Summary: Playto, the payments platform that helps service businesses get paid globally, has appointed upGrowth Digital LLP to lead Meta Ads growth for two businesses: Playto Pay and PlaytoHire, its marketplace for hiring vetted creative talent. upGrowth owns paid social strategy, campaign execution, conversion tracking and creative direction for both from October 2026.
A payments startup for agencies and freelancers appoints a Pune growth firm to run Meta acquisition across both of its products.
Pune. Playto has appointed upGrowth Digital LLP as its performance marketing partner for Meta Ads across Playto Pay and PlaytoHire. The engagement started in October 2026 and covers paid social strategy, campaign build and management on Facebook and Instagram, conversion tracking, audience strategy, creative direction, and landing page recommendations for both businesses.
The two products run on different funnels, so upGrowth runs them as two separate acquisition systems. Playto Pay sells to agencies, freelancers, consultants and IT services firms that need to collect payments from clients abroad, which makes it a fintech performance marketing problem where a signup only counts once it becomes a transacting account. PlaytoHire is a two-sided marketplace, so the work covers both demand (companies hiring video editors, designers and writers) and supply (the creative talent itself). upGrowth owns the Meta strategy and execution for both. Playto keeps product, pricing, onboarding and sales.
“Payments is a trust business. A cheap signup that never sends a single invoice is a cost, not a customer. With Playto, we’re building Meta acquisition around the event that actually matters, an account that transacts, and doing the same discipline on the hiring side where both buyers and talent have to show up,” said Amol Ghemud, Chief Growth Officer, upGrowth Digital LLP.
The appointment adds to upGrowth’s fintech work, where the firm has worked with lending, investing and cross-border payments brands on performance marketing, SEO and AI search visibility.
A: upGrowth Digital LLP, a Pune-based growth marketing firm, manages Meta Ads for Playto across Playto Pay and PlaytoHire. The engagement covers paid social strategy, Facebook and Instagram campaign management, conversion tracking, audience strategy and creative direction.
Q: Who is Playto’s performance marketing agency?
A: Playto has appointed upGrowth Digital LLP as its performance marketing partner for Meta Ads. upGrowth owns paid social strategy and execution, while Playto owns product, pricing, onboarding and sales.
Q: What does upGrowth do for Playto Pay?
A: For Playto Pay, upGrowth runs Meta acquisition aimed at agencies, freelancers, consultants and IT services firms that collect payments from international clients, with tracking built around accounts that complete onboarding and transact rather than raw signups.
Q: Which agency runs marketing for PlaytoHire?
A: upGrowth Digital LLP runs Meta Ads for PlaytoHire, Playto’s marketplace for hiring vetted video editors, designers and writers. The campaigns cover both sides of the marketplace: companies that want to hire and the creative talent they hire.
Q: Does upGrowth work with cross-border payments companies?
A: Yes. upGrowth Digital LLP works with fintech and payments brands, including Playto, a platform that helps service businesses collect payments globally, where it manages Meta Ads acquisition and conversion tracking.
About Playto
Playto is a payments platform for agencies, freelancers, consultants and IT services firms. Businesses use it to create payment requests, collect one-time or recurring payments, and manage invoices and agreements, with support for more than 45 payment methods across more than 170 countries and a Trust Score built from verified payment history and client reviews. PlaytoHire, part of Playto, is a marketplace for hiring vetted creative talent such as video editors, designers and writers. Learn more at playto.so and playtohire.com.
About upGrowth Digital LLP
upGrowth Digital LLP is a Pune-based growth marketing firm working with brands in financial services, healthcare, fintech, education, D2C, and consumer technology. The firm specialises in SEO, Generative Engine Optimisation (GEO), App Store Optimisation (ASO), performance marketing, and AI search visibility across platforms like ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google AI Overviews.
Outsourcing Meta Ads to a specialist agency allows a fintech like Playto to access deep platform expertise while its internal team focuses on core competencies like product development and sales. An experienced partner like upGrowth Digital LLP brings a disciplined, data-driven approach that is essential for building trust and acquiring high-value users efficiently. The strategy separates campaign execution from core business functions, creating a more focused and scalable growth engine. This model is effective because:
Specialized Expertise: upGrowth provides dedicated knowledge of Meta's ad platform, conversion tracking, and audience segmentation for the competitive fintech space.
Objective Measurement: The agency focuses on the metric that matters most, a transacting account, preventing the internal team from getting distracted by vanity metrics like cheap signups.
Resource Efficiency: It allows Playto to scale its acquisition efforts without the overhead of building and training a large internal performance marketing team.
This partnership structure enables Playto to concentrate on building a reliable payments product, a key factor in its ability to support over 45 payment methods, while its agency partner drives qualified customer growth. Explore the full announcement to see how this modern client-agency dynamic is structured.
Focusing on a 'transacting account' means the marketing goal is not just to get a user to register, but to guide them to successfully send or receive their first payment. This approach directly aligns advertising spend with revenue-generating activity, ensuring that upGrowth Digital LLP acquires customers who demonstrate real intent and contribute to Playto's bottom line. This value-based optimization is crucial for achieving sustainable unit economics in the fintech industry.
