Social Media Marketing Success: How A Fine-Tuned Geo-Targeting Strategy Increased Quality Business Leads

Case Overview

A Toronto custom home building company was present on most social platforms but were not getting any business leads through their social media. They came to the Marketing Garage looking for help with increasing quality business leads and weeding out clients who were not a match with their business. They were looking to find fame without the spam of smaller projects. Sounds easier said than done. We quickly realized it requires the tactical geo-targeting of prospective clients instead of simply bombarding social platforms with posts. This is also the reason we didn’t go after Google search. To learn more about why social media was a better fit for this project, check out this article by Canadian Contactor about our process.

After popping the hood, we noticed a few issues. Their social profiles were not optimized and did not showcase their work well, and they didn’t have a social strategy in place to target potential customers and increase leads. After performing a total social revamp and introducing a fine-tuned geo-targeting strategy, this business saw:

The Problem

We had to ask ourselves a few questions to figure out why they weren’t attracting customers. What are they posting? Are the captions interesting? Are their profiles optimized? We noticed 3 areas for improvement with their social profiles:

1. Content on social was not captivating enough. Posts were personal family shots instead of projects.
2. Social bios were not specific enough and didn’t clearly describe the types of projects they work on. This lead to unqualified leads from people looking for help with smaller scale projects.   
3. Not actively seeking their target audience on social media. Instead they were posting content hoping that their target customers would find it. This is a problem since organic reach has been declining making Facebook a pay-to-play platform. Without money behind it, your posts will not reach the amount of people you want.

The Fix

To target this specific audience, we really had to get into the mind of their main target audience. What are their interests? Hobbies? Careers? This is how we created our fine-tuned geo-targeted audience. After diving into the business and learning about what makes them unique, we came up with 3 tactics to boost their performance and drive those quality leads:

• Conducted 11 point social media audit to ensure social profiles were properly optimized.
• Updated social biographies to better describe the business and communicate the types of projects they work on.
• Revamped organic social media content to feature pictures of their work with enticing captions that were interesting and informational. Each caption was carefully written to both intrigue the reader and give details on the actual build process and techniques used.
• Posts were accompanied by a relevant link to the company’s website to drive website traffic and help people along the conversion path.
• Expanded social media presence and created a Linkedin profile to drive fame from the platform.
• These changes increased followers by 280% and engagements by roughly 225%.

• Defined and created 2 different audiences using location and interest targeting on Facebook to promote content to. This was done to test different assumptions as to the type of people who would be interested in and have the means to build a custom home or whole-home renovation.  
• They also wanted to target architects who were looking for builders to execute their projects. Unlike a lot of builders, the owner is actually a licensed engineer, which plays a huge role in the quality of the homes built. A third audience was made on Facebook that included residential architects in the Toronto area.
• Website visits increased approximately 181% with proper content and targeting.

• Developed multiple propositions to use in ads for each audience. This allowed us to message test and determine what message our target audience best responded to.
• Supported ads with boosted content from Facebook. This not only reinforces the ad messages but also increases organic reach.
• Used architect focused ads in LinkedIn. This platform provided another opportunity to reach business professionals.