Case Study: Virtus Associates

How We Generated 430% ROI In A Competitive Market Using Facebook Ads

Are you looking for a way to grow your business profitably without wasting money on ineffective advertising?

Do you want to generate a consistent stream of leads and customers from Facebook?

Do you want to build a strong brand so your business stands out from the crowd and builds a loyal customer base?

With more companies competing in the global economy, business is getting harder everyday. Many companies have failed to grow online despite waste thousands of dollars on advertising. Their advertising dollars do not convert to sales and profits.

Here's the thing...

The only way to produce consistent and predictable results is to follow a proven systematic framework.

And here at Wayne Research, we have refined a systematic approach to building profitable marketing campaigns by combining Advanced Analytics and Consumer Psychology.

Here is a detailed breakdown about how we used Predictive Advertising to build a profitable digital marketing campaign in the competitive financial services industry:

Background:

Virtus Associates is a boutique financial consultancy firm in Singapore that provides asset and wealth management services to professionals and executives.

Traditionally, they acquire new clients via referrals and other offline methods. They wish to build a new lead generation system online.

The Challenges...

1. Lack of Online Presence

Virtus Associates had negligible online presence at the beginning of the campaign. They did not even have a website or any social media accounts (e.g. Facebook). (Note: Since then, they finally have their own website.)

Virtus Associate's current website

2. Competitive and Saturated Market

In Singapore, the financial services industry is extremely competitive with many competing agencies. The market is also near saturation point with many individuals already engaging such services.

3. High Advertising Cost

Due to the huge amount of competition, the online advertising cost in financial industries are traditionally much higher than other markets.

The Stats

$21

Cost Per Lead (CPL)

430%

Return of Investment (ROI)

68%

More leads per month

The Solution

Using Predictive Analytics, we are able to predict future outcomes based on consumer behaviour patterns in historical data:

  • We identified both the demographic and psychographic profile of the ideal customers of Virtus Associates.
  • We created pools of custom audiences online based on the individual's predicted interest in the service.
  • As the service is a high-ticket product with each customer paying an annual recurring fee that ranges from $2000 to $20,000, it is also critical to pinpoint only qualified prospects who have the financial ability to become customers.

This allows us to generate high-quality leads and target only the 3% of the target market (refer to image below) who:

  1. Are ready to purchase
  2. Has the ability to purchase

This in turn allowed us to reduce our advertising cost and maximise our advertising budget by focusing on individuals who are most likely to buy from Virtus Associates.

This allowed Virtus Associates to compete with their bigger competitors (with more resources) in the market with significantly smaller advertising budgets.

The Ads

Because Virtus Associates does not have a website, we used Facebook Lead Ads to collect leads from Facebook:

Facebook Lead Ads allow Virtus Associate to collect contact information directly from leads who signed up, without using a website!

The ads were carefully crafted based on unique insights and understanding about the target audience according to what they are most likely to respond. During the testing phase, multiple variations of the ads were blasted out to determine the best performing ads.

Some of the ad samples we tested

Building A Rock-solid Foundation For Profitable Growth

Our tracking and monitoring software allows us to quickly identify winning ads so we don't waste money on losing ads. This data is also integrated into the campaign as feedback to optimise and further improve the custom audiences and respective ads.

We also identified the winning elements of the best performing ads and created even more variations of these elements to further scale the campaign.

As the campaign collects more data, the campaign becomes smarter and targets prospects who are even more likely to respond to the campaign. This way, the campaign continues to scale while keeping Cost Per Acquisition (CPA) as low as possible.

Snapshot of the Facebook campaign results

How To Build Trust In A Cold & Competitive Market

According to Harvard Business Review, the quality of online leads drop drastically per hour once they sign up. Companies that tried to contact potential customers within an hour of receiving a query are more than 60 times as likely to qualify the lead, compared to companies that wait 24 hours or longer.

In this case, we sent up an automated Lead Nurturing System:

  • Once the prospect signed up for a "free offline strategy session", the contact information of the prospect is sent automatically to the sales team using Zapier immediately.
  • So the sales team can shorten the sales cycle and follow-up within an hour of the lead signing up.
  • We also used Retargeting Ads to show the prospect a sequence of advertisements after they signed up.
    • Each ad was content-driven to provide value and goodwill to prospects before their upcoming offline session with a Virtus Associates consultant.
    • So we keep the prospect engaged and increase show-up rates of the offline sessions by highlighting the benefits of these sessions.
    • These ads were only shown to prospects who have signed up and were delivered in a specific sequential order for maximum impact.

One of the Retargeting Ads we ran

  • Each prospect was automatically signed up to an email list. They were sent a Welcome email series packed with valuable conten
    • To help Virtus Associates demonstrate expertise in the finance niche and build trust & goodwill with the prospects - before the offline sessions.

Automated Welcome Email Series for prospects who signed up.

"

Haoting & his team at Wayne Research came up with a data-driven marketing strategy which helped grow my company in less than 90 days. Their insider knowledge in digital marketing prevented us from wasting our precious budget on ineffective hype and techniques that don't work.


Trent Ng Founder of Virtus Associates

The Results

This digital marketing campaign helped the financial firm generate 68% more leads each month. And the average cost per lead throughout the campaign was $21. These were high-quality leads for a high-ticket offer with a recurring fee that ranges from $2000 to $20,000. 

The Bottomline

We helped Virtus Associates start from scratch and establish a brand new online client acquisition channel in the competitive financial services industry with less than $100,000

And we achieved this by maintaining a positive ROI of 430% throughout the whole campaign! 

Want To Scale Your Business?

If you want us to manage your entire marketing campaign and create a win for you like we did for Virtus Associates, click the button below to contact us: