Case Studies / LlamaCuba
Telecommunications · Multicultural Marketing116% More Reach and 51% More Conversions on 31% More Budget.
LlamaCuba connects the Cuban community abroad with their families back home. They wanted more customers and more brand awareness on the budget they already had. Then the market changed underneath them mid-campaign, and we rebuilt the account four times without losing a step.
Keeping Families Connected With Cuba
LlamaCuba was founded in 2009 in Miami by a group of young Cuban entrepreneurs. Their mission is to provide the Cuban community in the United States, Canada, and Europe with state-of-the-art yet affordable telecommunication services, so they can always stay in touch with friends and family in Cuba.
They sell both to end customers and to resellers, and have expanded into travel and news with LlamaCuba Travel and Cuba en Directo, aiming to become a one-stop destination for any service related to Cuba.
They hired Zebra Advertisement to increase their customer base and the market awareness of their brand.
Grow the Base, Build the Brand, and Survive a Market Shift
The previous 12 months had spent $39,983.67 to reach 1,418,774 people, at a cost per conversion of $2.25. The brief was to reduce that cost, generate 20% more customers on the same budget, and reach more people for less. Our initial analysis found four things to work on.
- A cost per conversion with room in it. Conversions counted new clients from the website, calls originating from the site, and app downloads, all at $2.25 with clear room to bring the number down.
- A new app that needed downloads. The second version had just launched and needed volume at a better cost per install.
- A reach ceiling on a fixed budget. More people had to be reached without more money to reach them with.
- Max CPC bidding built on a traffic-first assumption. The theory was that awareness alone would convert, so bidding chased clicks rather than customers.
Buy Customers, Not Clicks
Traffic was never the constraint. Qualification was. So we changed what the account was bidding for, split it into pieces we could fund independently, and then held all of it together through a market shift that arrived halfway through the year.
A Gradual Switch From Max CPC to CPA
We moved bidding to a CPA strategy in stages rather than all at once. Our case to the client was that CPA would deliver the same visibility as Max CPC while changing who actually saw the ad: delivery shifts toward people more likely to convert, so the same views become far more qualified.
Five Campaign Types, One Controllable Budget
We broke the account into five categories: click to call, Search, remarketing through the Display network, custom intent through the Display network, and app download campaigns. Separating them let us see which ones were working and move money into them immediately, instead of scaling the whole account at once.
A Market That Changed Underneath the Campaigns
Between 2018 and 2019 the fragile political situation in Cuba moved the entire industry away from selling minutes to call Cuba and toward recharging phone credit on mobile phones inside Cuba. We readapted every campaign to the new product while still meeting the goals agreed at the start.
We also opened a new market segment by targeting people looking to ship packages to Cuba. They have family on the island, so they are natural customers for the core service. That campaign lifted brand awareness and brought in clients at the same time.
Four Rebuilds, Zero Lost Learning
The assignment was to scale an account through a combination of campaign types rather than through budget, while a volatile market kept changing what the business actually sold.
- We added app download campaigns to the mix and generated over 8,000 new clients. The App Download campaign alone produced more than 1,953,116 impressions on just over $7,000 invested.
- We built repeat business into the app. Push notifications turned a one-time install into an ongoing customer relationship, so acquisition spend kept paying out after the first conversion.
- We restructured the account at least four times in one year without starting over. Every time the political situation forced a change, we reworked the existing campaigns instead of building new ones, keeping their history intact.
- That decision protected the economics. New campaigns would have triggered a fresh learning phase, pushing cost per click and cost per acquisition up at exactly the wrong moment.
From June 2018 Forward
Clicks, conversions, and cost all rose while the cost per conversion fell. The efficiency story is in the last line of the table: everything above it was achieved on a budget increase of just 31%.
The Numbers
| Metric | Result | Change |
|---|---|---|
| Impressions | 3,075,986 | +116.81% |
| Clicks | 90,834 | +53.56% |
| Conversions | 26,356 | +50.68% |
| Cost per conversion | $1.96 | -12.73% |
| Average cost per click | $0.57 | -15.03% |
| Search impression share | 22.15% | +65.00% |
| Total cost | $52,168.45 | +30.47% |
Cost is marked in red because it is the only line that went up against us. Every other movement is in the client’s favour.
The App Download Campaign
Added to the mix specifically to push installs of the second version of the app, and to give the business a channel it owned rather than rented.
| Impressions | Investment | New Clients |
|---|---|---|
| 1,953,116 | Just over $7,000 | 8,000+ |
The Business Outcomes
The last number is the one that mattered most to the client. Proving that growth could come from a different marketing mix rather than a bigger cheque opened the door to nearly doubling the budget over the following 12 months, with 78% of the market still unserved because of ad rank and budget rather than demand.
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