How to grow if the target audience is gone? The BAD marketplace learned to convert a cold audience into clients and grew threefold
What to do when you have already covered the entire hot audience, but sales still need to be scaled? Where else to find buyers? We attract a cold audience to the site, warm it up and convert it into buyers. And all this with the help of contextual advertising. We tell you using the example of an online store of dietary supplements iTAB. In the final, there is an algorithm for the scaling method, which can be applied in different topics.
Many companies are looking for an answer to the question: how to scale sales without increasing the share of advertising expenses (SAE)? Why is it so difficult?
Let's first figure out who the advertising should influence. We have only 2 types of target audiences: hot and cold:
1. Hot — these are consumers who have a clear need for your product or service. They type a precise query in the search bar, for example, “buy vitamin D”. Such a target audience is, of course, the most convenient for advertising, and therefore everyone works with it.
2. Cold — these are people who are aware of their problems/desires, but do not yet know how to solve them and are still studying the information. In the search bar, they type queries like “how to improve immunity”. Few people show ads to such a target audience, because they are not yet ready to buy, and it is scary to spend money on them.
It would seem, what is the problem? Let's advertise hot products and be done with it. But the capacity of this audience on the Internet is not unlimited. For example, let's take the key phrase “buy dietary supplements”. According to Wordstat, there were 29.5 thousand requests for it in May.
29.5 thousand requests is not a small amount, but let's not forget about the competitors who are fighting with you in the auction for these hot users. In order to scale, that is, to get more buyers, you need to increase the advertising budget. And if you fail to achieve a significant increase in requests, then the DRR will increase and advertising will be unprofitable.
So, we understand that a hot audience is an expensive pleasure. How else can you scale sales without increasing the DRR? We found an opportunity to get out of the “red ocean” and enter new, as they say, “blue” spaces. We learned to work with a cold audience. And in this case of a niche marketplace for dietary supplements iTAB we'll tell you how:
attract a cold audience;
warm her up and encourage her to buy;
analyze how many new orders it brought in.
In the end, we will give a universal algorithm for working with a cold audience, which can be applied in different topics.
The niche marketplace for dietary supplements has run out of hot buyers. They figured out where to get new ones.
Our client – iTABa niche marketplace for vitamins and health products, successfully operating on the market since 2019. Sells dietary supplements at retail and wholesale, offline and online, in the Russian Federation and on international markets. Produces STM (private trademark). There are 78,000 points of issue in Russia.
Peculiarity iTAB is that this is not just a site where you can buy dietary supplements. The company is actively developing the culture of consuming dietary supplements in Russia. Together with doctors, nutritionists, health coaches, and integrative medicine operators, an entire platform for health has been created. More than 3,000 specialists recommend iTAB to its clients.
We have been cooperating with iTAB for the third year already. Previously, we talked about cases about how The company took off in the market and then grew with the help of contextual advertising. And How worked with B2B audience to increase LTV of online store buyers.
From the very beginning iTAB sets us the task of increasing sales volume without increasing the share of advertising expenses. Everything was like that until we reached the ceiling of our hot audience. When the increase in the budget began to lead to an increase in DRR, not income.
We started looking for new ways to scale and developed a hypothesis. What if we expand not the budget, but the target audience. If the hot one is over, then we will get buyers from the cold one. The main thing is to know what it wants.
What does the cold one want? We test methods of influence and choose…
We have already talked about the fact that the cold audience is looking for information and is not ready to buy. Let's look at their pain points, expectations and objections.
Cold CA dietary supplement:
there is a health problem, but it doesn’t bother you much, they put it off until the last minute;
no time to consult a doctor or specialist;
they don’t know how dangerous vitamin deficiency is, what the consequences are;
don't know what they need;
do not actively search for vitamins or dietary supplements;
not familiar with the brand, no trust.
In a chaotic search for information, this audience wanders around information platforms. Having read enough, it flows into large marketplaces. And sometimes it even stops looking for a solution, pushing the problem into the background.
How to attract and hold her attention? It would be a mistake to immediately and head-on start selling your product. First, you need to interest her with useful information, then get her contact information for further warming up, and then convert her into buyers.
Luckily, we didn't have to go far in search of a means of attracting attention, because the iTAB website has a large number of cool tools:
lead magnet with a test to identify the problem and individual selection of dietary supplements;
ready-made selections of drug complexes from specialists;
online consultations with nutritionists;
various informational articles.
As you can see, our client has expert content built perfectly. iTAB actively educates its cold audience. We decided to experiment and combined content marketing with contextual advertising. We started driving traffic first to articles, then to expert selections. But the best way to attract cold target audiences was through tests on the selection of dietary supplements.
How to captivate the cold? Attracting a cold audience with contextual advertising
The tests for selecting dietary supplements were developed by iTAB experts based on the latest scientific achievements in nutrition. This is an innovative way to quickly find out the individual health characteristics of the user and offer vitamins and supplements that are right for him.
The site had special pages for each test. There were 8 of them in total — on the most pressing issues: gastrointestinal tract, liver, stress, men's, women's and children's health, immunity.
Above in the illustration is an example of a page with a test for selecting a dietary supplement to boost immunity. The user answered several questions and left their contact information. After sending, they immediately received recommendations by email along with a 15% discount on the purchase. That is, this test was also a lead magnet for obtaining contacts of potential buyers, who could be further warmed up and returned.
We collected semantics for each of the 8 problems. We prepared advertisements, and each topic had its own offers. The texts indicated not only the problem itself, but also the possibility of its solution – an invitation to take a test and get useful information on how to improve your health.
