Increasing Search Channel Impact

Project Overview

In the hyper-saturated financial solutions market, our client, one of the largest companies in the US financial industry, required continuous, high-quality lead generation to maintain momentum. Our goal was to leverage search channel operations to meet this ongoing need effectively.

Problem Statement

Our client's success hinges on its ability to be noticed in an industry brimming with competitors. The key challenges included breaking through the noise to generate a continuous flow of leads and the critical need to discover new niches for lead generation, ensuring the business remains at the forefront of the financial solutions market.

Our Strategy

We adopted a dual-focus strategy that balanced the main budget on high-performing campaigns while dedicating a portion to testing and identifying new niches. Our approach was comprehensive and aimed to cover every aspect of marketing channel operations, including:

• campaign ideation,
• backlog creation,
• navigating compliance hurdles,
• targeting the right audiences,
• tracking the performance and
• optimizing digital assets.

As part of the strategy, we've separated the branded and non-branded campaigns and tested different campaign types, including retargeting and remarketing campaigns.

Our goal was to have a smooth, structured process to ensure all our campaigns were not just executed but meticulously managed and optimized at every step to uncover and scale successful strategies and opportunities.

Execution

Our approach was both methodical and collaborative, grounded in a step-by-step process that emphasized precision and adaptability.

Initially, we delved into campaign and messaging ideation, swiftly followed by the creation of an ideation backlog. This foundational work required close collaboration with creative and compliance teams to ensure all campaign content adhered to industry compliance standards, a critical step in the financial sector.

Next, we meticulously crafted audience lists, leveraging both our CRM (first-party data), as well as marketplace and third-party data. This careful segmentation ensured each campaign was perfectly aligned with the client's overarching marketing strategy, and ready for targeted execution.

Once campaigns were live, our focus shifted to monitoring ads and their performance through extremely granular reporting. By integrating channel/platform data with the client's CRM data, we achieved a precise and transparent view of our leads' origins. This level of detail was pivotal for informed, data-driven decision-making, allowing us to ascertain the effectiveness of each channel, campaign, and ad with clarity.

The subsequent analysis of these reports informed our decisions on whether to maintain, optimize, or discontinue specific ads, ad sets, or entire campaigns. When faced with the need for content, messaging, or traffic optimization, we employed A/B testing and landing page optimization. These tactics were not merely about maintaining performance; they were aimed squarely at enhancing conversion rates and discovering new growth opportunities.

Results

Our efforts yielded tangible results, as evidenced by:

• Yearly managed budgets exceeding $2 million for Bing Search and $14 million for Google Ads.
  • Year-over-year increases in managed budgets, reflecting the client's trust in our capabilities.
• Consistent improvement in close rates, demonstrating our ability to enhance campaign effectiveness.
  • Bing Search close rates increased from 4.3% in 2021 to 11.5% in 2023.
  • Google Ads close rates increased from 6.2% in 2021 to 11% in 2023.
• Notable achievement over the last three years: up to a 4x increase in ROI, translating to a 50%-400% boost in marketing margin.

Conclusion

Our focused, data-driven decision-making approach to managing Search channel operations has significantly contributed to our client's lead generation efforts, ensuring they remain a competitive force in the financial industry.

Even in a saturated market, strategic planning, deep analytics, and execution can lead to substantial growth and efficiency.

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