marketing agencies. Here are those results:
| Contacted | Open Rate | Reply Rate | Meetings |
|---|---|---|---|
| 234 | 45% | 9% | 4 |
Results
Day 1: meeting scheduled with a high value, household-name consumer brand.
Two weeks: first pilot ad campaign created for a prospect.
3 months: 8 qualified prospects that moved into proposal or pilot campaign stage.
