Financial Services Lead Generation
Overview
A family owned, equipment financing services company came to us looking for more leads.
For years, this company had purchased leads through SIC codes and emailed the leads with plain text emails. Now, that method just wasn’t as effective.
The leads weren’t as good. Email marketing platforms started preventing purchased lists from being uploaded. Email in general started to get less attention as social emerged.
This called for alternative lead generation tactics to be explored.
Challenge
How does a 40 year old, family owned business increase brand awareness & leads?
The equipment financing company was facing a couple large barriers to success: competitors and cost of competing.
Equipment financing is dominated by large, national banks like Bank of America and Wells Fargo. Because the big fish swim online, the chances of ranking organically for equipment financing keywords was slim. Knowing this, the big fish were driving up the advertising costs of keywords. Each click on an equipment financing keyword commanded an average of $25 per click.
Far too much for a small, family owned company built on relationships over the last 40 years.
Solution
What is a small financing company to do when their website can’t compete with the major players? You get creative, and target specific equipment financing keywords on the local level.
In other words, go after the stuff that’s too small to matter for the big fish, but can make a world of difference for a small business.
With this mentality, we created between 4-8 pieces of content per month that targeted industries, locations, and specific needs of prospective customers. We promoted this content via Digital PR. The path was paved for search engines to discover and index the content via Technical SEO.
Collectively, the small opportunities represented a big opportunity online that would generate leads and inbound traffic outside of email.
Result
Any SEO campaign targeting low volume keywords on a low authority domain was bound to be slow moving. And, slow moving it was.
But little by little, prospective customers began connecting with this family-owned business to discuss their equipment financing needs. Over time, we started to rack up small wins that were collectively leading to leads. More than 30 target keywords achieved a first page ranking, with some pieces of content achieving a coveted featured snippet.
We created quite a bit of built-in value to the website as well. Here’s a graph that illustrates the equivalent value of the organic search traffic, should that traffic have been acquired via PPC.
That’s good value. We went from $145 of traffic value to more than $2,500 per month.
This traffic has led to some large and lucrative deals. But most importantly, these leads have kicked off the thing that matters most when ensuring the success of a 40-year old company: long-term relationships with customers.
