Digital Marketing Case Study Bodhisattwa Debnath

RightStay by MakeMyTriprightstay.com

The Product and BackgroundWhen I joined the RightStay team, we were at the early product discovery stage. The team wanted to build something we were inherently familiar with - travel and hospitality, but focus on some core consumer problems that needed solving. Narrowing down on a core segment, I started by doing intensive customer discovery, then worked closely with the product team to build the app.

I then focused on delivering key testing environments by funnelling fast-paced user acquisition of varying demographic, interest, and purchase history backgrounds. After the testing phase was over and we were able to narrow down our Unique Selling Points, I moved to scaling user growth at intense speeds.

The ChallengeThe travel industry is a highly competitive environment where there exists a culture of massive transactional discounting in order to gain market share, especially in the hospitality vertical. This is very detrimental for startups as they often have to fight against price volatility induced by large players without having the runway or funds to match up to them.

I had the challenge to understand to the deepest levels possible, the core problems of the luxury hotel booking segment so that we could create a product with a compelling USP. My next challenge was to funnel highly fragmented beta users for testing where the user personas changed twice a week. My challenge here was to funnel enough users for every product experiment so that the sample sets were equable.

The final challenge, and by far the biggest one, was to use limited funds to scale the product from scratch and prove market viability within three months.

Focus Growth Segment: Facebook AdvertisementI led the overall digital marketing effort for RightStay. However, for the purpose of the case study, the area studied here is focused on the largest contributing factor to the product’s mass adoption - Facebook Advertisement.

I helped grow RightStay from inception to over 100,000 active mobile users within 2 months of actually starting active marketing and 3 months of the full product lifespan. My goal was to get as many qualified users as possible, as fast as possible, and for as little amount of funds as possible. I was able to acquire users with over 40% repeat purchase history and maintain a 1:3 cost to revenue ratio.

MO: Customer Discovery

The focus of this segment of marketing is almost as important as the execution, if not more. Understanding your core target audience, their problems and buyer behaviour is what defines everything from ad creatives to product messaging and even customer support.

I started by extensively studying existing reports, customer insights and developing a set of hypotheses and counter hypotheses that needed to be tested and verified. I then handled massive outreach survey and conversation campaigns to validate these hypotheses.

Below are snippets of the hypotheses building and interview reporting stages:

The hypotheses building stage

The data build up stage

MO: Facebook Advertisement

I ideated, tested, optimised and stabilised sustainable Facebook user acquisition campaigns as according to a tried and tested workflow that I employ, detailed as under:

Creating ad content and copies for various target audience demographies: Create multiple ad copies and creatives for each target demography. Create variations of ads based on unique selling points, messaging and focus consumer pain point. This includes text copies and media creatives (images, videos or slideshows).

Installation and testing of conversion pixels: Install and test website conversion pixels so that we can measure ROI for each acquisition, use it for remarketing and create lookalike audiences for detailed targeting in the future.

Testing primary target audience and ad copies: Run small budget ad campaigns targeting main demographies.

Testing primary geography: Target and identify most cost effective micro geographies including city radiuses and suburbs.

Understanding audience insights: Use audience insights to understand which specific age groups and gender is performing the best both in terms of CPA and conversions.

Fine tune targeting as back burner ads for the next sprint: As a new set of experiments start (as detailed in the below point), use the learnings from the first sprint to fine-tune the targeting of the first draft ads on a steady budget to retain acquisition while new proxy targeting tests are run.

Testing targeting proxies: Identify and target audiences using proxies based on a number of behavioural, occupational and relational variables. These proxies include designations at workplace, marital status, etc., which often dictate buying behaviours.

Ad formats and placement split testing: Use a variety of ad variants available - carousel, banner, video/slideshows as well as placement settings like desktop news feeds, mobile news feeds, desktop right column and Instagram to identify the most profitable formats and placements.

Competitor targeting: Use precise USP based ad copies and creatives to target fans of direct competitors, secondary competitors (brands which are not direct competitors in terms of USP but has possible solutions for the target market.

Bidding optimisation to bring down costs: Apply bidding optimisation techniques to bring down CPC costs.

Understand days of week and time of day performance: Use two weeks of sample set to find out the best times during a 24 hour period and best performing days during a week to run accelerated ads on.

Lookalike Audiences: Start creating lookalike audiences from our acquired users and website conversions and target them, leading to further reach and reduction of CPA.

Remarketing: Start targeting dropped off users at various levels along the conversion funnel.

Start Branding Ads: Start Facebook page like ads to further increase brand awareness and create a fan pool to target new acquisition ads to.

Friends of fan and conversions targeting: Start targeting the friends and family of acquired users who are also expats.

Key Results:App install ads: Over 12% conversion rate on app install ads and a highly optimised cost of install at $1.46. It is to be noted that cheaper downloads were most certainly possible (even as low as $0.50 per install and lower, as shown below). However, the focus was on attaining better performing users that might cost higher but within an admissible range and ensuring that cost to revenue ration still remained 1:3

Marginally higher cost but better performing users down transactional funnel:

Lower cost but average performing users down transactional funnel:

Web click to Install Ads and Web adoption: A non-direct user acquisition tactic was to direct far cheaper but equally well targeted users to the web and start the conversion funnel from here. Although the drop-off was higher, the significantly lower CPC and the self-selected filtering made this acquisition channel extremely viable. CPC was attained at around $0.3 and a CTR around 3.7% to over 30%

Branding ads to grow community and target fans: I grew the fan base on Facebook to a sizeable amount and targeted the page’s fans to further lower the CPA and eventually, the cost per transaction. This also ensured that the fan base grew at a healthy rate. Because of accurate targeting and multiple touch-points, the cost per engagement was averaged at $0.01 as shown above and CTR of over 30%.

Core Creatives and Copies:Creatives and copies where changed extensively and very frequently based on data, for testing and to ensure ad frequency remained low. However, the below formed the core templates:

Conclusion

At RightStay, I helped grow a nascent product from scratch to mass user adoption with a healthy cost to revenue ration and hence prove product-market fit.

Digital Marketing Case Study Bodhisattwa Debnath

RightStay by MakeMyTriprightstay.com