PAID SOCIAL
How Bottlecode Boosted Paid Facebook ROI with an Expert Freelancer
1
Expert marketer hired
18%
Average month-over-month revenue growth for five months
20%
Average month-over-month order volume growth for five months
THE CHALLENGE
It’s easy to create performance marketing campaigns on Facebook and Google’s self-serve platforms. But for Drishay Menon, co-founder of men’s skincare startup Bottlecode, it wasn’t so easy to get performance marketing to perform.
He and his co-founders would set up a Facebook campaign. They’d see click-through, but no conversions. Then, after a week, they’d drop that campaign and start a new one.
“It really came down to the test, iterate and refine cycle,” Menon said.
Bottlecode was an early-stage startup with just four employees — three of them co-founders. No one on the team had a marketing background, so they weren’t sure how to iterate on early campaigns and refine their targeting. They didn’t have any success benchmarks to contextualize what they were doing. They didn’t have enough budget to learn on the job, either.
“How do you learn from these channels when you are constrained by cash?” Menon said. “It was really tough to be able to understand: Are we doing this right?”
They reached out to some agencies for help, but nothing stuck. Some had rigid DTC marketing playbooks that didn’t fit Bottlecode’s business; others were just plain too expensive.
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How do you learn from these channels when you are constrained by cash? It was really tough to be able to understand: Are we doing this right?
Drishay Menon
Co-Founder -
Bottlecode
THE SOLUTION
Menon first heard about MarketerHire through his friend — Zach Goldstein, founder and CEO of the buzzy athleisure brand Public Rec.
Menon trusted Goldstein, and he liked that Marketers Finder offered no-risk matching; his first five hours of work from an expert Marketers Finder freelancer would be free.
“You could just bring on one person and test it out,” he explained. “The low-risk experience upfront was very compelling to me.”
But could Marketers Finder fit Bottlecode’s highly specific need? They wanted a marketer who understood DTC growth marketing and knew their space — so ideally, someone who had worked for men’s brands and beauty brands.
Menon wasn’t sure it could be done, until he saw Bottlecode’s first match. The growth marketer, Mike, ticked every box.
The Bottlecode hired him on an hourly basis.
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THE RESULT
Right away, Mike set himself apart. Previously, Menon had heard the same thing over and over from marketers: “Everything that you do is going to take time.”
“He understands what it is to work with younger organizations,” Menon said. “We need to start seeing some results early on to feel comfortable about the return that we’re getting on the spend.”
Mike gave Bottlecode exactly that, using creative from the startup’s previous campaign attempts to win the startup its first “true-blue,” clearly-attributed Facebook acquisition.
(“We obviously have had customers come [to our site] through Facebook and Instagram,” Menon said — but previously, it had been hard to directly link purchases to ad campaigns.)
As he optimized the company’s bread-and-butter paid social strategy, Mike also helped the Bottlecode team flesh out ambitious 2021 plans.
“We’ve talked to him about all the different channels that we want to… expand into early next year,” Menon said. “Mike’s going to be able to continue to help us.”
Today, like Goldstein, Menon recommends Marketers Finder to colleagues, citing “how easy it is to scale up and scale down the experience.” If Menon ever wants to, he could add a paid social marketer or a PR expert to Bottlecode’s one-man freelance marketing team — fast.