Launched advertising on Search. These advertising campaigns provided coverage, but the number of user queries was limited. After the first week, we realized that we would only get large coverage from YAN. We focused on advertising campaigns in Yandex networks and Smart banners. For the latter, we prepared a manual product feed, where instead of products, we used these 8 problems with their solutions.
At first, we focused on the final goal — passing the test on the site, with payment for conversion. But after the first test, we saw that the coverage was small and switched to payment for clicks for scaling. We also studied user behavior on the site and added an additional goal — active time on the site.
This optimization method gave us an excellent increase in the number of conversions and allowed us to control the dynamics, constantly adjust the cost of goals and budgets of advertising campaigns.
With this strategy, the average cost per click was slightly more than 5 rubles. And the average cost of passing the test and receiving a unique user contact was about 43 rubles. For comparison, a click in contextual advertising in this topic costs an average of 66 rubles.
We started getting good results, but they were still not enough to scale up.
Yandex Direct has a very controversial but interesting tool that independently selects the target audience based on the content of ads and information from landing pages – this is autotargeting. At the start, we tried to limit it in every possible way to achieve the most relevant results. But now, for further scaling, we decided to give free rein to Yandex algorithms for selecting an advertising audience.
We also enhanced the effect by using a new type of advertising campaigns — EPC. This is a Unified Performance Campaign, which shows ads simultaneously on Search and in YAN, taking into account additional settings. As a result, autotargeting pulled almost all the traffic to itself, but most importantly, it allowed us to get 39 times more conversions at the cost we needed. At the same time, we adhered to the same strategy — payment per click.
Are You Warm, Girl? Warming Up and Bringing Back Cold Audiences with Retargeting
So, with the help of contextual advertising, we began to bring a cold audience to the client's website. But let's not forget that such an audience is not ready to buy and you will not get income from it from the first visit. Therefore, our goal was: to get the user's contact in order to warm him up later and bring him to the site for a purchase.
What did we do? We launched retargeting campaigns, actively reached out to the target audience with relevant products, discounts, and promotions. We also used the data of users who had passed the tests in the advertising settings — we made upward adjustments for such a target audience.
Meanwhile, the client was warming up the new target audience with the help of email newsletters.
But the most important stage of the work was to check and prove that this cold audience warmed up, converted into a buying audience, and our advertising investments paid off.
How to prove that the cold one got hot and bought? We are developing our own method of analytics
Please note that we did not receive user contacts that we could use to contact them, only their e-mail. Accordingly, we could not then see in the CRM whether that person had bought something from us. After all, the target audience of BAA often does not make a purchase right away. They may visit the site many times before ordering something. Therefore, we needed to track how users behaved after completing the test, how many times they visited the online store, and at what point they made a purchase.
Yandex Metrica does not have such a complex functionality to perform cohort analysis. Therefore, we came up with our own method of analytics. It allowed us to collect emails of all those who passed the tests, and the phones of those who later made a purchase.
The method consisted of three stages:
Downloading an array of data for each user visit using the Yandex Metrica API;
Formation of a machine-readable file with statistics;
Analysis of the obtained data using ChatGPT-4.
The last point is especially interesting because previously a full analysis of such arrays could take 4-5 hours of work. But after we began training ChatGPT-4 models to correctly study and draw conclusions from our reports, we spend no more than 10 minutes on this process.
This method of data analysis helped us to find out:
that about 6% of users, after passing the test, return to the site and make purchases;
what kind of audience and what kind of issues most often convert into a purchase, so that later you can train advertising campaigns to bring in more of the same.
For example, the behavior pattern of women aged 35 to 54 years, from large cities, who came to the site through ads about stress. If we actively caught up with them with retargeting within 5 days, then the conversion of such an audience increased by 14%. Therefore, we created an auto funnel from campaigns with such a cycle and they worked great.
We have found several such links and continue to search for new ones. But the most important thing is that this method of analysis shows the effectiveness of contextual advertising in attracting a cold audience and its subsequent conversion into buyers.
Results: 1500+ contacts per month, 43 rubles each, 6% of users become buyers and the client's income has increased 3 times
We launched a cold audience sales scaling project in November 2023. It helped us successfully solve the client’s main task – to increase revenue without exceeding the permissible DRR (share of advertising expenses).
Currently, with the help of tests we attract more than 1500 contacts per month, at 43 p. and 6% of these users become buyers. The project adds 90 purchases per month to the online store.
If we compare comparable indicators for 2024 with last year's, we will see that overall iTAB's income has grown threefold. For example, in April 2023, income: 2.4 million rubles, number of purchases 537, and in April 2024, income 6.5 million rubles, purchases – 1,220. This happened due to active testing of different hypotheses in contextual advertising and the connection of new Yandex Direct tools.
How to scale sales through cold audiences and without increasing DRR: an action algorithm
Step-by-step plan for attracting cold target audience and converting them into buyers:
We study our cold target audience, what problems worry them, what pain points and objections they have;
We develop a lead magnet that will meet the needs of the target audience and attract them to our website. For example: a test to identify ways to solve the client's problem, articles with unique and useful information, free consultations and calculations from specialists, etc.
We place a lead magnet on the website and think through an auto-funnel for further interaction with the consumer;
We prepare advertisements with triggers for the target audience and an incentive to go to the lead magnet on the website;
We set up Yandex Direct advertising campaigns for the initial attraction of the target audience, as well as for returns;
We are preparing a report that will show the entire user path and the effectiveness of contextual advertising, and will also provide food for thought;
We constantly analyze, adjust settings, build and test hypotheses to develop scaling.
We wish you success! Share your experience of working with a cold audience in the comments.
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