Mortgage Broker Online Advertising Case Study

Challenge

A Local Edmonton Based Mortgage Company wanted to better leverage online channels and advertising to acquire new leads and help brand their company. The competition in this industry was very strong, with many businesses already advertising online, in print, in radio and outdoor mass advertising. Strong Coffee was tasked with uncovering tactics and online marketing strategies that would help bring in new leads, more sales, increased brand awareness, and get them noticed by their competitors in this already busy marketplace.

Goals

Identify and employ online advertising strategies that bring in new leads and business. Help broaden awareness of their brand to the public and competition by being #1 in the online markets we choose.

Tactics

There were three elements to this strategy that had a major affect on the ROI.  First, the website needed to be flexible enough to capture, collect and convert leads. Two, the ad campaigns needed to be very targeted as search volumes were extremely high. Three, the ad campaigns needed to be continuously optimized and refined to be relevant and conversion focused.

Strong Coffee first began working with the existing templated website the company had, and after developing a small test of Google Adwords ads targeted to broad variety of keyword groups and targeted landing pages, soon found that the website itself was going to be a significant barrier to converting new leads.

A new WordPress website was developed, that had the capacity to be changed on a whim, collect user information and be flexible enough to support multiple landing pages. Once complete another test of Google Adwords was tested and the leads began to trickle in.  This test incorporated a variety of keyword groupings, and was analyzed down to a keyword level to determine which keywords were driving leads, and which were not as relevant.

Over time, after countless variations to the landing page designs, ad copy, ad keywords and more, Google started rewarding our hard work with better quality scores.  Where we once were lucky to have a quality score of “3”, we were now seeing “8” and “9” across the board.  This drastically reduced the price we had to pay per click, and improved our ad position to be #1 on a permanent basis in the markets we chose.

Within three months of starting the initial campaign work, the number of weekly leads was increased fivefold. Expansion was inevitable, and within 6 months, with new campaigns and targeting we were gathering leads at an astonishing rate with solid click-through-rates of well over 5%.

Conclusion

Strong Coffee’s targeted trial and error approach helped identify new channels and new strategies to help target and capture customer leads.  Continuous refinement and analytic research was used to identify patterns and opportunities to help increase return on investment and produce more sales.  Over time, the Strong Coffee team was able to develop a full-fledged online advertising campaign that not only preformed well, but continuous out-performed itself on a month to month basis.