Paid Digital: focusit
focusIT
The Brief
FocusIT is a B2B SaaS company. Their software solutions are tailored towards mortgage industry professionals. Since Careful Feet Digital already manages focusIT’s social media accounts and blog, they had asked us to test the viability of social media advertising to generate leads for their business.
Challenges
FocusIT hadn’t used paid advertising in the past, so we had to start from scratch, testing the right audiences, messaging and offerings. We started by assisting them with their ads strategy, suggesting that they create a customer funnel to educate those unfamiliar with the brand about the need for their services. Since FocusIT operates in the mortgage industry, it often caused Facebook’s bots to flag the ads.
How Careful Feet Digital helped
We started by assisting FocusIT with their ads strategy, suggesting that they create a customer funnel to educate those unfamiliar with the brand about the need for their services. Our suggestion was to create a free webinar for mortgage pros. The overall strategy was a simple 3-step funnel: social ads, landing page with a free webinar offer, and email marketing from there.
Once the landing page in place, ads were set up on LinkedIn and Facebook. On both platforms, we tried lead gen ads using internal sites’ forms and regular conversion ads to the landing page. Lead gen ads weren’t successful, but conversion ads were. After some extensive testing and multiple rounds of tweaks, we discarded LinkedIn Ads since the ROAS wasn’t satisfactory. The whole ad budget was rerouted to Facebook Ads.
During our initial test run on Facebook Ads, we generated leads at $58.42 on average. While it’s somewhat expected since we targeted a rather narrow and really expensive audience, we knew it was possible to improve these results. During the following 2 months, we tested 3 different pieces of copy, 3 different images, 2 goals, and 6 audiences. We narrowed down some working combinations and discovered 2 audiences, one lookalike and one interest-based, which provided the best results. By the end, our cost per lead was $28.37, a 51.43% decrease from our initial test results.
Facebook is notorious for having a somewhat irrational moderation policy. Even though our ads hadn’t dealt with mortgages themselves, we still received frequent ad flags from Facebook. That’s why one of our primary goals was constant monitoring of the account’s health, updating the ads, and sending constant appeals for a manual review of our ads.