Our integrated approach to audiences, data and creative drove a 208% increase in MQLs for B2B lender Capify
The Challenge
Capify provides direct business finance to SMEs in the form of small business loans and merchant cash advances. It was set up in 2008 to provide financing to the SMEs that were struggling with cashflow due to the financial crisis and were being overlooked by traditional banks. Since then they have provided hundreds of millions in financing to SMEs across the country.
Capify appointed DemandMore back in March of 2022 to handle media across paid search and paid social channels. The scope expanded in 2023 to include assisting Capify with measurement, so they could better understand the performance of their campaigns.
Capify had three key challenges with their activity that they wanted to address
1) Capify needed to improve lending application quality.
Capify’s sales team only had limited capacity. We knew that if the sales team were overloaded the conversion rate would drop and so focusing on quality was vital before scaling volume.
2) Capify were struggling to scale lending application volumes.
We were tasked with finding scale within the account; the key to this would be to improve the CPA so that we could effectively bid more aggressively on potential high-value customers.
3) Capify needed to better understand the value of their paid social activity.
Historically poor social attribution led to the channel being neglected. This was having a knock-on effect on bottom-of-funnel activity. We wanted synergy between all channels (Google, Bing, Meta & LinkedIn).
The Solution
Understanding the value of each channel and better allocating budget
To help Capify better allocate budget, we first needed to understand how many funded deals were generated by channel, as well as the revenue generated from said deals.
To achieve this, we fed offline Funded Deal & revenue data into our data warehouse at a keyword (& creative/asset) level, as well as sending deduplicated analytics data from the online channels.
Our team then stitched this data together and outputted it into a custom-built, cross-channel dashboard that broke down all KPIs to a daily, weekly, and monthly level. This allowed us to see the exact revenue and ROAS of all of our activity, right down to keyword, audience and asset level.
Using this data we were able to effectively plan our media spend and dynamically redistribute the budget based upon day-by-day performance.
Creating value-based customer segments to target across channels
By analysing our first-party data within the data warehouse, we were able to identify high-value audience segments. These were typically businesses that were either borrowing large amounts of money or had taken out multiple loans over an extended period of time.
We then created customer segments for these users and then pushed the audiences into each channel (Google, Bing, Meta, Linkedin); allowing us to target them as well as targeting users similar to them across channels for a joined up approach.
Reducing CPA with a consolidated structure
When Capify came to us they were using a traditional campaign structure across Google and Meta where campaigns were broken down by service, such as business loans, recovery loans etc. This limited the amount of volume that was being passed through the bid strategies, pushing up the CPAs.
With our new approach to the campaign structure we wanted to achieve one primary goal – to structure our campaigns around Capify’s business objectives, namely to generate the largest amount of lending, at the lowest media cost. We had to create a structure that balanced this goal while also meeting Google’s required 50 conversions per month per campaign. Any less and the performance would be irritative.
On Meta we used a consolidated full-funnel strategy, with a top of funnel campaign targeting new prospects. A middle-of-funnel campaign targeting prospects that were showing in-market intent. And a third, bottom-of-funnel campaign which targeted users close to conversion.
On Google, we bucketed keywords depending on whether they had converted into a funded loan or not. We built these lists using the UTMs keyword of the funded deals that we had collected.
From January to March 2022, 61 different Google Ads campaigns were live; we consolidated this, resulting in just three search campaigns (Brand, Generics & Competitor).
Improving lead quality
While Capify’s developers were building a custom solution to push their CRM data back into Meta and Google Ads, we needed to find a short-term solution to optimise lead quality.
On Google we did this by allocating more budget and bidding more aggressively for keywords that we saw were generated higher value-funded deals, with our integrated report.
We then calculated that we could spend 15% more per MQL generated from these keywords as they were highly profitable.
These high-value keywords were separated into a different ad group which had a tCPA bid strategy set 15% higher than the standard keywords. The higher tCPA allowed us to spend more per click & be much more dominant in terms of the SERP/Impression Share.
Creative
In the finance sector, it’s essential to build trust with customers. We took a two-pronged creative approach to achieve this. Firstly, by managing all of the media across search, social, display and video, we were able to ensure consistent messaging across platforms and across stages of the funnel.
Secondly, we knew from other clients in the space that Trustpilot reviews work well for improving CPAs and lending application quality, so we worked with Capify’s internal design team to create assets for all platforms showcasing their reviews.
We were also able to test effectively in single channels and roll out learnings quickly. For example, our ‘not a bank’ themed YouTube video was extremely successful for both Remarketing & Prospecting audiences, so we created matching assets/ads for LinkedIn & Meta.
We also identified that not all placements had appropriate creative. To address this, we built a template tool to ensure that going forward the creative team would build all of the asset sizes including RHS (right hand side) creative in static, alongside video creative.
It also allowed us to ensure compliance & shared the process with their legal team to ensure that any claims that we made would not contravene the rules set out by the FCS (Financial Conduct Authority).