Case Study - Unicorn Labs
Introduction
Leadership training. One of the only learning and development markets to have experienced growth independent of economic trends year after year.
Targeting startup managers, corporate teams, and c-level executives, leadership training programs have been around for centuries, and they have become more and more sophisticated as the needs of businesses, teams, and corporate leaders have evolved.
Today, these programs help businesses enhance the effectiveness of their workforce by training managers to become more effective leaders. And that’s exactly what Unicorn labs has to offer.
Led by Leadership Expert, Fahd Alhattab, Unicorn Labs trains managers in corporate leadership with the goal of turning them into high-performing team leaders.
They accomplish that through a number of high-ticket training programs that promise to accelerate managers’ business training and make them better leaders.
With the increased need for more skilled team leaders in organizations, there are more opportunities than ever before for Unicorn labs to broaden and expand its offering.
So along with Management Leadership Training, Unicorn Labs also offers Team Building Retreats and Corporate Leadership Keynotes.
They had 2 main target markets for their training programs:
- B2B clients – Enterprises, companies, corporations, and organizations
- B2C clients – Individual managers and team leaders
The one consistent message that underpinned all their programs and their communications targeted both audience sectors is to build corporate cultures that produce exceptional leaders.
With rising interest in leadership training programs, Unicorn Labs already had a viable product and market fit.
All they needed to do was get more attention and generate higher-value leads for their sales teams.
When they approached our team at ClassGrowth, their goal was to increase the number of leads and sales conversions that they were getting from their marketing investments.
They hadn’t worked with media buyers with specialized experience in the learning and education space.
They knew they needed to stand out among all the other training programs available in their space, but they weren’t sure how to do that.
Our goal was to generate genuine interest in their training, the kind of interest that creates high-value leads, at the lowest possible rate.
The Challenge
One of the main challenges Unicorn Lab was facing when it came to selling its training programs was the price tag which ranges from CAD $ 15,000 to $ 35,000.
They had been targeting both B2B and B2C audiences, but neither was converting well. With high-ticket offers, it’s expected that there wouldn’t be high-volume sales. However, for Unicorn Labs, sales had stalled over the past few years.
Lack of transparency
How much this was costing the company wasn’t entirely clear. There was no transparency on the number of sales conversions because their sales team converted leads in a process that wasn’t integrated with their marketing campaigns.
Their sales process for B2B businesses required their sales teams to call leads and pitch an offer. This was followed by a negotiation phase before the lead decided whether to enroll in that training program or not.
Because they conducted a separate sales process for conversions, there was no way of telling what the exact return on ad spend was, mainly because the sales conversions were happening at a later stage.
This impacted the clarity we had on their ROI, and the number of conversions they were generating from their marketing campaigns.
Lack of skilled specialists
Part of the reason Unicorn Labs wasn’t able to implement successful ad campaigns was that they didn’t work with specialized media buyers.
They had tried their hand at Google and Facebook with other agencies that weren’t specialized in the learning and education space.
Neither channel was delivering the quality of leads they needed to convert into sales. Their Cost Per Lead on paid ads was close to CAD $ 1,000 and their leads weren’t translating to actual sales so their FB experiment ended quickly, while the Google one (with another agency) was a bit longer.
When they reached out to us, they already had a slick website, with lots of great testimonials and rave-review from past clients. It clearly featured some recognizable brands like Shopify, Stellar, Trualta, and many more, all of whom add credibility and trust. However, there was very little traffic to the site.
They also had a compelling lead magnet, but it wasn’t generating many leads. The leads they were getting were mostly organic.
The Solution
We started working with Unicorn Labs in August 2021 and to kick off our partnership we honed in on Unicorn Labs’ most important goals and clarified our strategy.
- The goal: Generate leads from PPC.
- The strategy: Target their B2B buyers primarily through LinkedIn campaigns.
The Kick-Off
One of the core advantages GlassGrowth offers clients is our team of experienced buyers with specialized experience in the learning and education space.
With their industry and market insight, they can quickly and easily navigate that space and apply their digital marketing expertise to generate high-converting leads.
