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Consulting Project Promotion | PLCL
How to increase sales for a consulting business tenfold using specialized content, paid search, and targeted advertising?
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PROJECT WORK
The project we implemented was a typical startup. A team of lawyers and consultants with five years of experience as hired employees decided to launch their own enterprise providing professional services in the field of "Company Registration and Servicing in the EU."
Challenges
At the very beginning of cooperation with Proline Consulting, challenges arose that needed to be overcome with a limited budget (compared to competitors):
Strategy
Considering the existing limitations, before starting specific actions for setting up and promoting advertising campaigns, we conducted a detailed analysis of the enterprise's strengths and weaknesses, competitors, and main consumer segments. This helped us better understand:
Pain Points of Potential Clients
We thoroughly interviewed the project team about past experience, modeled the steps each buyer goes through before reaching the break-even point. Special attention was paid to the questions the client asks at each stage.
Additionally, we worked through the semantics of competitors and thematic phrases, divided the needs of potential clients into groups. We also distributed all search queries used by clients into service categories they lead to and purchase decision-making stages (which key phrases clients use at each of them).
We received special insights about client pain points, their fears, and key questions that influence their decision on how to complete the task from thematic forums and public groups where topics of opening businesses in Europe and solving various business problems were discussed. This allowed us to formulate a map of motives and behavioral models of potential Proline Consulting clients.
Composing the Customer Journey
We visualized the Customer Journey for each segment using, in particular, Lean Manufacturing tools – the Value Stream Map (VSM) and the House of Quality (QFD), and integrated marketing initiatives into the overall flow of the sales process.
House of Quality (QFD) - provided clear requirements for the entire team:
- what the creatives should be like; - what the advertising messages should answer; - the timing of each advertising campaign's activities for an individual client based on the time of the sales funnel stage the person is at before moving to the next step; - what set of functions and characteristics the offers and services should possess.
Customer Journey and Value Stream Map
Fully visualized the sequence of actions and promotion measures. Thanks to this, we prioritized and made a plan of tasks for launching advertising campaigns and converting "visitors" into revenue.
Priorities
Given the budget constraints, we paid special attention to specific directions, building the order of initiatives in such a way that the first and main efforts were directed to those areas where the maximum return could be obtained with minimal effort and cost. In particular, the following aspects were ordered by profitability level:
Implementation of Initiatives
After the first test launches of advertising campaigns, we formulated and subsequently successfully implemented a number of measures for client acquisition and sales generation using content and digital tools.
Step 1. Selling Content
For each segment and the main tasks of potential clients, in collaboration with the client's team, we prepared materials and educational articles on key "risk and problem" issues to increase trust in the company and strengthen the need to solve hidden problems related to company registration and servicing in the European Union.
The content was structured in such a way as to not just answer the questions, but also to sow even more fears about starting a business in the EU. It presents a description of risks and potential problems so that the reader not only understands their danger but is also convinced that achieving their goal is only accessible with Proline Consulting.
Step 2. Channels
Since the risks and solutions we described in the articles were not obvious to clients, direct acquisition of potential customers of online services through these queries was not effective. The understanding of "new problems that need to be solved" arose only as a result of working with the prepared materials.
Therefore, at the first stage, it was necessary to attract a cold audience using standard and generally accepted queries and creatives, such as "business registration in the EU," "opening a company in Germany," "creating a firm in the UK," etc. And then, on the website landing pages, use conversion elements to redirect them to the articles and webinars we needed.
For this, we used the following channels: - Paid search for general, targeted, and near-target queries (everything related to business in Europe); - Social media ads with a direct and clear message "registration, opening, launching a business in the EU"; - SEO optimization of pages for general search queries.
Performance Optimization of Advertising Campaigns
Since the click for cold and remarketing audiences was quite expensive, it was important for us to use the limited promotion budget as effectively as possible. According to our calculations, considering the market volume, we could potentially cover only a 25% share for direct search queries (based on average CTR and traffic frequency) and only 7% of display traffic, both remarketing and cold audiences.
Investments in content, the website, and funnel automation were quite significant, so it was important for us to immediately attract the most relevant audience, excluding clients who, according to the market evaluation matrix of competitors and offers, would not be a priority for Proline Consulting in terms of revenue and the ideal target portrait.
And our task was to implement the main principle of "Lean Manufacturing": focus on those actions and process elements that yield the maximum result, and completely exclude what has no value.
Targeting
Analyzing the target audiences, we defined the key targeting:
Understanding what the client "portrait" looks like allowed us to:
Effectiveness of Advertising Materials (Creatives and Banners)
Additionally, to increase the effectiveness of the creatives themselves, we created each banner variant in three color schemes with different elements. As a result, the total CTR increased by 80%, while users interacted with each ad differently depending on the placement.
To eliminate the irritating factor and unintentional clicks, for each stage of cascading remarketing, we reduced the number of impressions, finding out experimentally at what number of impressions we get the maximum number of clicks. As a result, the CPC indicator was reduced to 56%.
The days of ad display also had a huge impact. According to our calculations, the most active remarketing engagement, both in creatives and content, target clients (specifically target clients) made on Wednesday, Thursday, and Saturday. For the cold audience, these indicators were different: Monday, Tuesday.
It was decided to concentrate 80% of the budget on these days for each of the categories. And thereby cover 100% of clients on the days of greatest perception, at a lower cost.
Results
+480%
Return on promotion investment.
2X
Reduction in deal closing time by more than two times.
+320 %
Growth in closed deals from 20 to 65 per month through paid channels.
-420 %
Reduction in the cost of attracting a new client.