OC Capital is a mortgage company in Southern California. Surrounded by literally thousands of competitors, we were able to help OC Capital rank at the top of Google and, ultimately, eliminated its reliance on LowerMyBills.com as its primary source of leads.
Requirements
OC Capital had one requirement from their website: Generate mortgage leads for its loan officers. Although straight and to the point, that requirement was anything but simple. OC Capital was located in Southern California, the heart of the booming mortgage industry and surrounded by literally thousands of competitors, many of them vying for top spots on Google.
At the time they came to us, OC Capital was purchasing sales leads from a popular lead generation website at a cost of around $60 per lead. With each lead being sold to at least 2-3 other mortgage companies, there was enormous competition for each prospect’s business. OC Capital wanted to generate its own, unique leads that wouldn’t be sold to any other companies, so they came to us to get it done.
Due Diligence
Our due diligence revealed enormous competition for any mortgage-related keywords in the search engines and pay-per-click advertisers were seeing prices of about $10 per click at the time. Although competition was stiff, we thought there may be an opening for a smaller company in some of the long tail keywords that the bigger companies weren’t targeting as heavily. Long tail keywords are more specific and generally cost less to target and tend to convert better than the high-volume keywords.
The Process
We built a user-friendly, informational website with professionally written page copy to maximize conversions. We built pages around the keywords we identified as having light enough competition that the small company could afford to rank well for them, but also had enough traffic that they would still generate enough conversions for the company to feed its sales force.
The Results
Prior to this project, OC Capital was feeding its small, 10-person sales force about three new, purchased leads per day, at an average cost of $180 per person, per day; $1,800 total. After two months, we were able to generate an average of 17 leads per day from the new website; almost two per salesperson. After six months, that number was up to 39 new leads per day, four per salesperson at an average cost per lead of $37, representing a 38% decrease in average cost per lead. The closing ratio went up dramatically as well due to the fact that these leads were unique to OC Capital and not being sold to any other companies. The average, company-wide, closing ratio increased by 9.1% from 11.7% to 20.8%. Overall, the campaign reduced customer acquisition costs by $335 per customer.