The benefits of this model include:
Higher Quality Leads: It filters out low-intent users who sign up but never use the platform, reducing customer acquisition cost (CAC) for actual paying customers.
Improved Product Feedback: Data from successfully transacting users provides more valuable insights for product improvements than data from inactive accounts.
Sustainable Scaling: By tying ad spend to transactions, the model ensures that growth is profitable and not just a measure of top-of-funnel volume.
This disciplined focus on meaningful conversions is a core part of the engagement, reflecting a mature approach to performance marketing. Discover more about how this strategy is implemented by reading the complete article.
The strategy directly confronts the issue of non-transacting users by shifting the definition of success from a simple signup to a completed financial action. Instead of chasing low-cost registrations, upGrowth Digital LLP optimizes its Meta Ads campaigns for Playto toward the event that truly matters: an account that sends an invoice or makes a payment. This aligns marketing efforts with tangible business outcomes, effectively turning ad spend into an investment in revenue, not just lead volume.
This solution works by:
Qualifying Intent: The ad funnel is designed to attract users with immediate payment needs, such as agencies and freelancers with international clients.
Informing Optimization Algorithms: By feeding transaction data back to Meta's ad platform, the campaigns learn to find more users who resemble those that actually transact.
Reducing Wasted Spend: It stops investment in audiences that generate signups but have a low propensity to use a payments platform, directly improving marketing return on investment.
This approach ensures that every marketing dollar is aimed at building a base of active, engaged customers. The full piece provides further context on how this disciplined method is applied.
Using a single agency like upGrowth Digital LLP for both Playto Pay and PlaytoHire creates strategic alignment and operational efficiency. The primary advantage is a unified understanding of the overarching brand, which can lead to more cohesive messaging and shared learnings across campaigns. However, the key consideration is whether the single agency possesses true expertise in both distinct business models.
Factors to weigh include:
Pros: A single partner simplifies communication, provides consolidated reporting, and can often offer better pricing. They develop a holistic view of the company, which can uncover synergistic opportunities between the two products.
Cons: A potential drawback is a lack of deep, niche expertise if the agency is a generalist. Fintech acquisition requires a focus on trust and security, while marketplace growth is about balancing supply and demand, two very different challenges.
Playto's decision suggests confidence in upGrowth's ability to manage these separate funnels effectively. The article further explores how upGrowth runs them as two distinct acquisition systems under one roof.
This partnership highlights a modern approach where the client retains ownership of core business functions while the agency takes full responsibility for a specialized growth channel. Playto keeps control of product, pricing, and sales, while upGrowth Digital LLP owns the entire Meta Ads acquisition system, from strategy to execution and tracking. This clear demarcation allows each party to focus on what they do best, creating a more effective and accountable growth engine.
Startups can learn several key lessons from this model:
Define Clear Ownership: The announcement specifies that upGrowth manages paid social strategy and execution, while Playto handles the customer experience post-click. This prevents overlap and confusion.
Align on Core Metrics: Both parties are aligned on driving 'transacting accounts,' ensuring the agency's work directly supports Playto's business goals.
View Agencies as Partners: The relationship is framed as a partnership for growth, not just a vendor contract for campaign management.
This structure fosters transparency and shared accountability, which are critical for scaling a startup. Delve deeper into the article to understand the specifics of this collaborative framework.
To replicate this model, you must build your entire campaign infrastructure around the final business goal, not an intermediate step. The foundation is robust conversion tracking that can differentiate a simple registration from a revenue-generating action like a completed payment. Your goal is to train the ad platform's algorithm to find users who will complete the entire funnel, not just the first step.
Here is a stepwise plan:
Install and Verify Tracking: Implement the Meta Pixel or Conversions API to accurately capture not only signups but also key post-signup events, such as 'First Transaction'.
Define a Custom Conversion: Set up the 'First Transaction' event as your primary optimization goal within Meta Ads Manager.
Build High-Intent Audiences: Use lookalike audiences based on your existing transacting customers, not just all signups, to find similar high-value prospects.
Craft Value-Centric Creative: Develop ads that speak directly to the user's core problem, like collecting international payments, to attract serious prospects like those targeted by Playto.
This disciplined approach, managed by firms like upGrowth Digital LLP, ensures your ad budget drives business results. The full story offers more insight into this advanced acquisition strategy.
The core challenge for a two-sided marketplace is balancing supply (creative talent) and demand (hiring companies), as one side is useless without the other. An agency like upGrowth Digital LLP must run two distinct but coordinated acquisition funnels for PlaytoHire, each with its own messaging, targeting, and budget. The strategy involves carefully sequencing and scaling campaigns to prevent one side from dramatically outpacing the other.
Managing this requires a nuanced approach:
Supply-Side Campaigns: These target individual creators like video editors and writers, often focusing on benefits like consistent work and reliable payments.
Demand-Side Campaigns: These target businesses and hiring managers, emphasizing the quality and availability of vetted talent to solve their creative needs.