The first thing our teams did was look into Unicorn Labs’ overall media and content strategy. What it was, and how it could be improved. Google and Facebook ads were underperforming.
Our digital marketing and media buying teams began implementing a new strategy. One that incorporated Linkedin Ads that targeted Unicorn Lab’s ideal buyers more precisely. This was the beginning of the process that gradually improved the quality of their leads and ultimately optimized their overall conversion rates.
Funnel Building
With a clear strategy in hand, we began designing and implementing a funnel that could build on the organic SEO traffic they were generating from their popular blog. They already had a few effective email marketing automation that we could tweak to nurture leads, generate more interest, and ultimately more traffic to their funnel.
With a funnel in place, we could more easily track where their marketing budget was going, how it was performing, and where there was an opportunity to optimize it.
We introduced display banners to their custom funnel, which helped generate more qualified leads and a drop in the Clickthru Rate.
B2B Campaign #1 - LinkedIn
The first campaign we created for Unicorn Labs ran from August 8th to Nov 1st, 2021. In it, we gave away a free video training called “Six-step System For Elevating Leadership Performance”.
Initially, we were driving the traffic from the LinkedIn ads to Unicorn’s website, but we quickly discovered that conversion rates from the site were very low.
At a cost of CAD $313.80 per lead on traffic to that page, the first campaign was turning out to be very expensive. Because the conversion rates on the website were low, we knew that continuing to drive traffic to the website was not a winning strategy.
Within weeks, ClassGrowths creative teams were pulled in to create a targeted Landing page that followed best practices and could generate the highest possible conversions.
We tested dozens of creative and messaging approaches and focused on the ones that were converting most before scaling them into wider-reaching campaigns.
We also began using Lead Form ads on LinkedIn. This was a more effective option for Unicorn Labs, mainly because Lead Form Ads kept traffic within the platform. Also, the cost per lead was lower than ads, and that would help lower Unicorn Labs’ overall marketing costs.
The Lead Form ads led to the newly minted, cleanly designed Landing Page, where prospects could quickly fill out a form to access the free training.
Prospects were then led to a page for them to easily book their free consultation.
This process captured warm leads, actual contact names, and information that Unicorn Labs’ sales teams could use to call convert into actual sales, although the cost per conversion was still pretty steep compared to other similar clients in the Leadership Training niche.
From our first campaign, we were able to set our next goal: To lower the cost of conversion, by more precisely targeting Unicorn Labs’ prospective buyers.
B2B Campaign #2 - LinkedIn
For our second iteration of Unicorn’s funnel, we scaled down the “Lead Acquisition” campaign and launched a new one using another lead magnet more specifically targeting high-level corporate executives within the B2B audience.
This time we tried an ebook that managers and executives could instantly download for free. This further refined our targeting within the niche. The funnel was re-designed to promote the free ebook, and then re-target visitors to the Landing Page with course ads encouraging them to schedule a call.
We tested a bunch of different audiences and a bunch of different ads and chose the ones that performed the best. Through this process, we discovered that copy which was a little bit longer, and visuals that incorporated creative illustrations converted much better with our high-level executives.
Refining our strategies to better fit our clients’ specific audience is one of the ways we ensure our clients achieve the best results out of their marketing budget.
The ebook funnel performed much better than the free training and dropped CPL down from CAD $313.80 to CAD $135.15. That was a 3x drop in cost per acquisition compared to the previous lead magnet.
B2B Campaign #3 - LinkedIn
At a later stage, we introduced a third funnel triggered by a lead magnet targeting people in the companies (HR e-book).
This was also a Lead Form ad campaign that kept traffic within the platform and was more cost-effective.
The goal was to sell people on their need for the training and from there they have entered automatically into different email automation re-targeting people in the organization based on their seniority levels, which were segmented in the email.
Those campaigns were a massive success.
Not only did they deliver leads but they also delivered actual conversions from leads who purchased at least one training program.
The CPL for this campaign was around CAD $25 which was more than 10x lower than the average spend for leads for this account.
