Fundscraper:
75% Reduction
In Cost Per Lead
Discover how we used Facebook ads to scale lead generation and conversions for this private real estate investment marketplace in Canada.
Industry
Private Real Estate Investment
Tools Used
Facebook Ads
Region
Based in Canada,
with a domestic target market
Results
Fundscraper received a massive improvement in cost-per-lead & lead volume as we scaled the ad spend over time.
Fundscraper were very open and flexible in terms of testing different offer / funnels. More importantly, they we willing to move fast to get the work done for these new offers and funnels.
Many businesses are slow moving when it comes to experimenting, but it is the key to getting sustainable results.
Moving fast with creating new funnels, lead magnets, experimentation and iteration was absolutely necessary to get these results for Fundscraper.
0 %
Reduction In Cost Per Lead
1 X
Scaled Ad Spend 2.3x
"We have been working with Rocket since 2020. I highly recommend working with Rocket Conversions if you want an expert digital ads team to help you grow"
Barbara Pucher
Vice President, Sales & Marketing - Fundscraper Capital Inc.
Here Is What You’re Going To Learn In This Case Study
How financial industry companies can beat competitors and overcome increased ad prices.
Why launching different offers / funnels is the most sustainable approach to getting more leads and conversions.
How to analyze lead quality when you have long lead conversion times.
"Lars and his team guides us in marketing initiatives and develops excellent strategies to increase our return on investment. "
Barbara Pucher
Vice President, Sales & Marketing - Fundscraper Capital Inc.
Background
Fundscraper’s private real estate investment online marketplace helps everyday investors build institutional quality real estate portfolios at lower costs. Their online platform makes it easy to get started with as little as $5,000.
On the marketing side of things, Fundscraper’s in-house team were stretched.
They were wearing too many hats and had reached a point where their cost-per-lead was far too high. Due to having so many responsibilities, they didn’t have the bandwidth to stay on top of the ever-changing nature of paid ads. This is a common scenario for many companies.
Realizing they needed a fresh set of eyes and some support to free up their in-house team, they reached out to us to see if we could help.
During our initial conversations, we asked their team what problems they wanted us to solve
Here’s what they said:
- Audit their ads to see if we could identify any opportunities for reducing cost-per-lead.
- Drive quality leads of people looking for private real estate opportunities.
- Strategize and set up a marketing system that includes paid ads, lead magnets, funnels, analytics, CRM connection, and an iterative, intensive testing strategy.
Fundscraper was a business that had so many positive elements, great team, great platform, and great validation from the thousands of users in the community. Their success is what caused their problems, the growing pains of having so much to do, too little time and bandwidth to do it.
We agreed to audit their entire set-up, create a strategy / project plan to optimize their ads & funnels, and then work together on the execution.
Another great business, another hyper competitive market, another huge challenge. As usual, the odds were against us. Let’s see how it all played out.
Goals
Improve Cost Per Lead from Facebook Ads to $50 within 3 months.
Increase lead volume by 20% MoM within 3 months.
Increase unique users on-site by 10% MoM (30% in total) within 3 months.
"The guys at Rocket are excellent at listening to our feedback, collaborating with us and responding quickly. It’s a pleasure working with Lars, Steve & the Rocket team"
Barbara Pucher
Vice President, Sales & Marketing - Fundscraper Capital Inc.
Challenges
Challenge 1
Long lead conversion times made it difficult to understand lead quality for short-term funnel analysis.
Challenge 2
The double whammy of financial industry and ad platform restrictions forced us to be very careful with wording and creatives.
We had to understand provincial / federal regulations and work with Fundscraper’s compliance team for approval on creatives.
Challenge 3
Seasonal market fluctuations proved challenging because ads on the major ad platforms get much more competitive during periods like Q4.
While many businesses were pumping huge ad spend, offering discounts and all types of offers, we had to find a way to compete for ad inventory.
Solutions
Solution 1
Experimentation, iteration & scaling
Our very first month saw a massive improvement in cost-per-lead.
Then it was time to scale. After 2-3 months it became increasingly difficult to maintain results while attempting to scale the campaigns. We recognized the need work on different funnels and experiment with messaging that would resonate with different audience segments.
Solution 2
Long lead time = longer term funnel experiments
While cost-per-lead is an important metric, lead quality is even more important as it directly equates to conversions and revenue.
With an average lead time (time from first interaction to conversion) of 6-8 weeks before doing their first investment on our platform, we had to commit to running every funnel for 3 months (unless the lead cost was far outside our KPIs). We supported this with in-depth funnel and lead quality reviews scheduled on a quarterly basis.
Solution 3
Working with Fundscraper's compliance team
Regulations and ad platform restrictions represent a challenge for every financial services business that runs paid ads,
We worked closely with Fundscraper’s compliance team to make sure all ads were approved before going live.
Solution 4
Balancing the promotion of Fundscraper's offers with educational lead magnets
We experimented and found a balance between promoting Fundscraper’s offers and promoting educational lead magnets. Finding this balance was a key factor in maintaining cost-per-lead and lead quality.
Best Performing Ads
Below are examples of the best performing Facebook ads, measured by cost-per-lead.
