LifeMD provides easy online access to board-certified doctors who can prescribe care for patients from the comfort of their own homes. Since its founding in 2016, LifeMD has delivered affordable, accessible, and high-quality healthcare to over 600,000 patients across America.

Thanks to its revolutionary and affordable telehealth services, LifeMD has seen immediate and lasting growth since its inception. To sustain and accelerate this growth, Co-Founder Nicholas Alvarez has bet on paid social channels like Meta and TikTok as key drivers of customer acquisition and brand awareness. But, like most brands advertising on these platforms, LifeMD faced fiercely competitive auctions, and Nicholas found himself succumbing to ever-higher CPAs just to retain visibility.

Nicholas knew that lowering customer acquisition costs on Meta would require a more deliberate approach to LifeMD's targeting strategy. While broad campaigns returned relatively reliable performance, continuing to bid on publicly available audiences would inevitably result in less profitable campaigns. Plus, because broad targeting is a black box with unpredictable performance, it was challenging for Nicholas to extract consistent learnings about LifeMD’s customers that could be used to optimize future campaigns. Even if a broad campaign succeeded, Meta provides little to no visibility into the audiences that drove those conversions.

LifeMD faced similar obstacles on TikTok. While Nicholas found several high-intent audiences using the platform’s interest-based targeting, the pools were too small to sustain even modest increases in ad spend. Nicholas knew the fastest way to drive material results on both platforms was to acquire a deeper (and data-backed) understanding of LifeMD’s core customers.

During his search for an off-platform targeting and data enrichment solution, Nicholas discovered Proxima. As soon as he heard of our ability to build boosted seed audiences from a massive universe of cross-store shopper data, he was in.

Within a week of onboarding, Proxima’s AI Audiences were up and running on LifeMD’s Meta and TikTok channels. The Proxima team achieved this quick turnaround by mining its vast Shopper Universe (of 80M+ shoppers and $20B in purchases across thousands of eCommerce stores) and building data-enriched seed audiences of users whose behaviors mirrored LifeMD’s most loyal customers. In constructing these audiences, Proxima zeroed in on several trends defining the brand’s shoppers, including the categories they prefer, products they buy, how much they spend, and more.

And this deep dive was just the beginning. Since kicking off Proxima’s audiences, Nicholas and the LifeMD team have enjoyed:

1. Efficient prospecting on Meta and Tikok

Because Proxima takes such an intentional approach to audience building, Nicholas is able to reach sizable segments of high-intent users on paid social channels without having to burn through excess ad spend. In fact, Proxima-powered prospecting has helped LifeMD reduce Meta CPAs by 20% and scale TikTok ad spend by 50%. And because Proxima’s audiences are so efficient and scalable, Nicholas only has to refresh them every three to four weeks — in stark contrast to his other campaigns, which typically stagnate after just two. This longevity buys Nicholas back some bandwidth, giving his team more time for creative iteration.

2. In-depth performance insights

What’s more, Proxima’s continuous performance assessments and campaign insights ensure Nicholas is constantly collecting new findings surrounding LifeMD’s customers and the targeting methods that reel them in. Proxima’s suggestion to promote one of LifeMD’s sleep treatment products to an audience of users who’d already purchased stress-relief supplements proved especially impactful. “That segment never would’ve come into our purview,” Nicholas says. “But it ended up being one of our most scalable TikTok audiences.”

3. On-demand media buying recommendations

The hard results on both channels weren’t all that impressed Nicholas. He also appreciates the ongoing support and guidance the Proxima team has delivered from day one. Whether they suggest that LifeMD would benefit from testing various lookalike percentages or that the brand should consider running a particular ad set on a bigger budget, Proxima continues to deliver expert media buying recommendations. Not only have these real-time insights been spot-on, but they’ve equipped Nicholas’ team with the knowledge and skills they need to take a smarter, more iterative approach to all their paid media campaigns.

Nicholas’ decision to reinvigorate LifeMD’s paid social campaigns with data-enriched targeting was a resounding success. Adding Proxima to its account mix helped the brand reduce CPAs, reach incremental audiences, and scale ad spend without efficiency loss.

And the results speak for themselves:

• 20% improvement in Meta CPAs
• 50% increase in profitable TikTok ad spend
• $5M saved on media buying costs

In the future, Nicholas is eager to test Proxima’s audiences on a series of new product launches. He specifically plans to use these campaigns to start chasing new KPIs — such as lower CPL (cost per lead) and higher LTV (lifetime value) — and can’t think of a better partner to help him achieve these goals.