B2C / B2B - Financial Industry:
Going up against the larger, national banks was no easy task when Liberty Savings Bank launched their newest product, the Big Interest Bundle. See how we were able to build steady account registration growth through organic traffic, content, email, and a paid ad strategy.
The Company
Liberty Savings Bank is a local Florida community bank with 5 branches located in and around Sarasota and Manatee County.
The Product
Liberty’s major advantage is its newest product: the Big Interest Bundle account. This account offers extremely competitive interest rates compared to that of the larger, more nationally recognized banks, and it was our goal to create a comprehensive digital campaign to support their new product and get online applications.
The Challenge
The biggest challenge Liberty Savings Bank faces is having to compete for attention with major banks like Chase, Wells Fargo, and Bank of America. Coupled with a brand new product, their high-interest checking, and savings account, they had an uphill battle to build search authority and grow organic traffic past that of their competitors.
We had to take a local community bank and a brand-new product and deliver an impactful strategy that would help them increase their ranking and online account openings.
The Solution
Our goal was to build a long term solution that would continue to provide results over time. So, we set out to launch a complete inbound strategy with content creation and organic reach intended to drive traffic to the site and convert that traffic into leads. In the short term, we supplemented the inbound strategy with paid ads so that Liberty could see success with the launch of their new product right away. Here’s our process, step by step.
Step 1: Building the Landing Page
The first step was to create an easy-to-use landing page in HubSpot to be the center of the campaign. Whether it was through CTAs optimizing blogs and other site pages, traffic from Google and Facebook Ads, or email campaigns to their existing database, all traffic pointed back to the landing page. All this with the goal of being able to capture and track all the leads who filled out an application to open an account.
Step 2: Email Campaigns
After building the landing page, we worked within Liberty’s database to build segments for an email campaign promoting the Big Interest Bundle.
Step 3: Blogging and Organic Traffic Strategy
When developing a strategy for blogging and content, we knew we had to work with Liberty’s biggest strength: its local roots. A weakness of a national bank is that it has a hard time connecting and communicating with a local audience. So, for Liberty, a local community bank, we focused our efforts on keywords and topics that would tackle industry topics but also let us focus on their Sarasota and Manatee County audiences.
We wanted to be very targeted with who we wrote for in order to compete with the banks and beat them to the local audience we were after.
Step 4: Implement Google Ads Campaigns
With the goal of quickly gathering Big Interest Bundle signups, we implemented our ads strategy with 3 separate campaigns:
The first ads we used targeted an audience within the branch locations with messaging focused on their quality in-branch customer service, the value of the product, and the benefits of banking locally.
The second campaign was a test run focused on areas “within arms reach” of the branch locations (with-in 50 miles) with messaging focused on the easy online signup process, the value of the product, and the quality service of their easily accessible support team.
Finally, we re-targeted landing page visitors with display ads to encourage them to return to the site.
The Results
Since we launched this campaign and landing page, we’ve seen a steady growth in traffic and contacts generated from it.
Overall Campaign Traffic Growth
Overall Lead Growth From Campaigns
With three well-defined Google Ad campaigns running, we wanted to see how each campaign influenced the end goal of closing more Big Interest Bundle customers. With slight iterations over time to ad copy and campaigns, we were able to get great results from these campaigns:
Branch Area Target Audience
Outside Branch Area Target Audience
Retargeting Display Ads
Of course, we were happy with an 8.43% contact to customer conversion rate from our paid ad efforts, but we continued to see leads funneling in and wanted to make sure we were doing everything we could to nurture those that fell through during the application process.
We created emails to bring leads back into the process they started and never completed:
1. The first reengagement email was a follow up 10 minutes after they converted, to thank them if they had completed or encourage them to finish the application they started. We wanted to stay in front of them as much as we could without creating a negative experience.
2. The second reengagement email was created based on information we learned from our clients. We found out that switching banks was a hurdle for many people and we wanted to provide them with an offer that showed them how simple it was to switch. We re-engaged with those that started the application process and didn’t complete it a month later.
For the remaining leads generated, we put them into a soft nurturing drip campaign to keep Liberty Savings Bank top of mind:
The Big Interest Bundle campaign is still running and we are continuing to implement new and innovative ways to generate, nurture, and close more customers.
Here are our overall digitally influenced results to date:
From the 1,026 submissions on this landing page, 77 eventually became Liberty customers with 56 of them opening a Big Interest Bundle account. The remaining 21 customers chose other bank accounts with Liberty.
Read their review on the HubSpot Partner Directory.
