SWIDIA

BACKGROUND

Introduce your business and what you do there.

I work at Radish Fiction, and I am the director of marketing.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

What challenge were you trying to address with SWIDIA?

Our engagement started when we first decided to start building out our user acquisition channel. We’d been doing some very low-budget testing but hadn’t focused on paid ads at all and wanted to ramp up that part of our process.

SOLUTION

What was the scope of their involvement?

Our initial agreement was for them to help us get started with a steady schedule for spending on paid ads, with the goal of achieving profitability and scaling within a few months. We are currently focused primarily on Facebook ads for the moment.

What is the team composition?

Initially, we worked with the two co-owners of the company, but they have had an additional member of their team join since then.

How did you come to work with SWIDIA?

We are a startup, so we were looking for a smaller, more boutique agency that we could have a close relationship with to help us throughout the project. From our first meetings, they were very approachable and easy to talk to, so we were convinced that we would be able to maintain the kind of collaboration we were looking for.

How much have you invested with them?

Our spending with them started at about $9,000 per month, and I believe we are closer to $15,000 a month now. In total, we’ve probably spent around $120,000

What is the status of this engagement?

The project started in June 2019 and is ongoing.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

What evidence can you share that demonstrates the impact of the engagement?

In terms of campaign results, we started with an ad budget of $30,000 a month and we have since expanded that over 10 times, to close to $300,000 a month, and we are looking to scale even more. That level of growth has really satisfied us in terms of the results we were looking for, and we’ve been impressed by their ability to scale quickly once they found the right audience.

It’s really nice to have a team that can be the pros at the platform and can execute on something to that level for us. Their work has contributed to the really significant level of growth that we’ve seen in the last four months and we are targeting $1,000,000 a month of spend for the future.

How did SWIDIA perform from a project management standpoint?

The biggest factor in the project’s success has been their ability to communicate openly and often. Because we are a relatively early-stage startup, every dollar counts, so their availability to us has been absolutely incredible.

Reporting really matters to us because we are reliant on day-to-day numbers, and we have a pretty solid reporting infrastructure on our end that they have integrated with quite seamlessly. They’ve also helped to build out some pretty great dashboards and tracking materials specific to their work that are proving to be incredibly helpful in establishing and sticking to goals throughout the project.

What did you find most impressive about them?

We are no longer working with their design team because we were able to bring on a lot of resources in-house, but for the first half of the project we worked with their team for design as well, and they were absolutely wonderful.

That team is very impressive in terms of both their ability to collaborate with the client and their overall expertise, so we were able to develop some really great creative resources that helped us a lot at the beginning of the relationship.

Are there any areas they could improve?

The initial few weeks involved quite a lot of back and forth with regard to our brand and what exactly we were trying to showcase in our work with them.

That ramp-up process was pretty difficult for us, which was necessary to a certain extent but could potentially have been supported by establishing an infrastructure for the communication a little more quickly. Once we got into the rhythm of it, however, it was completely seamless.