How a Comedy Event Agency Doubled Campaign Output With an Overseas Media Buyer
Zack AllenMay 15, 20266:32
A breakdown of one placement: the bottleneck, the search, and what changed after the hire started.
This is a breakdown of how a live event agency doubled their campaign output for less than half the cost of a local hire.
Ryan runs a marketing agency that promotes live shows for comedians and comedy clubs. His job is getting people into the seats.
The bottleneck
Ryan had a lead media buyer based in the US, which meant paying a premium salary. And her time was all going into launching the roughly 300 campaigns they ran every month. That created three problems:
- She was pulled away from the strategy work he was paying her for.
- Nobody was optimizing or fine-tuning campaigns after launch, because there was no time.
- There was no bandwidth to test TikTok and Google, the other channels that could help fill rooms.
Ryan had recruited domestically and internationally before and didn't want to go through that process again. He needed someone to build campaigns right away, make decisions from the data and free his lead media buyer to step into the bigger role.
Scoping the role
On the call we scoped it as a paid media specialist and media buyer. The core work: build and optimize Meta campaigns from existing briefs and an existing media library, then oversee each campaign until the event date.
We targeted Argentina and Colombia, for time zone alignment and because we found a deeper talent pool there for these specific responsibilities. The salary target was $1,800 to $2,000 a month.
Running the search
We launched the campaign the same day. We reached out to past applicants in our database with the right experience, sent a blast to our newsletter, posted on LinkedIn Jobs and Indeed, and ran Facebook ads. That covered both active job seekers and passive talent who weren't looking at job boards.
It was a niche role that needed direct experience, so we got about 150 applicants, lower than usual but plenty to work with. Everyone went through our four-level vetting:
- Initial application: speed test, English test, resume and video responses, all reviewed by my team.
- Campaign walkthrough: a mock scenario from the role. For this one, a screen-share Loom of how they'd build this client's campaign in Ads Manager. That step proved very useful.
- 1-on-1 interview: their story and how they present themselves.
- Final options: we presented three or four candidates 14 days after launch, as promised.
The hire
The client chose Frank, a full-stack performance marketer from Argentina who'd been in digital marketing since 2020. He'd co-founded a marketing agency, managed 12-plus accounts, and scaled a DTC brand from $30 a day in spend to $50,000 a month in eight months. The follow-up interview went extremely well, and he started the next Monday: 19 days from our first call.
Before and after
Before: the lead media buyer was buried in campaign builds, nothing was being optimized, other channels were untouched, and another local hire would have cost $5,000-plus a month.
After: campaigns are optimized daily, the lead media buyer can think strategically and expand into new channels, all for about $2,000 a month in salary and zero recruiting hours from the team.
The hire made the existing team more valuable and removed the capacity bottleneck.
It's worth pointing out this wasn't a virtual assistant role. It was a targeted, experienced role. It's also a recent placement, so there aren't detailed results to share yet. So far it's off to a great start.
Transcript
Show the full transcript
Today I'm going to break down how a live event agency doubled their campaign output for less than half the cost of a local hire. So this is Ryan. Ryan runs a marketing agency launching event promotions for comedians and comedy clubs, getting people to come to the live shows. He has a lead media buyer based in the US, which means paying a premium for that salary. and her time was all spent launching the 300 campaigns that they were running per month, which means three problems.
One, she was pulled away from the strategy work. Two, there was no optimization and fine-tuning being done to these campaigns after they were launched because there was no time for that. And three, they had no bandwidth to test Tik Tok and Google, the other marketing channels that could easily help fill those seats and fill those rooms. The founder, Ryan, had recruited internationally, domestically before, and did not want to go through that process again.
He simply needed someone to build these campaigns right away, hit the ground running, make decisions from the data so that the lead media buyer could move in to that more important role that he was paying her to do. And so we scoped the role on the call to be a paid media ads specialist slash media buyer. The countries we targeted for this were Argentina and Colombia because of the time zone alignment as well as we found there was a lot of deeper talent pool for the specific responsibilities.
We targeted a salary of $1,800 to $2,000 a month USD. And the core work is around building and optimizing their meta campaigns from existing briefs as well as an existing media library. basically plug and play, launch the campaigns and uh oversee them until the event date. So, we got the logistics out of the way and launched the campaign same day. We started off with our internal database going back on past applicants that had the experience outreaching them.
Then we did our internal newsletter, sent a blast out if anyone had if anyone had direct experience or they had recommendations. We posted on LinkedIn jobs, we posted on Indeed, and we ran Facebook ads. Now, these put us into two buckets. One, the active job seekers that were on the LinkedIn jobs and the Indeed and applied to the job posting, but also the passive talent, people that were not necessarily looking for a new job or actively searching on the job boards at that time.
So, we we casted a wide net, had a lot of applicants come in, and started funneling them to our website to run run everyone through our four-level vetting protocol. Now, since this was a more niche role, required a lot of direct experience, not a not a VA role, we got about 150 applicants to come through, which is lower than typical, but still plenty of surface area for us to work with. On the initial applications, we got the speed test, the English test, their resume, their video responses, all the information we would need in order to move them to the next step or not.
Those all get manually reviewed by my team. Then we do the campaign walkthrough. For this, we always have like the the mock scenario, situations they would find themselves in in the role. And for this one specifically, we chose to do a screen share Loom walking through how they would build this specific campaign for the client in Ads Manager, which proved to be very beneficial. From there, we hopped on the ones that we liked, one-on-one interviews with, get to know more about them, learn their story, how they present themsel, and then we presented those final options to the client.
I believe we presented around three three to four candidates for the client 14 days after launching just like we told them that our target was and in the end we found Frank from Argentina he's a full stack performance marketer digital marketing since 2020 six years of experience at one point co-founded a marketing agency moved on to manage 12 plus accounts for different clients including Nespresso his uh numbers statistics were he or accolades was he scaled a DTOC brand from $30 a day in spend to 50k a month in eight months and so the follow-up interview with the client went extremely well we had him starting the next Monday and in the end the client before actually before the client was had their lead media buyer stuck in all these campaign builds they weren't doing any optimization they had no bandwidth for the other channels the cost of another local hire was 5K a month plus and they didn't want to waste their time on recruiting.
19 days after the campaign, 14 days to present the options, 19 days for the start date is is from the call we had until the hire started. Now they have a dedicated media buyer in place. Campaigns are being optimized on a daily basis. their media buyer is able to think strategically, move into these other channels that they want to expand into. All for $2,000 a month in salary and zero recruiting hours from the team.
They simply were presented the top options that already matched the stuff that they told us they needed out of their way. Now, this hire made the current team more valuable and fixed the capacity bottleneck they were facing in the business. I think an important part to point out here is this was not a virtual assistant role. A lot of people think about hiring internationally and think that it's just a virtual assistant random customer service role, but this was a very targeted, experienced, mature role that has proven to be very valuable for this company.
Now, this was a very recent placement, which is why I'm making the video about it. We don't have spec specific stats as to what they accomplished, but so far off to a great start. So, I'm really looking forward to seeing how it progresses. And if you're thinking about a similar hire, this is exactly the process we would run for your role and for your business. So, if you want to click below in the description, there's a link to book a demo and I'll walk you through the criteria, the responsibilities, the kind of campaign we would run for the role your business needs.
See you there.
