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The Doe:
Thinking Beyond the Media Plan
How we used paid social to increase a media brand’s cultural relevance.
Paid Social Case Study: September 2024
The Ask
In May 2024, we were given a modest monthly media budget
of <$10k with a big ask:
help us increase cultural relevance for a startup editorial brand.
Here is how we approached this goal.
Our Best Work Starts with a Transparent, Collaborative Client/Agency Relationship.
Client handed us an amazing goal.
Increasing cultural relevance doesn’t fit neatly into a media plan, but this macro brand goal served as our north star, guiding our entire paid social strategy activation and keeping us accountable for more than just a straight-forward boosting program.
Brand organic team shared intel that informed paid focus.
Together, we identified the most valuable results we could reliably impact at scale with our paid spend. This was informed by intel from the organic team and led us to focus on post shares.
Client gave us the freedom to push our paid strategy further.
Our team then recommended a custom KPI that was very much measurable (just not a plug-and-play in-platform media goal) and developed a plan that focused on driving efficient results for this KPI.
Unpacking 'Cultural Relevance' as a Media Goal
The Challenge
Off-the-shelf in-platform media goals didn’t feel quite right. It’s not particularly difficult to secure paid video views and impressions in high volumes, but with a limited budget, we needed a more tangible, real-time gut check to ensure that our spend was impacting the brand’s cultural relevance, efficiently.
Our Solution
We recommended a custom media KPI, Cost Per Share, to help our media activation have a larger impact on the larger brand goal. While our campaigns were set up to optimize toward Video Views and Profile Visits, our manual optimizations against audiences and creative were all focused on lowering the cost per share.
How We Arrived at ‘Cost Per Share’ as Our Primary KPI
We needed to consistently and significantly increase post visibility to impact our brand goal: increasing cultural relevance.
Agnostic of Source
Post shares result in both high video views and increases in exposure that can lead to follower growth — two secondary goals that were highly valued by the brand.
Primary KPI
Post Virality:
Shares
(Cost Per Share)
Secondary KPIs
Account Optics:
Video Views
Account Growth: Profile Visits
We let ad platforms optimize toward these anchor media KPIs as we made larger decisions around our primary metric, Cost Per Share, manually.
Primary KPI Results
Primary KPI Wins: Our paid efforts resulted in 7.5M video views and 6k post shares on Meta.
Top organic content was further amplified with a Cost Per Share media goal.
Post Virality: Shares (Cost Per Share)
Instagram: Prior to our activation, the brand had been activating a low-lift post boosting plan, supporting each new post with a minimal budget. We used this data to set our benchmark for success around one primary KPI: Cost Per Share.
Following our activation, we were able to reduce the Cost Per Share by 85%, resulting in +6k post shares and 7.5M additional video views.
Brand campaign served to audiences who had viewed video boosts to reinforce brand mission.
Bigger Picture Impact
Related to our macro goal of increasing cultural relevance, the brand was recognized as a finalist for Best Use of Social Media: Digiday and Best User Generated Content: The Drum.
Our collective use of paid media helped amplify this award-winning work to millions of users.
Secondary KPI Results
Secondary KPI Wins: We drove over 71k profile visits on Meta and nearly 7k new followers on TikTok.
Account Growth (Meta): Profile Visits
Instagram: One of our secondary goals was to drive greater follower consideration by increasing traffic to our Instagram profile. We did this by optimizing toward profile visits in both a dedicated campaign and in our weekly post boost campaigns.
This focus resulted in +71k additional profile visits from paid media.
Account Growth (TikTok): Followers
TikTok: In May we began running small tests on TikTok to see if we should consider increasing paid efforts on the channel and we very quickly realized that we could drive significant follower growth at a very modest spend level.
In just 1.5 months, we were able to identify the right content and media KPI combo to increase followers by 3.5x with <$10k in spend.
TikTok Account Growth
Nice Words from the Client
Cleo Stiller | Editor-in-Chief | Narratives
The Doe
We worked with goodhelp on our paid social media strategy across Instagram and TikTok for four months. During that time, our small to midsize account (330,000 followers) saw 7.5M video views, 6k post shares and 71k profile visits on Meta; and nearly 7k new followers on TikTok. Not only were the metrics fantastic, but working with Jenny is so fun. Will certainly bring her on my next project no question.
Kiana Fathi | Fractional Head of Social
The Doe
Jenny’s ability to strategically align our paid initiatives with our organic efforts has driven significant growth within only a few months while helping us create a cohesive brand presence across the board. By leveraging the strengths of both channels, we were able to create a powerful dynamic that enabled us to hit key goals much earlier than expected.
