|  The
Background:
Right
now, with the BP Oil Spill disaster in the Gulf
of Mexico, there's intense interest in alternative
energy, and preventing future disasters from happening.
Like
it or not, the world is addicted to fossil fuels.
Here in Boulder, Colorado, about half of our office
rides their bikes to work each day. But I know
it's not realistic to ask everyone to give up
their cars -- the US economy and infrastructure
is largely based on the car as personal transportation.
At
Customer Paradigm, we take environmental issues
seriously, and have done a lot of work for Greenpeace
and solar energy manufacturers, too. We've built
sustainable development software planning tools
for the Global Environmental Management Initiative
(GEMI.org). We've also
worked with BP, Shell and other energy companies
to help them with their marketing
But
an interesting trend has also emerged. With the
oil spill in the news, pricing for direct investment
in oil exploration has fallen to low, low levels.
The
Goal:
Our
client, Andy Leib, is an independent broker who
helps bring investors and companies together.
He wanted us to use search engine marketing to
drive leads from Australia and UK. We're also
helping the company, wwXploration, drive US and
Canadian leads, too.
Our
Pitch / Idea:
Jesse
Schultz and I listened closely to Andy. We tried
to understand what motivated the end user to want
to invest directly in oil exploration (high returns,
and tax benefits if it didn't work).
The
strategy: drive leads via geo-targeted Cost Per
Click (CPC) advertisements on Google, Bing, Yahoo
and Facebook. Traffic would be sent to a dedicated
landing page on the wwXploration.com website,
and code would be placed on the site to make sure
that if a lead came in from overseas, special
trackable phone numbers and contact forms would
be displayed. Our goal was to create a compelling,
trusted experience for site visitors.
How
the Campaign Worked:
Step 1: Build the Landing Page
Before
driving traffic via paid search engine advertising,
we first needed a solid way to 'catch' them when
they came to the site.
Previous
statistics for the wwXploration.com website showed
that their conversion rate was dismally low. The
conversion rate is calculated by how many people
who visited the page and then filled out a contact
form, or picked up and the phone and called the
organization.
One
of the reasons their conversion rate was low in
the past was because they merely sent everyone
to the home page of their site, and "hoped"
that people would fill out a form or pick up the
phone:
(Sending
leads directly to the home page of a site is known
as the "Kiss of Death" in CPC Advertising.)
Instead,
we created a landing page that allowed people
to find out more information in a concise way:
It
tries to consolidate all the information that
they need to know onto one short and simple page,
and asks them to fill out a form for more information.
And
if the end user clicked through to other pages
on their site, we used special tracking codes
to insert the international phone numbers and
contact forms that would go directly to Andy,
for a quick response.
Here's
the standard header on the website for US-based
clients:
Here's
the trackable header on the website, with international
phone numbers, that follows the end user around
the site when they come in from a CPC campaign:
Likewise,
the footer navigation at the bottom of each page
changed if the user came in from overseas. Here's
the standard navigation with US-based phone numbers:
Here's
the footer if they came in from the /Invest/ landing
page from overseas:
Step
2: Drive Leads Via PPC
Once
the landing page was set up properly, the next
step was to create pay per click campaigns in
Google, Yahoo, Bing and Facebook. Pay Per Click,
for those that aren't familiar with it, works
when your advertisement is listed on a search
page (i.e. Google.com) when someone types in specific
keywords. You don't pay for advertising impressions...
only when someone actually clicks on your advertisement.
This is how Google generates the majority of their
revenue.
Here's
an example of a CPC Ad on Google:
As
I've written about before, it's really easy to
waste money doing pay per click marketing.
For
the campaign, we created specific ad groups to
geographically-target the ads to people in Australia,
the UK, New Zealand and other areas. We created
literally thousands of permutations for keywords
for advertising, so that if someone searched on
a keyword, we could capture their click for the
lowest cost possible. We
also put in lots of negative keywords (so that
the ads weren't displayed when someone had the
term "free" in the search.
Contact
Form: Main Call to Action
The
landing page featured a contact form, which invited
a person to fill it out and learn more:
As
soon as it was filled out, the wwXploration team
received an alert email letting them know they
should contact the person right away:
Results
The
second day the campaign ran, the client received
four phone calls and three contact form submissions
-- way ahead of expectations. They're thrilled
with the initial results so far.
Client
Feedback:
"The
phone just keeps ringing with great leads!
I'm really happy."
Summary:
A
well designed landing page, with strong calls
to action, combined with Pay Per Click Marketing
generated strong leads within two days of activating
the campaigns.
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