Scaling Soter Inc via Targeted Ads

Background

Soter Inc is a disability advocacy and assistive technology consultancy based in New York. The firm advises organizations on accessibility programs, assistive hardware, and the legal and insurance maze that sits between a person who needs support and a product that actually ships. The audience is real, fragmented, and chronically underserved: people with specific mobility, vision, hearing, and cognitive needs; caregivers; occupational therapists; and procurement leads who have to justify spend against ADA, Section 508, and insurance codes.

The growth problem was not “more traffic.” Generic disability keywords are noisy, captured by national charities, device manufacturers, and content farms. Broad Meta interest clusters (“disability,” “wheelchair,” “accessibility”) mixed advocates with people who had clicked a single awareness video. Cost per click looked cheap until you looked at who actually booked a consult. Customer acquisition cost (CAC) was drifting up while the pipeline filled with curiosity clicks and out-of-area inquiries the team could not serve.

The brief was to reach people with specific accessibility needs — and the professionals who buy on their behalf — without inflating CAC, and without the usual dark-pattern playbook that treats disability as a conversion lever.

The Strategy

We rebuilt acquisition around three constraints: the audience is small, the language is precise, and the landing experience has to work for the people the ads claim to help.

Custom audience segmentation. On Google Search we moved off head terms and into intent that named a job-to-be-done: workplace accommodations, assistive tech assessment, WCAG remediation for a public site, insurance documentation for a specific device class. Match types were tight; negatives were aggressive (jobs, donations, news, Wikipedia-style research). On Meta we built behavioral and interest clusters around occupational therapy, adaptive sports, caregiver communities, and professional associations rather than a single “disability” bucket. Lookalikes were trained on booked consults, not page views.

Accessibility-first landing pages. Ads that send a screen-reader user into a broken form are not a growth tactic. Every landing page was built to WCAG AAA on the surfaces that matter for this funnel: contrast, focus order, labels, error recovery, time limits, and alternatives for media. We tested with VoiceOver and NVDA, not only axe. The lift was not abstract — conversion among screen-reader sessions moved in a way paid search never had, because the page finally matched the promise of the query.

Retargeting as education, not nagging. The buying cycle includes compliance language, insurance coverage, and internal buy-in. We ran multi-touch email and ad sequences that answered those questions in order: who Soter is, what an engagement looks like, which documents to gather, what “accessible enough” actually means for a given channel. Frequency caps were conservative. Creative used plain language and real program names, not stock photos of ramps.

The Outcome

Within 90 days, monthly qualified leads grew by 300%, while blended CAC dropped by 38%. Qualified meant a completed brief we could staff in New York, not a newsletter signup. Search captured high-intent work; Meta filled the mid-funnel with caregivers and practitioners who needed time. The AAA landers paid for themselves in assistive-tech sessions that used to bounce. The same system still runs: tighter queries, honest pages, and a sequence that treats the audience as experts in their own needs.