Case Study: Cow-Ork, flexible workspaces provider

Using Instagram data to generate leads

Overview of client & challenges

Andrea and Gian Luca, the co-founders of COW-ORK, an innovative start-up offering flexible workspaces across Miami, were looking for scalable ways to acquire new members while keeping the budget on track. The company transforms restaurants, hotels and other hospitality venues into an all-access network of working and meeting spaces, allowing freelancers, home-workers, flexible employees, and students to work in shared spaces at an affordable price.

When first launching their product on the Miami market, Andrea and Gian Luca decided to target professionals working from similar locations (coffee shops, restaurants, etc.) via Instagram Direct Messages. First, they identified the relevant Instagram accounts of such venues, then manually analyzed user accounts that tagged themselves in these locations. This alternative method of acquiring new leads came about because the classic customer acquisition methods, such as Facebook or Google ads, did not prove to be cost-effective. While thishyper-targeted approach allowed them to grow their initial member-base, it offered numerous challenges for future scaling. Manually qualifying user accounts and engaging one-to-one quickly became too time-consuming for the busy founders.

As a result of their busy workload, they looked for growth marketing agencies that could help them engage at scale with the right target audience, meanwhile keeping the cost of a new member acquisition under $100.

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Summary of challenges:

• ‍‍Scale with low acquisitions costs
• Decrease manual work
• Need to validate theproduct-market fit rapidly

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Scope of work

At Skief Labs, we specialize in identifying the right growth opportunities by leveraging the most effective outreach channels and data sources. Based on their initial success sourcing new members from Instagram, we decided to keep this social network as our primary source for potential customers.

We agreed on a list of Instagram accounts whose followers should fall within the criteria ofCOW-ORK’s target audience. We extracted all their followers, analyzed their bios and other available data points to score each lead (location, job title, account category, availability of public emails etc.). We have analyzed over 100k profiles and ultimately kept up to 2000 users that satisfied all the criteria.

Overview of the workflow

• Data extraction of followers of target Instagram accounts
• Advanced leads scoring based on a list of criteria:
• Email deliverability verification (to eliminate old or unused emails, spam traps and disposable addresses).
• Cold email outreach with a 2-step sequence inviting users to try out the service for a limited period of time.
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Zoom on the implemented lead scoring system:

• Location: Miami area (based either on the keywords in bio, publicly available location or phone area code)
• Keywords in bio: such as “founder, freelance, digital creator” and others to identify profiles to keep. We also applied the “stop words” such as “tattoo, lash, hair” and a few others to eliminate the false-positive profiles that matched in the previous step.
• Filters based on simple KPIs such as the number of followers/following to eliminate inactive or fake accounts.

Overview of results

Thanks to the customer acquisition strategy described above, COW-ORK acquired 50 new members after the first two months of campaigns. The initial success of this campaign allowed the founders to validate the product-market fit and set foundations for strategic expansion(possible new hubs and external funding to accelerate growth, among others).

Highlighted below are the key outcomes of the campaign:

• Total audience size: 1955 emails sent
• Key KPIs: 66% open rate,17.14% click rate, 5.22 reply rate
• Campaign goals: 20 new members per month
• Customer acquisition rate after two months of campaigns: 25 monthly (25% over the target)
• Overall user acquisition cost: $2000 ($39/mo x 50 members)