Full-Service Marketing for SPPF

Background

Marketing Strategy

Content Strategy

Website Support

SPPF is a property investment company with an innovative approach to long-term property investing. Their main investment focus is high-yielding residential and commercial UK property assets.

The SPPF team approached us looking for help to generate more leads and grow their business. There was a legitimacy issue that needed to be addressed that they had struggled to iron out previously.

The first requirement would first involve a branding overhaul to establish credibility and an integral storefront online. The second requirement would be to deliver an effective lead generation strategy to get more customers (investors) on their books.

Challenges

Trust is a big factor when people are investing money.
The way their existing marketing was presented lacked the professionalism and cohesion needed to portray a message of trustworthiness and integrity.

SPPF had been conducting their own cold calling and email marketing efforts, but the emails contained multiple domain names from different email addresses, which caused an element of distrust amongst prospective customers. This consequently led to low open and reply rates.

On the back of having multiple different websites based in different parts of the world, we suggested that SPPF kept the focus on just the one website based in the UK. There were, however, a lot of rules around marketing an unregulated investment in the UK, which would pose a challenge when writing the website content.

They had been driving traffic to their website via Google Ads, but were seeing very poor ROI and continuous issues with advertising as Google had cracked down on non-FCA regulated advertisements.

We had planned to embark on a Facebook Ads campaign to generate investor leads, however, we knew we would also run into issues and restrictions when creating these campaigns, and would not be able to use our usual advanced targeting strategies to maximise the ads’ deliverability. This would force us to continually look into different ways of adhering to Facebook’s strict advertising policies to still generate meaningful leads.

Marketing this type of business could be a restrictive task as we had to continually adhere to certain legislation, and this would only serve to be more challenging as the business grew.

Therefore…

A clever, creative style of marketing would be required to market the business and generate leads.

Solution

The first step with any full-service marketing programme is strategy.

We implemented and redesigned the main SPPF website in line with all branding and tidied up content to ensure there was one clearly defined website that would satisfy the many legal requirements and projected a unified story for their target market.

We set up highly advanced and automated lead forms and a slick calendar booking system on contact pages and footers with HTML autoresponders to cater for any incoming enquiries on the website. This would feed into advanced mailing lists and funnels we would later activate.

Their ranking for key search terms was poor, so in an effort to increase their online visibility we optimised their website using on-page SEO best practices. We also supplemented this with local SEO in the form of a fully optimised Google Business Profile with FAQs, news and updates. The goal of this would be to ensure SPPF could be found easily by prospects searching via Google and to increase the number of reviews to generate strong social proof.

We would create highly engaging and visual video and image content to build brand equity and to support the ambient social media strategy across LinkedIn, Instagram, Facebook and Google Business Profile.

As a large percentage of investors had been previously generated by partnering with Independent Financial Advisors, it made sense to us to focus on this persona. This still would be a difficult challenge as a lot of these IFA’s are only able to sell and promote their own products to investors.

By creating a LinkedIn profile for a key SPPF employee, we were able to build a professional profile and company page to provide the legitimacy and credibility to conduct our sales outreach strategy and give a face to the company’s offering.

From a lead generation perspective, we created 2 scalable automated email ecosystems.

One of these ecosystems catered to nurtured prospects (Independent Financial Advisors) that we gathered by connecting on LinkedIn. These emails were crafted in a highly personalised way, containing problem, benefit and solution themes designed to build trust and educate prospects into becoming ‘sales ready’ by replying to the emails or booking a call with a sales representative.

A key strategy for obtaining IFAs would be to tap into these networks to find investors who were willing to invest in SPPF’s fund.

In Addition…

The second ecosystem used Facebook Ads as a traffic source advertising a free brochure in order to generate leads. These contacts followed a similar route whereby they were educated and nurtured until their trust level was primed for a call with an SPPF representative.

We designed two specially-created landing pages to send this traffic to. These landing pages targeted Persona 1: Independent Financial Advisors and Persona 2: Investors. Both landing pages were designed in a way to illustrate all the key benefits of working or investing with SPPF with a lead magnet to download a brochure and in doing so capture their contact information.

The success of the campaign would be comprised of the following:

40% down to the quality of the data
40% down to the quality of the content
20% down to the creative processes

Results

In Conclusion…

A big priority for SPPF was to achieve 1st ranking position for the keyword ‘SPPF’. They had previously never been able to achieve this. After the website was redesigned and optimised, we soon helped them achieve this milestone.

In addition to the number one position…

We built a collection of key citations to strangthen SPPF’s online visibilty, which led to a substantial increase in enquiries, calls and reviews to their Google Business Profile.

SPPF saw fantastic engagement on various social media platforms – with followers and enquiries increasing month on month. The library of content that was created was highly engaging and visual, which attracted the attention of investors and IFAs.

After embarking on an intense LinkedIn Lead Generation strategy, we received a great response rate and acceptance rate to our initial messages. These were strong conversation openers with many contacts wanting to learn more or arrange a call. We then passed these sales-ready contacts onto the SPPF sales team. We took the LinkedIn connection level from 0 to 500+ highly targeted connections within the first 12 months.

Our email communications received impressive open (30%) and click rates (10%) after taking all vital steps to maximise email deliverability and land in prospects' primary inboxes.

The level of positive responses was enough to keep the sppf team busy!

These contacts had gone through several points of communication to prime their knowledge and trust in the company, so the team was starting with warmer contacts than usual.

Our new landing pages were created to emphasise all of the unique selling points of partnering and investing with SPPF and had clear CTAs, which helped drive several calendar appointments.

The challenges of running a successful Facebook Ads campaign in this industry were overcome, resulting in hundreds of brochure downloads at a cost per click of just 25p. By split testing these ads with various video, image and carousel assets, we were able to figure out which ads resonated best with our target audience.

With a successful Facebook Ads campaign came an exponential increase in engagement and followers on the Facebook page, which helped generate more trust and legitimacy for the SPPF brand.

Overall…

Even though there were many challenges to marketing the SPPF product due to the ongoing changes and restrictions in legislation and regulations, the client was very satisfied with the level of leads received. This campaign helped put SPPF on the map within the property investment market and proved to be an effective stepping stone for additional marketing efforts.