Ryan Sloper
LEAD GENERATION
The Before:
Ryan Sloper, Regional Manager at American Financial Network, has been working with our team since late 2018. Ryan’s niche is in finance, and his team supports potential home buyers with down payment assistance, refinancing, Veteran assistance loans, FHA, and USDA loans.
Before our partnership began, Ryan had been running ads for his business for a few years, but was struggling to attract qualified leads who were ready for their services. He wanted support, not only in increasing his lead generation, but also in creating a funnel that would filter out wrong fit customers and in scaling his ad spend budget to double what it was previously.
The Details:
The Strategy:
Ryan’s main goal is to generate as many high-quality leads as possible to the top of his funnel. We drove mainly cold traffic straight to the landing pages of his funnels to a quiz that is used to qualify them to receive a call from the AFN team.
A great deal of our focus for Ryan’s strategy was on our messaging in our ad copy and creative. Because his account is in a special ad category with limited targeting capabilities, nailing our messaging was absolutely vital in attracting the right leads into his funnels.
We tested out a variety of different creative and found that video content performed much better than images. So, we shifted to incorporate more engaging videos that were direct, to the point, and no longer than 1-2 minutes. The videos hit on the audience’s struggles to receive the mortgage loans they need to make their home buying dreams come true and provided them with actions they could take immediately to get support.
We were extremely direct in calling out our target audience within our ad copy. For example, in his funnel for Veteran assistance, our ad copy might explicitly say “Attention Veterans!” By honing in our messaging to better speak to Ryan’s audience, we saw our cost per lead lower at the beginning of 2021.
The Results:
For Q1 of 2021:
Average Landing Page Conversion: 36.73%
Average Cost Per Lead (across all funnels): $7.43
Total Leads: 6,725
The impact: By focusing our efforts to refine and improve our messaging, we have been able to overcome the targeting limitations of being in a special ad category. Not only have we been able to consistently drive more leads to Ryan’s funnel, but we are driving highly qualified leads who actually convert! Which means Ryan has been able to support even more people in getting the mortgage loans they need to finally purchase their homes.
Ad Examples:
Takeaways:
Messaging is absolutely critical in this new era of digital marketing
Especially in the case of Ryan’s account being in a special ad category, we really had to step up our messaging game in our ad copy and creative in order to attract the right leads. In this new era of digital marketing, if your messaging isn’t dialed in, if you don’t stand out, if you can’t hook your ideal customers, you will not find success with your marketing.
Test, test, and test again!
One of the keys in our lead generation strategy was continuously testing new creative versions until we found what resonated the most with Ryan’s audience. We started by testing a variety of different images, but after testing video content it was clear that this was what his audience best responded to. Even with our video content, we are always testing different formats. Sometimes the videos are very straight to the point and call out the audience’s pain points and why Ryan’s services are the clear solution to their problems. Other times, the videos are more lighthearted and fun. There is no blanket answer for which creatives perform the best, it’s something you must test on your own to determine exactly what works for your audience.