Client Background
Our client has a landscaping business in Alberta, Canada and came to Hemlock Digital to explore digital marketing for their company. This business had no website and little experience running online advertising. They did have a local social media presence and had started to get some leads trickling in through their Facebook page.
The majority of their marketing initiatives were boots on the ground, word of mouth, and homeshow booth marketing.
Opportunity –
Put simply, the opportunity for this client was to build a simple, SEO optimized website that drives lead generation for them and then to begin experimenting with online advertising.
We started with Facebook & Instagram ads because they had a small audience on there and had some success with leads coming from Facebook.
Solution – Messenger Ads on Meta
The first thing we had to do was get a website launched. We whipped up an SEO optimized website for our client that had all of the necessary components to convert potential customers and analyze results.
Next, we began experimenting with Facebook advertising. Our team tested a number of different campaign types and creative, and the campaign that jumped out as highest performing was Messenger ads.
For those that don’t know, Messenger Ads are similar to Lead Form ads on Facebook, except when the user clicks on the call-to-action (CTA) on the FB ad, it opens a Messenger chat with the Facebook page instead of opening a Lead Form.
Messenger ads are very frictionless and simple to use.
We took things one step further and set up an automation so that when the inquiring customer clicked on the CTA, the Messenger chat would open up and they would have 3 preset messages to choose from when messaging the landscaping business or they could write a custom message. If the customer clicked a preset, we had instant replies come back to the customer and then our client would jump into the conversation from there shortly after.
Results
In our first season working together, we drove this landscaping company 258 Messenger leads at $5.33 per lead for a total ad spend of around $1400. For a relatively low investment, they had an exceptionally profitable year!
Our client had the highest revenue year on record, and directly attributes the growth to the investment in digital marketing they did. The majority of their business came straight from these Messenger ads that season.
It’s worth mentioning that Messenger ads may not work for every business, because some companies do not have the systems in place to actively respond and manage leads in their Facebook inbox.
Messenger ads worked so well for our client because they become very active on Facebook and would reply to all of their messages. For companies that can do this, Messenger ads are a major opportunity!
We are also seeing exceptional results for other clients running Facebook Lead Form campaigns, if that structure is a better fit for your business.
We continue to operate the digital marketing for this client, running online advertising and SEO initiatives. We’ll report back at the close of the season, but so far we are seeing very similar results running almost identical advertising campaigns. This year more SEO organic leads are coming in for our client which is great and adds another acquisition channel to fuel growth.
Looking to grow your business? Book a free audit.
If you are interested in trying some of these digital marketing strategies for your company, we would love to meet you. Book an initial consultation and we’ll perform a marketing audit on your business free of charge.