Coordinated Budgeting: The agency must dynamically allocate the budget between the two sides based on which part of the marketplace needs more growth to maintain a healthy balance.
Effectively managing this dynamic is a key responsibility for the performance marketing partner. You can learn more about how upGrowth tackles this for PlaytoHire in the full announcement.
Given their background, upGrowth Digital LLP can apply several trust-building strategies from other fintech verticals to benefit Playto Pay. In industries like lending and investing, establishing credibility is paramount, and these tactics translate directly to the cross-border payments space. The focus shifts from purely promotional messaging to educational and reassuring content that addresses user anxieties about security and reliability.
Proven strategies likely include:
Social Proof and Testimonials: Using ad creative that features case studies or quotes from existing happy clients (e.g., agencies and freelancers) who successfully use Playto.
Transparency in Messaging: Clearly communicating key trust factors in ad copy, such as Playto's support for 170+ countries or its built-in 'Trust Score'.
Educational Content Funnels: Running campaigns that target users with content about the complexities of international payments, positioning Playto as a helpful expert before asking for a signup.
These tactics help pre-qualify users who value security and reliability over just a low price. The article hints at this disciplined approach, which is critical for success in the payments industry.
The growth of the freelance economy requires a strategic evolution from broad targeting to hyper-niche segmentation. For platforms like Playto, upGrowth Digital LLP will need to move beyond general categories like 'freelancers' and target specific, high-value creative and technical professions that have a strong need for cross-border financial tools. The future of acquisition in this space lies in understanding the unique workflows and pain points of different remote work verticals.
Future strategic adjustments may include:
Vertical-Specific Campaigns: Developing unique ad campaigns for video editors, web developers, or marketing consultants, with messaging that speaks to their specific client types and payment challenges.
Geographic Expansion Targeting: Focusing on emerging corridors for remote work, such as talent in Southeast Asia working for clients in North America.
Creator Economy Focus: For PlaytoHire, campaigns might increasingly target creators on platforms like YouTube or TikTok who are looking to monetize their skills by working with brands.
This increasing specialization will be key to maintaining a competitive edge in a crowded market. The full article sets the stage for this targeted approach to global talent.
This appointment reflects a significant trend where companies, especially in complex sectors like fintech, seek agencies that offer more than just ad management. Playto chose upGrowth Digital LLP not just to run campaigns, but to own the entire paid social strategy, informed by their experience in cross-border payments and fintech. This signals a move toward agencies as embedded growth partners who understand the industry's unique challenges, such as building trust and navigating compliance.
This evolution is characterized by:
Deep Industry Expertise: Agencies are now expected to have specific knowledge of the verticals they serve, from fintech to SaaS.
Full-Funnel Ownership: The engagement covers everything from audience strategy and creative direction to conversion tracking, showing a holistic responsibility for results.
Consultative Input: The partnership includes landing page recommendations, indicating the agency's role extends into influencing the user experience to improve conversions.
This deeper, more integrated relationship is becoming the new standard for high-growth companies. The announcement is a clear example of this shift toward strategic, specialized partnerships.
Appointing a single agency like upGrowth Digital LLP provides a centralized command center for solving the classic marketplace dilemma for PlaytoHire. Instead of two separate teams or agencies working in silos, one partner can strategically sequence and balance the acquisition of both talent (supply) and hiring companies (demand). This unified approach allows for agile budget allocation and coordinated messaging to ensure the marketplace grows in a healthy, balanced way.
This solves the problem through:
Sequenced Campaigning: The agency can initially focus a larger portion of the budget on building a critical mass of vetted creative talent to make the platform attractive to businesses.
Dynamic Budget Allocation: As the marketplace matures, upGrowth can shift budgets in real-time to whichever side is lagging, preventing imbalances.
Shared Learnings: Insights from the supply-side campaigns (what talent values) can inform the messaging for demand-side campaigns (what businesses can expect), and vice versa.
This coordinated management is far more efficient than trying to manage two separate acquisition tracks independently. Read the full article to see how this unified strategy is being deployed.
The strategies for Playto Pay and PlaytoHire must be fundamentally different because they target distinct audiences with unique motivations. For Playto Pay, the focus is on B2B professionals, while PlaytoHire requires a dual approach for both businesses and individual creatives. Tailoring the targeting and messaging for each is essential for campaign efficiency and relevance.
The approach for upGrowth Digital LLP would likely diverge as follows:
Playto Pay (Fintech): Targeting would focus on job titles (e.g., agency owners, consultants) and interests related to business software, invoicing, and international business. Creative would emphasize security, efficiency, and professionalism.
PlaytoHire (Marketplace - Demand): Targeting would include hiring managers and marketing leads. Creative would showcase the quality of talent and the ease of hiring.
PlaytoHire (Marketplace - Supply): Targeting would be based on skills (e.g., video editing, graphic design). Creative would highlight opportunities for flexible work and reliable payments.
This segmentation ensures that the right message reaches the right person, a core principle of effective performance marketing. The article confirms these two products are run as separate acquisition systems.
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