At Simplicity Lone Beacon, we provide our clients with timely, quality, relevant content, as well as strategies for how to use it. We recently used short and long-form content in a three-tiered funnel campaign which pushed people down the marketing funnel from the awareness stage to the decision stage. We knew that funnel campaigns are effective because they target prospects based on where they are in the marketing funnel, and so we developed short and long form content for each part of the funnel. In this campaign, we first nurtured new prospects with a blog in the top of the funnel, with a longer guide on a topic they demonstrated interest in at the middle of the funnel, then pushed them to sign up for a review at the bottom of the funnel. Using this funnel campaign design, at the bottom of the funnel we increased the amount of new visitors to our advisor’s site by 280% and got 644 new leads.
Top of the funnel
We started by running Facebook ads pushing a blog on either Social Security or tax tips, targeting the residents of our advisor’s state over the age of 45. We created one-off landing pages on our advisor’s site for the blogs, populated with links to related blogs like “Don’t Overlook These Tax Breaks and Deductions” and “Social Security’s Decreased Buying Power.” At the end of each page was an offer to download either a Social Security guide or Tax Planning guide for more information on the topics mentioned in the blogs. The goal was to have new prospects explore the website and engage with more content, and we had a total 7,498 landing page views.
Middle of the funnel
The next step was to run Facebook ads pushing a more meaningful content offering. We offered either a Social Security guide or a Tax guide depending on which topic users had shown interest in at the top of the funnel. We targeted both people who viewed the initial blogs and a cold audience curated using Facebook’s new tax, Social Security and financial interest filters. The purpose of this part of the campaign was lead generation, and we achieved success with 160 requests for a copy of the Social Security guide, and 40 requests for the tax guide.
Bottom of the funnel
At the bottom of the funnel we targeted the combined the Social Security and Tax Tips audiences and a Facebook look-a-like audience with ads pushing a free review. After a week we also added an audience of current prospects from Act On, our marketing automation software, and a look-a-like audience based on the advisor’s High Net Worth clients to increase the effectiveness of the last part of the campaign. Moreover, we refocused our efforts on the second part of the funnel to increase web traffic and get more leads. This was a success, as we increased the number of new visitors to their site by 280%, got 200 guide downloads, and 644 new leads.
Analyzing the Results
While we originally viewed two prior touch points as being enough to draw people in for free reviews via Facebook ads, this was simply not the case: We constantly monitor all of our campaigns, implement new creative when necessary, and alter strategy – not just for the next campaign, but for the current one. During this campaign, we reverted the remainder of the budget towards the second stage of the funnel after getting fewer review sign-ups from the Facebooks ads than we expected. In the end, this produced 644 leads for our advisor, which was over 200 more leads than the 4 months prior to this campaign. We also increased the amount of new visitors to their site by 280%, or by 8,777 individuals in comparison with the same time frame in 2018. With this super-sized and engaged database, we felt that the money was well spent.
We earned the title of Innovators in Chief after running a 5 month long funnel campaign to attract prospects at all stages of the marketing funnel with our wide variety of content. We look forward to running our next funnel campaign and know that it will be even more successful than the first. If you’re interested to know how we could help you increase your web traffic, database, and leads, get in touch.
