Why advertising on The Local really paid off for this startup

Whether you're a startup or a large business, using native advertising to reach The Local's audience of internationals pays off. 

Craft Academy wanted to recruit students to its three month programming bootcamp. Founder Thomas Ochman explains how an article on The Local helped them achieve this.

Why was The Local the right channel for you?

We wanted to reach people who live in Sweden and who have English as a first language – but also other non-Swedes who speak it very well as a second language and who want to learn to code.

Our course is an alternative to taking a full university course and gives a quick way into work for people who want to be junior developers.

Non-Swedes are more prepared to pay for education. Foreigners make the connection between the direct cost and the value to them.

I've known about The Local for a long time, but I only thought about it as an advertising channel when we decided we wanted to reach this target group and Googled 'Swedish news in English'.

What effect did your article on The Local have?

There was an immediate effect. The reaction was ten times bigger than with any other channel we've tried. We got very relevant, highly-qualified customers.

We're a startup and we've worked with social media marketing and sponsored tech podcasts. They've been good for branding, but the direct effect on sales wasn't great.

The difference with The Local was that people got in touch with us straight away and the conversion rate was excellent.

In concrete terms, what sort of reaction did you get?

We got over 75 expressions of interest, we've converted seven and we're talking to several more. 

As what we sell costs 84,000 kronor (€8,600) and requires a big time commitment - three months - that was a very good conversion rate. Committing to our course is not like buying a carton of milk. 

How was the process of working with The Local?

It was great. The team was easy to talk with, and the people who were interviewed for the article only had positive experiences.

What would you tell others about the importance of communicating with ‘expats’ and internationals?

It's really important to understand their situation. It's useful to have a bit of in-house knowledge about how they view things. Many of our leads were handled by an American who works for us - that was useful.