THE GOAL:
Generate more closed customers and repeat business to increase total billing revenue in the face of a flat budget and higher competition
THE CLIENT
A major company that is a resource for workplace safety, compliance, and HR, that provides online tax filing services for Form 2290, a required annual filing for owners of heavy commercial trucks or fleets.
THE CHALLENGE
As an IRS tax product, prices were the same no matter where someone chose to file, and seasonality for every competitor followed the same pattern. Making matters tougher, competition was tight and the company’s digital ad spend was relatively flat despite an increased YoY revenue goal. Statwax was brought in on paid search efforts and tasked with uncovering new areas of opportunity and deeper-level optimizations that could produce greater customer conversions and lead to more revenue, without increasing marketing budget.
THE STRATEGY
Knowing that ad spend was capped and competition was high, Statwax turned to customer data in order to build more precise target audiences. Data analysis on the demographics, location, and history of the company’s customers helped pinpoint geographical areas where ads were leading to customers at a better rate, as well as patterns in user behaviors that were common across customers. Pairing this analysis with search impression share data allowed the SEM team to see where the most opportunity was being missed. With lower budgets, many areas in the campaign were producing strong ROI but missing out on even more revenue by not spending enough, or keeping spend too low and letting competitors overtake the share-of-voice. Bid adjustments at a ZIP code level helped ads push past the competition and maximize visibility solely in the areas of most opportunity, conserving budget.
Statwax also identified a strong need for dayparting in the account. Specific hours of workdays were far higher in generating customers quickly after ad engagement, tied to the fact that the company’s customers were likely doing tax filings while at work when they had a large block of time. Platforms don’t allow individual hour bidding by default, so Statwax took matters into their own hands. Data analysis combined conversion and revenue performance with specific ad initiatives that were capping out due to spending restrictions and mapped it across each hour of each day. Heatmapping was able to highlight the best days and times with the most missed potential customers – areas where revenue was literally being left on the table because spend was being used elsewhere at other times. Custom scripts were written to overcome Google’s time-of-day bid limitations, automating bid adjustments for every hour. The result was avoiding overspending at non-performing times, allowing bids to be amplified in the hours that mattered most and overtake competition without requiring more marketing budget.
Finally, Statwax worked with the client to better understand the nuances of their audience and of the tax filing process. Through the research of their past customer journeys, Statwax was able to map out a series of remarketing audiences based on where prospective customers and returning customers might be in the funnel. Mixing audience exclusions, remarketing campaigns, bid adjustments based on how many prior years users had been customers, and dynamic display content helped engage the most valuable users first while trickling the budget down from there. The previously untapped customer journey and lifetime-value audience segmenting now allowed the highest potential for ROI to be the first priority in budget usage.
THE TAKEAWAY
Sometimes you really can do more with less. Statwax understands that marketing budgets aren’t infinite, and spending more isn’t always the best solution. When a competitor is throwing more spend and higher bids into the mix, we dive into the prospect journey and customer data to find the hidden potential not yet tapped into. This client was able to squeeze out new performance from existing solutions, without breaking the bank to do so.
Sometimes all it takes is a new perspective. If you’re interested in hearing ours, let’s start a conversation.