Website Free-Trial Campaign
While we were creating and optimizing LinkedIn ads, we also implemented a free-trial campaign and created banners that promoted it on their website.
Before the free-trial campaign, anyone interested in Unicorn Labs’ training programs would need to schedule a call to request a free trial. A sales rep would send them over the logins and they would eventually log in.
As you could probably tell, not many people wanted to do this. There was a lot of manual work involved, so naturally, conversion rates weren’t high.
So our teams got to work making the free-trial process quicker and easier for prospects. Our digital marketing teams have a lot of experience with Kajabi and were able to request free automation that allowed people to request a trial and receive it at the same time without waiting for anyone from Unicorn Labs to get back to them. This decreased the time it took to receive the trial, and it also freed up Unicorn Labs’s sales resources, who could now focus on converting qualified leads.
B2C Campaign #1 - Google
Based on the success of our B2B campaigns, Unicorn appointed ClassGrowth to lead the drive targeting their B2C clients.
Our media buyers took over Unicorn Labs’ Google Ads account.
Their first goal was to implement a targeted campaign strategy for Unicorn Labs through Google ads.
This meant bidding for top-ranking keywords and using them to create the course’s funnel content, including a new landing page targeting B2C clients.
From the landing page, leads were moved to an automated email funnel, with segmented sequences that encouraged leads to schedule a strategy session.
If leads did not book, they were re-marketed through youtube and other banner ads, and depending on how they were segmented in the mailing list, they are encouraged to either book a call or get a free trial. Out of 4 booked calls, 2 converted to sales, at a total conversion value of approximately CAD $40,000.
B2C Campaign #2 - LinkedIn & Facebook
On LinkedIn, we created a customized funnel targeting their B2C prospects which included a landing page (targeting B2C clients) built around a personality test
This generated an increase in traffic from the Linked ads we were running, straight to the website.
We then added Facebook to the mix so on the B2B side we created a landing page for the HR book. And from here we wanted to make people download the free e-book.
We’re currently pushing traffic from Google, LinkedIn, and Facebook to the B2C landing page, and remarketing to page visitors through Youtube and other google campaigns.
The Results
There’s a lot of hard work that goes into generating leads. The process is always a journey of continuous improvement and optimization.
From little things like tweaking an ad’s creative, or polishing up the content, to redirecting traffic from the social media platform, re-imagining the lead magnet, and refining the customer journey, our goal is to make the most out of a marketing budget by continuously monitoring, tweaking, revising and improving a funnel’s online performance.
The strategy we originally implemented for Unicorn Labs had performed very well for our clients in the leadership program niche. We knew the results we could potentially see, and that helped us recognize very early on that this particular strategy needed tweaking for Unicorn Labs’ specific B2B and B2C audiences because different audiences can behave differently.
This is one of the important benefits ClassGrowth offers our clients. The niche experience is needed to quickly realize when results can be improved, and the specialized expertise to know what to do and how to do it, in order to improve campaign performance if it’s not optimal.
Through the course of our partnership, we were able to gradually improve the quality of Unicorn Lab’s leads and their overall conversion rates.
For Unicorn Labs, our process took around 9 months and it resulted in:
- Doubled free trial requests
- Increased overall traffic by 129%
- Increased overall conversions by 296%
What we were able to achieve
Within 5 months Unicorn Labs had made close to 27K in sales.
We had delivered a 261% rise in its conversions, while also decreasing their cost per lead by 40%.
First 5 month Stats:
Unlike Unicorn’s previous campaigns, the campaigns ClassGrowth ran were able to generate high-value leads for Unicorn’s sales teams and provide them with actual email addresses, contact information, and background insights that did a lot of their sales teams’ heavy lifting and made their conversion process more efficient.
After partnering with ClassGrowth for 9 months, Unicorn Labs are now on target to achieving over 50K in sales, all underpinned by high-performing funnels that bring in about 10 highly qualified leads every week at a third of the cost per lead (averaging CAD $120-180 CPL).
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