Scaling a Fem-Tech Start-up Worldwide

It can be challenging to market healthcare products. Audiences are generally niche. Every year, the competition rises, and so do acquisition costs. 

In late 2021, healthcare began getting even more challenging. Facebook banned “sensitive” targeting options — which include most healthcare terms. And Apple killed IDFA, making it difficult to identify potential customers.

Mira is in the middle of this privacy storm: it’s a femtech startup providing ovulation and fertility trackers. These are products that women really need; first-time buyers usually stay loyal for years.

But how could we find those buyers? Without access to keywords like “ovulation” or “fertility,” we couldn’t directly reach our audiences, and they couldn’t find us, either.

The Solution

The only targeting still allowed on Facebook, post-2021, was for wider, less specific groups. So we began testing affinity-based targeting.

Fitness, meditation, yoga and other wide-appeal terms looked like they might have significant overlap with women who needed to track their own fertility. By researching and testing many of these verticals, we found some that worked.

After completing our testing phase, we’d found our target markets. Return on ad spend increased by 45 percent, and cost-per-acquisition dropped by 50 percent! And as a result, we were able to increase ad spend to $2.4 million over the course of a year.

Our success at Mira came down to a focus on creative marketing strategies, data-driven decision making, and a commitment to continuously optimizing campaigns. The results speak for themselves!