NEW CENTURY FINANCIAL CASE STUDY

THE GOAL

Get more Clients

THE STRAIGHT LINE THINKING

Product – financial cash flow solutions

Strategy – disrupt antiquated market

THE RESULTS

Increased lead volume 5x all while reducing acquisition costs

New Century Financial is a factoring company, offering invoice-based, receivables-based, and other types of factoring services. Essentially, NCF purchases receivables at a slight discount, and extends immediate funding to businesses in return. This is a good way for businesses to offload risk and gain access to quick working capital. New Century Financial was founded in 1985 and has been serving customers for over 25 years. They serve a variety of industries and are known for their exceptional customer service and no hassle, 24 hour streamlined approval process.

THE CHALLENGE

New Century Financial came to us in an almost exasperated state, sick and tired of having been promised quick turnarounds and PPC wizardly by a number of PPC agencies, only to have been let down time and time again. They needed a partner who truly understand their space and that has a substantial amount of experience in the cutthroat financial services sector broadly, and in the factoring business more specifically. In other words, they needed a partner who not only talked the talk, but also walked the walk. What we inherited from their last agency was nothing short of a disaster.

CPA was exorbitantly and prohibitively high at over $1000 per lead

lead quality was poor, engagement and time on site were suboptimal, best practices like extensions weren’t adequately deployed.

The landing page was dated, and perhaps most importantly, proper tracking and proper utilization of data were entirely missing.

In a nutshell, NCF looked the part of an account that has been tossed around, dealt with by too many cooks, and taken for granted. Because of the substantial length of time having done digital marketing, we knew there was a lot of data in the system, all it needed was the intelligence to utilize and act on the data appropriately.

Solution

What got NCF towards the right path, and then eventually to rousing success, is a concerted, comprehensive plan of action. Towards the beginning we erred towards the side of over communicating so that we could absorb as quickly as possible their pain points, customer personas, product offering, conversion funnel, creative assets, and overall messaging. It was during this phase that we realized the necessity of a concurrent, multi-pronged approach.

We began with good, old fashioned campaign reorganization, optimization, enhancement, and intelligent segmentation. Campaigns were restructured according to our best practices, waste was cut out, winners pressed harder, and we applied proper upward and downward bid adjustments to segments based on their relative success. We got rid of certain cost sinks altogether by looking at their history, conversion rate, and CPA.

In tandem with this, we created a new landing page that dramatically improved the conversion rate and cut the CPA. These initial pushes were enough to get NCF humming along at a very healthy positive ROI, but we did not rest on our laurels. We tagged every digital interaction with NCF with our proprietary set of parameters so that useful data would be properly stored and reported back to us.

With keyword level data, we were able to go a step deeper and not only optimize based on leads, but on the very keywords that generated final deals. To those who understand the link between leads and final sales/deals, this is really the holy grail. We did not stop there.

On top of properly tagging web leads, NCF also wanted HawkSEM to implement intelligent call tracking so that we would be able to open up that entire other channel, trace everything back to the original keyword, and find out how the sales team might be able to do better.

On top of all this, we substantially expanded their negative keyword list to get our keyword schema down to an even more efficient core.

RESULTS

In the world of digital marketing, and in the space of financial services, the work is never really done, but we are happy to report that after the aforementioned actions were put into place, HawkSEM was able to help NCF undergo a radical transformation that situates them firmly in a place of success.

Instead of teetering dangerously between profitability and loss, NCF now has a very efficient engine in place where it is able to bring in leads at a healthy cost, and realize positive ROI. Due to deftness with which HawkSEM worked, the expertise and professionalism that we exhibited throughout the process, and the results that we ultimately drove, NCF continues to expand the scope of work that they’ve entrusted to HawkSEM. Not only does NCF trust us to manage their PPC, SEO, landing pages, and reporting and tracking, but they’ve also brought us on as a partner in projects wholly unrelated to factoring.

When we first brought onboard to help NCF engineer the turnaround they sorely needed, CPA was at over $1000; today, that number is closer to $200. In addition, the conversion rate went from 2.5% to nearly 10% in the recent month. We are now able to bring in more than 5x the original monthly run rate of conversions, and nearly 50% more clicks per month, at about the same level of ad spend. The relationship continues to grow, and we continue to work closely with NCF to unlock even more value for them. In fact, we trade notes on underlying data almost daily and hop on weekly calls.