Jai Singh is growth and marketing VP at Peerspace, a digital marketplace that quickly and easily allows people to book meeting rooms, event venues, and filming locations. Jai has previously worked for Facebook, TripAdvisor, and Vistaprint and is a graduate of the University of Massachusetts Amherst.
Peerspace is an incredibly diverse platform. Our audience comes from every sector, and the requests can vary from finding a location for a birthday party to launching a brand-new disruptive product for a tech giant. Simply put, our target demographic includes just about every adult in the US.
When Peerspace first launched, we tried to speak to everyone. We knew our potential audience was huge, and the plan was to get our message in front of as many people as possible. However, we quickly saw that when you attempt to reach everyone, you actually end up reaching no one.
As soon as we understood that this method wasn’t working, we decided to try a different approach. We began retargeting users with AdRoll dynamic product ads, as this allowed us to showcase spaces that consumers had already viewed online. And, while this was effective, it still wasn’t enough. We were lacking messaging that spoke directly to the consumer, so we figured what we really needed was to create content based on an in-depth understanding of the particular needs of each customer segment.
We knew we would only be able to achieve our long-term goals if we truly understood who we were trying to reach. That meant figuring out our most important business users, their personas, the reasons for their bookings, and how to better appeal to them. To get these answers, we looked at booking data and also performed secondary research, which led to us identifying our value-add to three key audiences: off-site, event, and production.
After this, the first step was to identify each user’s interaction with our business. This revealed to us the importance of market segmentation and subsequently creating unique values for each persona. For example, while ease of booking on the platform was common to all personas, the other benefits varied greatly. For some, the benefit was being able to cut costs, while for others, it was access to an inspiring environment.
With particular regard to our production audience, we discovered that our service was able to solve two primary issues:
We were able to eliminate a 30% location scouting fee that users had previously had to pay.
We were able to give them virtual access to more sites because of our visual library, greatly reducing the time spent having to travel.
Armed with a lot of information about key consumer personas, as well as a sense of their needs and habits, we also defined a retargeting strategy. We were able to ascertain how regularly ads should be displayed, what the key messages should be, what visuals would be effective, and what would encourage users to visit our website. By targeting accurately and astutely, we were able to witness both a noticeable upswing in the users responding to our ads and a distinct improvement in website conversions.
After adopting this marketing strategy, we reduced our cost per acquisition (CPA) by 32% while increasing our conversion volume by 73%. By collaborating with AdRoll, we were able to better appreciate the value of embracing a forward-thinking strategy and the importance of detailed and accurate targeting.
Last updated on September 20th, 2023.