WISE Employment: Innovating to drive new customer acquisition growth
WISE was faced with a decreasing ROI due to inflation and increasing competition in market.
Sounds familiar right? Digital media seems to be getting more expensive and less effective.
WISE Employment helps people with disabilities find jobs. Across Australia, only 56% of people with disabilities are employed — compared to 80% of those without — making WISE’s mission critical (ABS, 2024).
2024-2025 WISE faced a triple challenge:
Digital ad costs were rising due to inflation, increasing by nearly 5% (AdNews, 2025), making every impression more expensive than the year before.
At the same time, global employment giants like SEEK and LinkedIn were increasing spend on the same job-seeker keywords and audiences. Across the board, digital investment rose 10–26% on digital channels (IAB, 2025), also driving up costs and competition.
For WISE, a not-for-profit, matching that spend or increasing it dramatically simply wasn’t an option.
How do you help more people with a disability find work when inflation and increased competition is driving up ad costs, decreasing leads and decreasing overall ROI?
This was more than a media and marketing challenge
This was more than a media & marketing challenge. For people with a disability, finding meaningful employment remains incredibly difficult — due to stigma, systemic barriers, and a lack of tailored support.
WISE’s opportunity was to show up differently, not louder, but smarter.
As a leader in disability employment with decades of experience and thousands of success stories, WISE was uniquely positioned to cut through the noise, connect with diverse audiences, and prove that deep insight and empathy could outperform inflation and big spend.
We couldn’t compete on spend, so we won with strategy
WISE couldn’t compete with inflation or competitors on spend to acquire and help more job seekers find meaningful work, so it had to win on strategy.
We used disability-centric targeting and creative to make every advertising dollar work harder. Rather than waste spend on generic ads or broad targeting, WISE made every dollar work harder by reaching people where they were and showing people with a disability we understand them.
We diversified the channel mix to lower our costs and expand reach. We used to rely on Meta (Facebook & Instagram) and Google to drive lead generation for customer acquisition. But due to inflation and increasing competitiveness of these platforms, it was becoming more expensive and eroding our ROI. So we diversified and expanded our channel mix to include more cost-effective options such as Performance Max and programmatic display.
We increased results through timing rather than budget, spending media aggressively when job-seeker behaviour, interests and intent peaks during the year.
And we tested what worked and then scaled it. Often in digital media, agencies have a set and forget mentality in the management of ad campaigns. But digital media platforms are changing all the time, with new features and innovations. When a specific combination of message + platform + segment converts above benchmarks, we scaled it.
Powerful results mean more job seekers with a disability are finding work
We proved that deep audience insights and smart strategy can outperform market inflation and big spending competitors.
WISE Employment increased its digital media spend by just 9.5% however its customer acquisition results have increased by 24% year-on-year — showing the returns far outweigh the investment.
At a time when media costs were rising and competitors were outspending, WISE achieved more — not by outbidding, but by outsmarting.
Results
AWARDS
SERVICES USED
Creative, Content and Video
Always-on Digital Performance
Customer Acquisition Strategy