Virtual College
Virtual College increases ROAS by +42% YoY, whilst increasing revenue by +33%
The Challenge
Duetto was heading into an aggressive growth phase, with stretch pipeline targets to match. Its paid programme was doing two things well: Google Search to capture in-market demand, and a single, tightly-targeted LinkedIn campaign to stay visible with a core audience. On a spreadsheet it looked disciplined — modest spend, cost per lead under control, little obvious waste. But it had been built to sustain a position, not to scale one.
Set against the number the business now needed to hit, it wasn’t a little short — it was an order of magnitude short. You cannot optimise your way to a step-change, and a lean two-channel programme has a hard ceiling that shows up in four ways:
- A reach ceiling. Two channels only put you in front of so many buyers, and with almost nothing feeding awareness, the audience pool wasn’t growing.
- Capturing demand, not creating it. Search harvests people already in-market. With no awareness or mid-funnel layer, nothing upstream was creating the new demand a bigger target requires.
- Diminishing returns on optimisation. Shaving CPCs and tightening targeting improves the ratio; it doesn’t change the magnitude. The business didn’t need an increment.
- No room to absorb investment. Pouring more budget into the same two channels just inflates CPMs against the same finite audience.
Paid Media Channels
Paid Search Paid Social Industry/vertical media
Regions Managed
North America EMEA Rest of World
The Solution
Stop optimising. Start building. As a team, we needed to build, not tune. To deliver growth at the scale the business was targeting, we needed a full-funnel, multi-channel engine that creates demand rather than only capturing it and we needed to invest ahead of that demand, not wait for it. We accepted the trade-off: as we funded new, colder, top-of-funnel channels, blended cost per opportunity would rise before it fell. We chose that deliberately. When you’re chasing a stretch target, short-term efficiency is the wrong thing to protect; momentum toward the number is the right thing.
From two channels to a full-funnel engine. We launched an awareness layer to start creating demand; added Bing (a low-risk lift-and-shift of the proven Google structure) and Meta (lookalike and broad-ICP awareness) as new paid channels; rebuilt LinkedIn around a jobs-to-be-done creative system — a set of messages each pulling a different lever (education, social proof, competitive urgency) rather than one repeated brand message and added a Hotel Tech Report placement to reach in-category buyers the ad platforms couldn’t.
What we tested and learned. A rebuilt Non-Brand landing page converts materially better than the old one — a 6.6× lift in click-to-MQL rate — and we’re localising it into additional EMEA markets. A smaller, highly targeted industry placement significantly outperformed its budget share, becoming one of the programme’s most efficient pipeline sources. Lead quality improved as we scaled: MQL-to-SQO conversion rose roughly 40% quarter-on-quarter, so we generated fewer but materially stronger leads. And where certain markets convert less efficiently than others, we’re reallocating budget toward consistently efficient markets and building awareness activity to close the gap.
How we worked with Duetto. Ziggy operated as an extended demand-gen team rather than a channel vendor. Critically, we built an automated data pipeline and dashboard that unions Duetto’s marketing investment with its CRM and revenue data, giving both teams full-funnel visibility from spend through to MQL, SQO, pipeline, closed-won and CARR, sliced by market, channel, campaign and keyword. We managed the programme to pipeline and revenue, not just leads, and that is what let us widen the funnel with confidence.
The results
Thinking bigger did what a two-channel programme structurally couldn’t: it scaled. Year-over-year, sales-qualified opportunities grew +288%, the pipeline the programme sources more than doubled (+114%), and qualified pipeline rose almost eight-fold (+790%) — with closed-won deals climbing meaningfully year-over-year.
Crucially, we widened the top of the funnel without diluting the bottom. As the programme scaled, sales-qualified opportunities and closed-won deals grew far faster than lead volume, so a far greater share of the top of funnel converted into real, sales-ready pipeline. If anything, we sharpened the funnel as we widened it.
You can’t optimise your way to a step-change. Efficiency is how you run a programme that’s already the right size — not how you make one bigger.
Results at a glance
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Sales-qualified opportunities (YoY)
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