Deel is a San Francisco-based financial tech startup that gives companies big and small the tools they need to build international teams, while staying compliant with labor laws and minimizing risks.
In December of 2020, Deel successfully raised a Series B funding round of $30 million dollars to help them scale their international payment solution.
We launched Deel's paid program in August 2020 across Google, Facebook, Instagram, Linkedin, and Bing. Within the first six months of advertising, we were able to double their account signups & demo calls per month.
The first challenge was tracking MQL & SQLs for Deel's organization. Deel has multiple ways a lead could inquire about their services.
We rolled out Google Tag Manager across Deel's website & app to full track the user journey towards becoming a customer. This provided Deel's organization with useful customer data that helped our ad program, as well as the conversion rate optimization of the entire website.
Deel also underwent a re-brand before their Series B announcement, meaning we had to overhaul our creative strategy for our advertising.
We were able to provide Deel's creative team with different creative briefs to provide guidance for new creatives.
An additional challenge is that Deel is global. They can serve anyone in the world.
We had to identify and distribute our media spend to countries that generated the most growth. Managing campaigns across dozens of different countries added to the complexity of this ad program.
Finally, Deel wanted to grow quickly.
They needed to lean heavily on paid advertising as an avenue for growth. Their ambitious growth goals meant that digital advertising needed to be scaled quickly, while maintaining their Target Customer Acquisition Cost.
We started off doing an audit of the website, providing the Deel team with tweaks to improve the conversion rate of leads that come to the site.
We also provided custom creative briefs per platform to make sure that we leveraged creative assets fit for the advertising platform.
We identified the top countries to target based on revenue potential and began our advertising programs there. Starting with a select few nations, and then increasing in scope every month.
We leveraged search-based platforms to place text ads in front of anyone looking for ways to pay their international contractors or employees.
Given the fact that these keywords are in the financial niche, they are highly expensive and competitive. This meant that we had to dial in our ad copy and landing page design to keep CPCs down and improve Conversion Rates.
On the social ad side, we segmented our strategy based on prospecting and retargeting.
We rolled out a number of different prospecting campaigns by geo, identifying the countries with the most effective leads.
We leveraged a number of different look-a-like audiences in order to find the best targeting avenues for our ads.
By basing our look-a-like audiences on existing high-quality customer data, we were able to effectively find top-of-funnel users who were highly qualified to become customers.
Additionally, we focused on retargeting. Many people required multiple touchpoints in our marketing funnel before finally converting.
By effectively leveraging different types of retargeting ads, we were able to “nudge” users towards converting. This turned out to be highly effective and led to efficient customer acquisition costs.
Our ad program helped Deel scale their business rapidly.
Deel experienced a 130% increase in account signups and a 102% increase in Demo Calls month-over-month.
Deel's digital advertising program was, by far, their biggest lever for growth, accounting for 55% of total conversion volume.
Overall, Deel is a perfect example of how paid ads can be a powerful lever to acquire new customers for startups with ambitious growth goals.
