Case Study:
How Incognito Logic Doubled First-Time User Base for Online Education Platform in Under One Year
This enterprise-level client achieved positive results above their original goal in the online education space, one of the top 3 most competitive industries on the internet.
With creative resource management and strategizing, the campaign was a wild success.
Background on Client
SkillShare was searching for a marketing company that could increase their user-base by 30,000 month-over-month from cold traffic sources.
Already a notable online education platform, the company boasted over 3.5 million users actively enrolled in classes across the website.
Still, they were struggling to get new users engaged with the platform in a cost-effective manner. At the time, their user value was $40 per sign-up, and they were spending $30-35 to acquire each user.
The problem? Online education is one of the top #3 most competitive spaces on the internet.
Executives were willing to test the waters, but were overall uncertain about how an investment into SEO would perform for their business model.
Furthermore, no internal resources could be devoted to the project unless we could directly propose an ROI benefit to the company.
This meant that we would have little access to their backend web development team, and they did not want to make any changes to the site on the frontend. This presented a significant challenge in the implementation stage of the campaign, as uploading optimized content is a strong driving factor in any successful SEO campaign.
Still, the company knew they needed to reduce their user acquisition spend, and reached out to us for consultation.
The Solution
We agreed upon an initial trial period of 3 months at a lower budget to allow us to demonstrate a small amount of growth given the competitiveness of the industry.
At the end of the 3 months, we agreed on a longer 9-month engagement at a higher budget, this time to achieve their original goal off 3,000 new sign-ups month-over-month.
This meant that our target was to help them gain 27,000 cold sign-ups over the next 9 months, which would require us to generate a significant amount of traffic – about 300,000 new users – for a highly competitive industry that typically sees a conversion rate of 0.52% – 1%.
“At that point, SkillShare was the biggest engagement I had ever had. The lessons I learned here allowed me to go on and successfully work with Adobe, Stanley Black and Decker, and other enterprise-level companies.”
After the campaign renewed, we were given the ability to upload content to their blog area. While we could not make any changes to the front-end navigational pages themselves, we were still able to create authoritative articles to push link authority to the target pages.
Narrowing down high-value classes based on user engagement and popularity, we chose top-performing classes to promote within categories such as photography and graphic design, which are also notably competitive, broad terms within the online education industry.
We then sourced strong and authoritative backlinks from notable publications and produced content for each new ranking page to support it.
Using this indirect strategy, we were able to show Google that these high-value classes were something users were interested in seeing.
Once the target pages began ranking, we improved content and metas on-page to match user intent more closely, and increase overall user conversion.
The Results
SkillShare had set out to increase their userbase by 3,000 month-over-month, meaning we needed to generate at least 3,000 new cold sign-ups each month through indirect methods.
The campaign was a success, and we provided them with a 15-25% higher conversion rate above their original goal, making it one of the most successful online marketing campaigns they had run to date.
Months of Work
%
Lower Aquisition Cost
%
Increase Above Goal
New First-Time Users
During the campaign, we achieved first-page rankings for all our target classes. Most notably, we achieved first page ranking for the broad term Graphic Design, among other related keywords.
We demonstrated a significant amount of organic traffic growth for the company, increasing their traffic to over 500,00 per month in just nine months.
The 12-month campaign was a success, and SkillShare quickly became one of the most well-known online education platforms on the internet. These efforts laid the foundation for them to reach an estimated 1.8-million organic users on a monthly rolling average in the following years.
Later in 2019, SkillShare’s head of marketing and CEO reached out to continue marketing discussions for other projects, such as digital artwork platforms following a hybridized ownership model.
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“Elliot is very good at SEO. I was very happy to get a DETAILED report of how my website is performing and what I can do next to improve. His content planners exactly point out what the people are searching for, so we can design valuable content for people. Without Elliot, I didn’t know what to do next. However, Elliot MAPPED out literally EVERYTHING for me.”