Local Outlet Marketing for Consumer Apps: Beating a Target CPA

Most people think of Local Outlet Marketing (LOM) as a brand awareness channel. For consumer apps, the more useful question is whether it can deliver installs and paying customers at a cost a performance team will sign off on. This is one campaign where it did.

The situation

Jackpocket is a lottery app that lets people order official state lottery tickets from their phone. It only operates in certain states, which creates a problem for national advertising: a large share of any national audience can’t use the product.

Their marketing team already ran paid ads, brand partnerships, and influencer campaigns. They came to us with a clear brief:

• Grow the user base in the states where the app was live
• Lower cost per acquisition (CPA) while increasing total spend
• Scale without adding much work for their internal team

Why local outlets fit

Local outlets solve the geography problem by design. An outlet covering Texas reaches people in Texas. That meant every post could speak directly to an eligible audience, with messaging written for that state or city instead of a generic national line.

It also changed how the offer read. A promotion on a local outlet lands as a piece of local information (“residents here can now do this”) instead of an ad for an app.

How the campaign ran

• Outlet selection. We proposed batches of vetted outlets in the client’s priority states. Their team approved the ones they wanted through a shared campaign queue.
• Custom content. Each outlet got its own creative and copy, written to match that outlet’s style while staying inside the brand guidelines.
• Tracked links. Every outlet had its own tracking, so installs and customers could be tied back to the post that drove them.
• Steady pacing. Outlets were activated a handful at a time each week instead of all at once, which let us adjust as results came in.

The results

The numbers below come from a single early campaign push, not our full body of work with the client.

The takeaway: with the right outlets and tracked links, LOM can hold its own as an acquisition channel, not only an awareness play.

What happened next

That campaign was the first of many. LOM became a standing part of the client’s marketing mix, and we went on to run dozens more campaigns for them over the following years. The app was later acquired by DraftKings.

Is your app a fit?

LOM tends to work best for consumer apps when:

• The product is only available, or only relevant, in certain markets
• There is a concrete offer for new users
• You can track installs or sign-ups by source

If that sounds like your app, reach out and we’ll put together outlet options for your markets.