ChefSteps



Client: 
ChefSteps

Services:
Social Media Marketing
Increase CLV
Social Listening
Regression Modeling
Data Analysis
Paid Social / Media Planning

ChefSteps was an early-stage, venture-backed culinary education startup founded by Modernist Cuisine alumni Chris Young and Grant Crilly. Their platform combined expert-led cooking tutorials with a rapidly growing online community of chefs and food enthusiasts.

Challenge

ChefSteps sought to quantify how its fast-growing social audiences contributed to real customer value in advance of launching its first product. Despite strong content engagement, leadership wanted to understand:

  • Which social touchpoints actually drove sales
  • How to structure acquisition and retention efforts based on Customer Lifetime Value (CLV)
  • How to identify and invest in high-performing audiences at or below a target acquisition cost

CROWN proposed a two-phase diagnostic:

  • CLV + Content Analysis (quantitative measurement)
  • Acquisition Optimization (strategic implementation)

Digital Ecosystem Audit
CROWN’s team conducted a top-to-bottom review of ChefSteps’ owned, earned, and paid media, mapping user journeys and engagement patterns across social platforms. The team measured the value of various communities, touchpoints, and content and surfaced arbitrage/acquisition opportunities below target CAC.

Deliverables included:

  • URL Matrix of content performance
  • Social listening analysis to locate high-value conversations
  • CLV correlation between sign-ups, social engagement, and purchase data

Controlled Social Ad Testing
CROWN ran four classes of social media ads against 64 creative variants (4 headlines × 4 body copies × 4 images):

External Website Ads → chefsteps.com
Channel Ads → Grow community reach
Content Ads → Content engagement
Sponsored Stories → Leverage social proof

Creative testing emphasized precision targeting (male chefs, 25–44) and iterative copy optimization.

Outcomes

  • Identified Facebook-authenticated users as the highest-value audience cohort
  • Increased CTR and sales efficiency on Facebook via segmentation
  • Established repeatable methodology for channel-level CLV modeling
  • Laid the groundwork for ChefSteps’ future Joule product launch targeting through owned community data








Client: ChefSteps
Agency: Crown Social®