Most B2B business owners, marketers and sales executives will tell you they can never have too many quality leads in the pipeline. But for some companies, their lead gen appetites are voracious. Whether it be increasingly high quotas to meet or a lack of customer retention, a consistent influx of fresh prospects is a marketing must.

This then begs the question: how can a company significantly increase their lead levels, in a relatively short amount of time, while still keeping their cost per lead affordable?

That was the dilemma facing Precision Marketing Group and Greystack Digital.

A regional chain of fitness centers needed a reliable source of cost-effective leads, due to the inherent customer turnover in their industry. Their marketing agency Greystack Digital Marketing turned to Google and Bing's pay-per-click (PPC) search engine advertising for such a lead source.

Greystack did begin to see the leads coming in, but they were not completely satisfied with the consistency, nor the cost of the leads they were getting on behalf of the fitness chain. Plus, they grew frustrated with the “black box” approach of the PPC agency with whom they were working. They paid the agency a certain amount every month, but it remained unclear how much of that fee was actually allocated to buying ads and how much went to the agency.

Because of all these reasons, they decided to pursue using a different PPC agency. Enter PMG.

High Hopes

When our team took over the health club chain’s existing PPC campaigns in February 2016, our PPC specialist saw a lot of opportunities for improved results. We significantly restructured the campaigns and redistributed the marketing dollars. With these changes, they were hopeful for an immediate boost in results in the first 30 to 60 days.

That didn’t happen.

Slow and Steady

Still, the account team continued its optimization process and saw small, incremental improvements each month. They knew they were on the right track, even though the results weren’t exactly an overnight success.

However, those small, incremental gains began to add up. Over a six-month period, the cumulative results were excellent:

• Ad response rates increased by 40%, attracting better, more targeted traffic.
• Free trial lead levels were boosted by an impressive 167%.
• The cost per lead decreased by 15%.

Picking Up Speed

After a year of continued optimization, the results were even more dramatic.

• We successfully increased free trial leads by 383%.
• We reduced the cost per lead by 49%.

In effect, they were getting almost 4 times the amount of leads, while cutting their cost per lead in half!

Hidden Benefit: What Do Prospects Really Want?

There was one other big-time benefit gained from implementing this pay-per-click program using our PPC specialist's methodology: discovering the client’s most potent value proposition.

We began testing different value props and messaging to determine which was most valuable to the fitness center’s ideal prospects.

• Convenient locations?
• Variety of exercise choices?
• Cost per month?
• Clean facilities?
• New equipment?
• Personal training assistance?

The results were statistically definitive… and a little surprising. It wasn’t price, or convenient locations, or the variety of workout options. All these are important, of course. But the most attractive value proposition dealt with the overall experience for the user: newer equipment, clean facilities, not too crowded, helpful staff, etc.

The fitness chain no longer had to guess at what was most important to their best prospects. They now know the most compelling, attractive message to use, including the precise wording, and they can extend it across all of their marketing efforts.

Will Pay-Per-Click Advertising Work for You? 

PPC advertising is not recommended for every company. For example, if your Average Lifetime Customer Value is modest (under $100), the cost per click may make it difficult to produce a positive ROI.

However, for many companies, PPC provides an affordable and reliable source of high-quality, targeted leads.

Not sure about your company? Contact us to set up a free assessment and we’ll take a look at your situation and run some projections. Don’t worry… we shoot straight around here!