"We're having trouble reaching our target customers."
Farm Credit of North Carolina’s three member institutions have a high-value customer base. That’s the good news. Reaching commercial and family farmers in the rural parts of the state, however, has proven difficult. In the past, FCNC focused its marketing efforts on fairs and farming trade shows. However, sponsoring booths and buying IP-targeted digital ads generated results that were less than ideal. FCNC saw no leads and had little visibility into ROI data.
“Did you get any customers from these efforts?” we asked when we first connected with them. “We just don’t know,” they replied.
"Ok," we said. "Let's take a deep dive into your existing data, build audience and persona models, and use that intel to boost lead generation and ROI data."
A deep dive into existing customer information and other data yielded a good bit of actionable intelligence. This intel helped us build three targeted audiences composed of farmers, rural property owners, and agribusinesses. We then used these audiences to boost lead flows and maximize the ROI of paid ad spending.
"Let's also generate actionable intel we can use to decrease wasteful spending and improve FCNC's overall pipeline."
The data we collected helped us put upward pressure on awareness and engagement, keep downward pressure on overall spending, establish important benchmarks, and maintain best-practice spending ratios. This data can help FCNC fine-tune its overall marketing efforts and keep upward pressure on the ROI of marketing spending.
How does GoConvert help?
By combining the self-sufficiency of an application with the expertise of an agency, GoConvert uses four actions to help FCNC quantify results, maximize ROI, and achieve its marketing goals.
Audience Modeling
GoConvert uses all available data resources — social media intel, Google Analytics, contact information, and other digital signals — to continually fine-tune FCNC’s audiences. We always know whom we’re speaking to and how well we’re resonating with them.
Content Strategy
GoConvert uses audience intelligence to build highly-relevant marketing collateral. This helps ensure content topics, social media channels, and ads align with known audience variables. Now, marketing spending has the potential to generate exponential returns.
Lead Generation & Nurturing
We use a series of audience-specific lead-generation resources to generate a steady stream of customer leads. This allows the FCNC marketing team to nurture prospects along a well-defined conversion path and creates additional front-line intelligence we can use to fine-tune our various audience hypotheses.
Measuring, Analyzing, Reporting, Learning & Fine Tuning
We use engagement data and other digital signals to constantly learn from our marketing efforts and improve our audience models. This allows us to fine-tune collateral resources, improve lead generation, hone conversion workflows, and improve overall marketing efforts (on- and offline).
Data & Discoveries
Working with GoConvert is an adventure. Our customers usually start with one set of assumptions. Then, working side by side, we discover all sorts of exciting, unanticipated things. Steering into these discoveries helps maximize the ROI of overall marketing spending. This is certainly true in FCNC’s case.
Intelligent Growth
In terms of lead flow, GoConvert (green) did out-perform the IP-targeting campaign (gray) that FCNC ran during the same three-day farm show the previous year. In this first phase, we also collected some important data that would allow us to boost the ROI of future marketing efforts.
However, we were dissatisfied with the total number of leads we generated (4) as well as with the average amount we paid for each lead: $87.34. This is competitive with common financial services benchmarks, but we’re used to outperforming industry lead cost averages by dozens of percentage points.
We knew we could do better.
Actionable Insight
We encouraged FCNC to limit spending on farm shows in the future. “Instead,” we suggested, “let’s expand our audience to include farmers, rural property owners, and agribusinesses and market within the state of North Carolina year-round.”
This impacted the campaign in a number of different positive ways. First, we were able to generate a diverse range of customer prospects for FCNC. (Note, “Expanded” leads are rural residents, agribusiness entities, and other relevant non-farmer customer prospects.) We were also able to cut average lead costs in half. FCNC is now paying 40% less per lead than the average financial services company.
Spending ratios also improved dramatically.
The first three days in the example represent lead costs during the farm show. Days 4+ represent lead costs for the rest of the month. After the farm show, FCNC never paid more than $30.08/lead: 60% less than the industry average.
The Virtuous Gap
After the farm show, by the second month of our engagement, we were also able to achieve and sustain one of our most important abstract models: the “virtuous gap.”
As we fine tune a customer’s audience data and use that intel to improve the alignment of channels, messaging, and creative, we begin minimizing spending (cost per click or “CPC”) and maximizing engagement (click through rate or “CTR”).
This is marketing in its most harmonious state: putting sustained downward pressure on CPC (red) while simultaneously putting upward, even exponential pressure on CTR (gray). More often than not, the virtuous gap has positive collateral effects on lead flows as well.
Testimonial
“How has GoConvert helped Farm Credit of North Carolina?”
GoConvert helped Farm Credit of North Carolina’s three member organizations generate more leads and insights than our previous digital marketing efforts. The ROI they helped us generate from our spending was more than adequate. I’d recommend them to other financial services companies.
Marketing LeadFarm Credit of North Carolina
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