Case Study
Paid Search Helps Leading Financial Services Company Increase Qualified Leads by 85%
The Story
For more than five years, Workshop Digital has worked with an enterprise-level financial information and analytics company to drive paid digital marketing initiatives. As a subsidiary of one of the nation’s largest financial services companies, the publicly-traded corporation provides intelligence solutions—including a platform that incorporates data, research, and news to track performance—to individuals, businesses, and governments on a global scale.
The company provides industry-specific information to investment professionals, corporations, universities, government agencies, and more. And each division has marketing teams running numerous campaigns with different budgets. Because of this, Workshop Digital manages up to 100 or more campaigns at any given time. While Workshop Digital began working with just a few of these marketing teams, we’ve since refined the company’s overarching strategy and influenced teams across different divisions to use digital marketing to help achieve their goals.
The Challenge
As a leading player in a crowded financial data space, competition is high for our client. Because they count multinational businesses as clients, their sales cycle can be extensive. Although it can take up to three years to convert a lead, the lifetime value of a client ranges from thousands to millions of dollars. Early on in our partnership, the main way for our client to attract leads on their website was through a lengthy demo request form. This created an immediate barrier for entry.
In addition to the extended lead cycle, another challenge for our client was managing the sheer volume of content and campaigns. Our client offered an extensive range of information, but had difficulty tracking which campaigns generated initial interest. Workshop Digital saw an opportunity to help our client improve the tracking success of that content and provide more targeted campaigns that went beyond a traditional demo request. Ultimately, our goal was to make this content work harder for our client—and reach a wider audience.
The Approach
Our first goal was to help our client get more eyes on their resources—and provide more touch points for leads across the conversion cycle. Refining our client’s paid search strategy with display remarketing and display prospecting campaigns helped accomplish these goals. Secondly, we wanted to refine their attribution model, so our client could better understand which efforts were contributing to conversions.
Coordinating paid search and display across departments helped our client refine their strategy and kickstart success. For example, display remarketing and display prospecting enabled us to target users who either had or hadn’t been to our client’s website, respectively. Redirecting these users to relevant, industry-specific content helped improve engagement. Finally, targeting the right people with the right campaigns helped content reach more qualified audiences.
Switching the attribution model within Google Ads enabled us to better understand how campaigns were performing. Because our client had a substantial research cycle, campaigns at the beginning of the cycle were not receiving credit for contributing to a lead. However, using a position-based attribution model enabled us to track exactly which campaigns attracted users in the first place. This helped refine paid search budgets for each marketing team.
The Results
By helping our client get more mileage from their existing content, and utilizing Google’s smart bidding and attribution features, we saw an increase in lead volume in 2020. In fact, we exceeded our Q1 goal of driving branded paid search leads by 85% and our goal of driving non-branded paid search leads by more than 200%. Additionally, we helped decrease branded cost per lead by 36% from $237 to $151.
Workshop Digital has established a true partnership with our client. In addition to weekly strategy meetings, we’ve gone above and beyond our paid search account and have helped them resolve tracking issues, fix issues on their website, and set up analytics to optimize results. Ultimately, this success extends beyond this division. We’ve also worked with different branches of the corporation, including its parent company, to drive digital marketing results.
