34.5% Reduction in Paid CPA: Kickfurther Growing a Niche Audience with Primer’s Cross-Channel Targeting

Kickfurther is an inventory funding platform that connects brands to backers, who pre-purchase consignment inventory. It’s pretty cool, the opportunities they’re able to generate for both parties, but being a marketplace comes with its challenges. 

They partnered with Primer to build custom audiences of their ICPs to leverage across advertising and outbound channels. By syncing enriched contact data into their CRM and ad platforms, they ensured messaging alignment across touchpoints.

The Problem: Activating a Niche Audience Across Channels

On the one hand, they need to identify CPG brands in need of inventory financing.  And on the other, backers, who are willing to purchase consignment inventory through Kickfurther’s platform. With highly specific ideal customer profiles (ICPs) and constrained market size, particularly among potential backers, Kickfurther struggled to identify and activate qualified prospects across channels without wasting budget.

Because our targets are so focused, we’re challenged to be more tactical to uncover opportunities to get in front of the right prospects,

said BJ Scott, Kickfurther's Director of Digital Marketing.

While Kickfurther understood their ideal customer, activating it across multiple channels posed problems:

• When trying to target on paid channels, they had a hard time honing in, which meant wasted ad budget on poor fit contacts
• Native targeting didn’t provide an easy way to identify qualified individuals with precision
• Similarly, with outbound prospecting tools, reps wasted time cold emailing unqualified contacts
• There wasn’t any simultaneous alignment across advertising and outbound messaging, so messages weren’t breaking through

So what is a B2B company to do? How could Kickfurther identify and activate their ICP across channels and unlock growth?

The Hypothesis: Consistent Cross-Channel Targeting

Kickfurther went looking for an approach to target the same qualified audiences across advertising, outbound, and traditional mail channels. They learned that with Primer's audience targeting and sync tools, they could:

• Build custom audiences tailored to their ICP criteria
• Leverage these audiences across ad platforms via Primer’s ability to sync to Meta, Google, and LinkedIn
• Export audiences to their CRM to fuel outbound efforts
  

By using Primer to build and enrich audiences they could directly target in their advertising and outbound campaigns, Kickfurther expected increased efficiency and return from their highly targeted efforts.

The Approach: Unified Targeting Fueled by Primer Audiences

Kickfurther executed their "always-on" targeting initiative in four steps:

1. Build Target Audiences 

Using Primer's filters, Kickfurther built multiple audiences matching their highly specific criteria. This included:

• Company-Level criteria: Specific industries and technologies used
• Contact-Level criteria: Target job titles

2. Sync Audiences into Ad Platforms 

After building audiences tailored to their needs, Kickfurther leveraged Primer's platform to sync audiences into LinkedIn and Google Ads, where their Primer-audiences ensured that cross-channel campaigns actually targeted the same individuals in both ad networks.

3. Export Audiences to CRM 

In addition to advertising, Kickfurther exported enriched audience data directly into their CRM, HubSpot. With advertising building awareness, this gave their team qualified and warmed up contacts to fuel effective outbound efforts.

4. Align Messaging Across Channels 

Finally, unified audience targeting allowed Kickfurther to align messaging across advertising creative and outbound plays.

With the same contacts targeted across platforms, Kickfurther's end-to-end narrative matched, regardless of touchpoint and they broke through the noise.

The Result: Increased Efficiency, Higher Conversions

By leveraging Primer Audiences to fuel outbound and cross-channel advertising, Kickfurther increased ROI across efforts:

• ‍34.5% Reduction in Paid CPA
• Their most successful Backer campaign of 2023
• Higher quality outbound leads increased sales velocity

‍Additionally, the unified approach reduced wasted time and budget:

• Reps no longer wasted time cold outbounding unqualified, cold contacts
• Contacting leads “warmed up” through ads increased connect rates
• Tight audience criteria ensured lessened wasted ad budget

For BJ, the efficiency gains were clear:

Our outreach is more efficient and effective, as a result of the awareness built through integrated, cross-channel messaging to the same audience.

Key Takeaways

For B2B companies struggling to identify and activate niche contacts, Kickfurther's success provides an excellent blueprint.

Leveraging Primer's audiences and sync features to fuel precise targeting across advertising and outbound channels offers a way to increase ROI across efforts.

Additionally, their approach of matching narratives across touchpoints stands out for improving conversions. With the same contacts targeted across platforms, tailored messaging reinforcement is more important than ever.