We sometimes get questions about how other clients work with Tuff to reach their growth goals — so we’re sharing some stories to help bring our services to life.

Author’s note: This post was originally published in 2018, it has since been updated for 2022! 

Thnks is a platform designed to help users build business relationships by sending thoughtful gestures of appreciation. With a curated catalog of gifts, personalized messages, and more, Thnks is helping sales organizations, marketing groups, customer success teams, and more grow their business.

Why Thnks Tapped Into Paid Social Acquisition

Any company looking to grow through paid social has to consider a few things before getting started.

First, you have to work towards building your audience in the right channel. Secondly, understand that it takes time.

Scaling growth requires you to be rigorous about the channels you experiment with in the early stages of your business. It might seem easy to find one right away and then dump all your money into that one tactic but that almost never happens. Testing, analyzing, and optimizing is a great three-prong approach to finding the recipe for success.

We found the most success with user acquisition for Thnks with social ads, specifically Facebook. With a wide range of targeting options to help businesses find the right niche to reach their target audience,  Facebook ads can be a highly cost-effective channel for customer acquisition. We launched Facebook and Instagram campaigns with highly specific interest and demographic targeting with ads that were relevant to those audiences. Our goal was to help grow overall user growth, while also finding efficiencies along the way. 

The Three-Step Process

Step 1: Conduct user research and identify key audiences to target

Figuring out the right targeting is key to reaching the audiences most likely to convert. As an agency, you can lean on your client’s customer-facing team members. If you’re in-house, partner with your support team to learn more about your customers and their goals and interests. This background information is vital in crafting audiences that can attract and convert your target customer.

For our core audiences, we relied heavily on interest and demographic targeting. Knowing that sales and human resources are Thnks primary customers and highest converters, we did testing of different variations of demographic and interest targeting to create the perfect mix of both to find the ideal audiences. In addition to core interest- and demographic-based audiences, we also built out lookalike audiences using website traffic, used existing customer email lists as well as leveraged pixel data from our ads, and created lookalike audiences of people who successfully submitted leads or interacted with our ads.

Step 2: Develop custom creative for each audience

Once we were confident that our targeting options were set up to attract the right audience, we then had to look at the end product–the ads. Knowing that we were going to be targeting specific people in the sales and human resource fields, we needed to build ad creative and copy that spoke to those people.

The major difference between the two ad designs is that the sales creative relates to people in that specific role that are looking to prospect new clients and close deals. The human resource ad calls out use cases for people in the role to “welcome new employees”, keep current employees happy, and show them you care. These differences may not seem like a lot at first, but speaking directly to these audiences with this messaging showed an immediate lift in performance. 

Step 3: Analyze and improve

Looking back on your data and analyzing results is one of the most important steps of the whole process. Figuring out what is and isn’t working is the first step to being able to scale and grow users. Through this process, we were able to scale what was working and optimize away from what was not. As a result, we were able to scale Thnks users by 81% in just 30 days.

Sales Audience Growth:

Human Resource Audience Growth:

At the end of the day, there really is no secret sauce to finding success through paid acquisition.

It’s only with meticulous research on your target audiences, testing different creative and ad copy, and analyzing and optimizing based on your data you can find success. Growth is a journey, not an overnight magic trick.