If you’d like to see if we can get you more conversions from your Facebook ads, feel free to check out our plans below.
Ad Type 2
Ad Type 1
Ad Type 3
"Great strategies, great ads, great results"
Barbara Pucher
Vice President, Sales & Marketing - Fundscraper Capital Inc.
Ad Campaign Strategy Breakdown
Ad Account Status Quo
Analyze data in CRM, Google Analytics & Facebook ad account to gather insights
Looking through Fundscraper’s campaigns, we got the following key takeaways:
1: Fundscraper had only tested banner ads and no other ad formats. We tested more different creatives and formats to be able to bid on all of Facebook’s ad inventory and improve performance.
2: They had already tested a lot of different audiences. Broad audiences appeared to work best, however, they had barely tested lookalike audiences, so there was a big opportunity for testing here.
3: Fundscraper had run lots of small campaigns, we re-structured this and switched to a consolidated campaign structure in order for Facebook’s artificial intelligence to do a better job. Fewer campaigns. More data.
Competitor Analysis
Find out what is working for the most successful competitors
We got 2 key insights from analyzing competitor campaigns.
1: Banner ads appeared to be the dominant ad format in the industry.
2: Creatives ranged from illustrations, to real estate imagery, to stock photos, so we needed to experiment with very different messaging approaches.
Audience Research
Learn everything about the audience, where they are, & what they want
We aimed to understand the emotional characteristics, desires and fears of our audience.
One useful way of doing this is by reading through comments on posts across Fundscraper’s social media posts, reading their reviews on review sites, and doing the same with their top competitors. We also browsed sites like Quora, Reddit and other sources to learn the types of questions & concerns our audience had. This gave us great insight into the type of language the audience uses, so we could leverage this in our ads, lead magnets, and funnels.
Two key insights we gained:
1: There were a variety of reasons why people invested into REITs, so we could not use the same messaging for all our audiences. For some it’s the stable monthly returns, for others it’s diversification, and for others it’s the passive investment aspect.
2: Our audiences are busy people. We had to remove as much friction as possible from our customer journey to make it seamless.
Ad Strategy Development
Strategizing the customer journey
Based on the insights we acquired, we built a campaign strategy around the following priorities.
1: A/B testing the calls to action of our funnel. We needed to understand whether booking a call instead of “sign up to our marketplace” would help our audience to move quickly through the complexity of our customer journey, and to get even more insights into our audience behavior.
2: Focus on creative testing. There hadn’t been much testing done on the creatives, so we decided to go heavy on testing creatives to find winning ads for our audiences.
Iterate To Succeed
80% of what you test will fail, embrace it. Analyze, Test, Improve, Repeat
Focusing on the fundamentals, we planned a strategic testing system and restructured the ad campaign structure in order to easily analyze the data of our tests. Over time, we refined our campaigns and improved results using the following key insights:
1: It turned out that the call to action of booking a call performed badly. It didn’t lead to better results because we were sending less data back to FB (more people would sign up, less people were willing to directly get on a call). This led to weaker performance because Facebook’s artificial intelligence was not being supported with quality data from our ads.
2: Carousel ads performed best in our conversion campaigns (ad-to-landing page), and banner ads performed best in our lead generation (native Facebook lead form) campaigns. This insight helped us cut the lead cost down significantly.
3: Different funnels resonated with different audience segments, naturally. This opened up a way to scale our results horizontally, and provided less volatile results.
Takeaways
Takeaway 1
Experimentation & iteration of funnels.
Don’t rely on a single funnel.
When your business is reliant on Facebook ads, it is vital to run multiple funnels.
This allows you to scale further and faster because you’re speaking to different audience segments.
It also minimizes the risk of being impacted by external factors like the next algorithm update or competition.
Takeaway 2
Agility & openness to experimentation.
Moving fast and testing is a fundamental requirement for success.
Especially when you’re a service business. You need to experiment to find different ways of standing out amongst all the brands who are also targeting similar audiences to you.
Free resources, quizzes, or other valuable educational resources can be a great way to do this.
Lead Generation For Your
Financial Services Business
Want a scalable marketing system that delivers leads consistently?
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We have been working with Rocket since 2020. I highly recommend working with Rocket Conversions if you want an expert digital ads team to help you grow. Lars and his team guides us in marketing initiatives and develops excellent strategies to increase our return on investment. The guys at Rocket are also excellent at listening to our feedback, collaborating with us and responding quickly. It’s a pleasure working with Lars, Steve & the Rocket team. Great strategies, great ads, great results.
Working with Rocket is excellent. Lead price has come way down, and feedback from the sales team is the leads are very good, having a lot of good conversations, and definitely getting buyers with money on the phone. The lead quality in general has been very very good. I've had no complaints from my sales teams, all saying that the leads have been of a high standard, bringing a lot of prospects who are buyers, and in the market looking for property to invest or buy for their own use. So thank you very much for your efforts in sorting the audiences. Working with Rocket is brilliant because we really nailed down a number of solutions to problems I felt we were having with our lead gen, and my team and I have a lot of confidence to move forward with our next developments. We had our highest sales months on record while working with the Rocket guys, which was a build-up from the start of all the work we do together, so massive thank you there.
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