Paid Social Audience Restructure Doubled MQLs and Reduced CPL by 30%

The Challenge

Our client Renofi is a home renovation loan company. They originally partnered with Greenlane for SEO support but quickly found they were also in need of paid advertising improvements as they worked to land marketing qualified leads (MQLs) and opportunities from their paid social campaigns.

After exploring the renovation loan company’s previous campaigns on Facebook and Instagram, it was clear they were wasting spend on the wrong homeowners by relying too heavily on the social platforms themselves to determine the loan company’s audience instead of leveraging their own strategic targeting. For example, the company leaned way too much on Facebook’s Interest options and didn’t have proper exclusions in the campaign.

The Goal

Our goal was to drive higher-converting leads and reduce wasted spending on unqualified homeowners by overhauling the audiences our client was using across their Facebook and Instagram paid advertising campaigns. 

The Strategy

The Greenlane team began by refining campaigns across Facebook and Instagram to rely less on platform-curated lists and more on lists created from the company’s own first-party data. We requested the client put together email lists of their 4-5-star customers — the company’s ideal homeowners — which we used to create lookalike targets in our advertising campaigns. We also took lists of the 1-2-star homeowners — their unwanted leads — and created a lookalike for paid campaign exclusions.

Our team went to market with three campaigns, each targeting audiences aligning to the sales funnel, including Top of Funnel (TOFU), Middle of Funnel (MOFU), and Bottom of Funnel (BOFU). Budgets were apportioned to each based on lead volume and lead quality. Each campaign also contained unique creative tailored to the call-to-action we were asking of each audience based on their buyer’s stage, such as “Learn More” for TOFU, “Get a Quote” for BOFU, etc. 

Greenlane’s Paid Media team also employed ad creative testing to understand which imagery best resonated with the new audiences. They also tested different types of paid content, such as before-and-after videos, testimonials, etc., to determine which performed best.

The Results

All the strategic revisions and testing paid off. The client enjoyed a +113% lift in leads and a +137% increase in opportunities, while cost per lead and cost per opportunity decreased -30% each over a 3-month span. The percentage of MQLs increased by +14%, while unwanted leads decreased by -35%. The client was able to raise their Paid Media budget from $20K a month to $60K to grow their lead volume further.

As a result of their partnership with Greenlane Search Marketing, paid social became one of the strongest drivers of qualified sales leads for the business.

“Greenlane was a great partner for us and worked as an extension of our small team rather than an agency. They were quick to define our audience challenge on Meta and offer up solutions. We iterated often and turned our social channel into a much stronger source of quality leads.”

Lauren McFalls Perez
Head Of Marketing
RenoFi