Annuity Association Partners with HawkSEM to See Nearly 5X More MQLs & Appointment Requests From Facebook Ads

Financial Services Company | Paid Social Media Case Study

About Annuity Association

Annuity Association is a leading provider of independent annuity recommendations for protected income, safe growth, and other benefits in retirement. With over 10,000 people retiring every day, Annuity understands how important it is to make sure every person has a sound retirement plan.

From the safe accumulation of assets to guaranteed income streams, long-term care planning, and more, the Annuity Association team helps solve the financial needs of retirees now and for the future.

The Goal

The Annuity Association team wanted to increase appointment volume to lower CPL without compromising lead quality for people signing up for retirement annuity planning. They also wanted to increase the average case size (invested amount) of leads.

The Challenge:

The financial services industry is highly competitive, and the advertising environment for annuities on Facebook is highly saturated. The high competition and inability to track age-based demographics due to Meta’s financial services special category made the goal a challenging one for the HawkSEM team.

The Results

595%

Increase in MQLs

82%

Decrease in cost per MQL

450%

Increase in appointments scheduled

The Solution

Rather than optimizing solely for appointment volume, we built a qualification-first strategy designed to identify higher-intent prospects before they reached the scheduling stage.

While many competitors were driving users directly to appointment schedulers, we used Meta’s Lead Gen infrastructure and more intentional messaging to create additional qualification points, helping improve lead quality while working within Meta’s restrictions for financial services advertisers.

Used product-specific messaging to pre-qualify interest We shifted creative away from broad retirement messaging and focused on specific annuity products, investment amounts, and financial strategies. By speaking directly to users already familiar with annuities or actively considering retirement income solutions, the creative itself became the first layer of qualification. This allowed users to self-select based on their level of awareness and interest. Rather than relying on restricted demographic targeting, we used messaging to naturally attract prospects who were more likely to understand the product and have a genuine interest in exploring an annuity.

Built qualification into the lead-generation experience We leveraged Meta Lead Gen Forms to introduce additional qualification steps before a prospect could move further down the funnel. Forms were designed to capture more information about each lead while incorporating SMS verification to validate phone numbers. Requiring users to verify their phone number added friction intentionally. Instead of optimizing for the highest possible form completion rate, we prioritized signals of genuine intent and created a stronger pool of leads for the sales team to follow up with.

Used geographic signals to prioritize higher-value opportunities With Meta’s restrictions limiting traditional demographic and audience targeting for financial services, we leaned more heavily on geographic performance data. We prioritized states where the client had historically generated higher-investment case sizes, while also identifying cities with strong concentrations of retirees and higher household incomes. This allowed us to focus budget on geographic markets that demonstrated stronger potential for both lead volume and investment value without relying on restricted age-based targeting.

The Impact

The success of the Meta Ads strategy gave the Annuity Association team greater confidence in paid social as a scalable channel for generating high-quality opportunities.

As lead volume increased, the client expanded its advisor team to ensure it could effectively manage and follow up with the additional demand. The results also reinforced the team’s belief that Meta represented a significant growth opportunity when paired with the right targeting, messaging, and qualification strategy.

Building on this momentum, Annuity Association expanded its paid social investment beyond Meta, adding LinkedIn Ads and TikTok Ads to increase brand awareness and reach prospective customers across multiple channels.

At the same time, the team continued investing in its highest-converting channels, including paid search and Meta ads, creating a more diversified paid media strategy while maintaining focus on the channels driving the strongest results.