Nine new markets.Five of themunder day-to-day management.
Novakid teaches English to children one to one, online, with native-speaker teachers and a curriculum built on CEFR standards. In early February 2019 its paid media ran in Poland and nowhere else. Below is how far that went, how much of it was held long term, and which part of the result the published study never put a number on.
- 9
- new markets entered
- x2
- increase in customer base
- 4,000+
- hours on the project
- 5
- markets under ongoing management
Nine markets, and translation was the easy part.
A market entry that language would not solve
Going international meant arriving in countries where nobody had heard of the brand, selling a product parents buy for their children rather than for themselves. The study is explicit that translating the messaging was not enough: each market needed its own read on the cultural context and on what parents there expect from a lesson.
Search and display had stopped producing
The campaigns already running, focused on Google Search and Display, were no longer generating meaningful outcomes. Optimising them harder was not the job. Growth had to come from channels and creative that reached audiences those two were not reaching at all.
Acquisition cost had to hold while spend went up
Every market added to the plan raises media investment, and efficiency is the first thing to slip when it does. The stated objective was to scale the footprint while keeping customer acquisition cost under control, which is the constraint that decides whether an expansion pays for itself or gets bigger.
Test it when nothing depends on it. Scale it when everything does.
Channels tested before anything depended on them
After a market analysis, testing moved outside the two platforms already running: Taboola, Outbrain, Twitter and Snapchat. July and August brought a decline the study attributes to the normal seasonality of the category, and that stretch was spent rebuilding tactics and processes rather than defending a monthly number.
Mothers as the source of the creative
Influencer work started with women who could take the lessons and say what they thought, on Instagram Stories among other places. Their material then became the Facebook Ads creative. For something bought on behalf of a child, a parent needs a stronger signal than a product page. The study puts the emphasis on what those ads converted, rather than on the attention they drew.
A process layer between the specialist, the client and the creators
Performance analysis was built into the influencer channel rather than bolted on after it, with defined processes connecting the specialist, the client and the influencer team. The study is direct about why that mattered: when the channel expanded into other markets, it could already run at scale instead of being rebuilt country by country.
Markets tested in September, scaled through the pandemic
From September the account began testing other countries. European ones first, then more distant locations including Brazil, Argentina, Korea and Japan, with Italy, Romania and the Czech Republic turning into ongoing work. When the pandemic moved daily life indoors, influencer marketing went into the new markets and Google Ads and Meta Ads scaled on the data those earlier tests had already produced.
Nine markets is a scope, not a result.
The published study puts four figures on this engagement: nine new markets entered, five markets under ongoing management, more than 4,000 hours of work and a customer base that doubled. Three of the four describe the size of the job rather than what it returned. The chart below takes the two that measure the same thing.
These two are the same unit and they do close. Of the markets the brand entered, five ended up with campaigns run day to day, and the others were supported through consulting and design work instead. Entering a market and running one are different amounts of work and different amounts of risk, so a headline quoting only the larger number is quoting the easier half. Three other figures stayed off this chart on purpose. A doubled customer base is an outcome rather than a count of markets and would draw a bar that means nothing next to these two. The 4,000-plus hours are effort, so they sit in the strip at the top and nowhere near a results chart. And the study opens by asking how to get “from a single market to a presence in nine markets” while its results section reports “nine new international markets”, which are two different totals, so the starting count is written here and not drawn beside the nine. On what the expansion earned, the study says lesson bookings and paid enrollments grew significantly and that customer acquisition cost fell substantially, and it publishes no figure for either.
“The efforts have helped grow traffic for the business significantly, more than doubling their customer base.”Anna Tolstochenko, CMO, Novakid Inc.
Ask which number an expansion case study is quoting.
Everything here was tested while nothing depended on it. Channels went into a summer when results had already dipped. Markets were tested from September, well before there was pressure to be in them. So when the pandemic moved demand online, the study says the scaling decision rested on data those tests had already produced. Run your first test of a channel in the week you need it to perform and you buy the same learning at the worst possible price.
The second one is about the number at the top of this page. Nine is how many markets the brand entered. Five is how many were run day to day. When somebody pitches you international expansion, ask which of those two numbers their case study is quoting, because the cost and the risk live in the smaller one. Then ask what the expansion did to bookings and to cost per customer. This study answers the first question in full and does not answer the second at all, which is worth knowing before you treat any of it as a forecast for your own account.
This work was delivered by MTA Group, which Zero Fluff Digital is part of, by the same specialists who would work on your account. Every figure here comes from the case study MTA published, republished here with their consent. The reviews behind it are public and verified on Clutch, where clients rate the work rather than the agency describing itself.
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