How a Brisbane local business got 4X more leads in six months (and how you can too)

Out and About Healthcare has spent the last 14 years building a mobility aids business with an excellent range of quality products and a sterling reputation.

From humble beginnings with a small store located in Caboolture, Queensland, they have seen their family business grow rapidly and now deliver high-quality mobility products all across Australia.

Within six months of engaging Excite Media, they:

• Got 3.8x the lead volume from their advertising campaigns
• Slashed their cost per lead by 74%
• Pivoted and thrived during a global pandemic

In this article, I’ll also share the background behind one of my favourite emails that I’ve ever received from a client

“We have too many enquiries!”

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It all started when a seemingly trivial website update created a crisis

The team at Out and About Healthcare contacted us in late 2019 after they noticed a significant drop in traffic and enquiries from their website after their current agency advised them on making changes to their site structure.

This had a huge negative impact on their organic rankings in popular search engines, and led to their website traffic dropping significantly, and therefore their inbound leads also took a nosedive

The first thing we did was reverse the changes made to the website domain and site structure, to get things back to normal as quickly as possible.

You’ll notice in the same chart (above) the organic traffic bounced back immediately after we resolved the problem in late November, and the organic traffic trend has been slowly growing, and surpassing previous traffic levels, into 2020.

The quick decision that turned things around ⏳

After the initial shock of losing most of their organic traffic, they acted quickly and set up their own Google Advertising campaign in order to replace the visitors and leads that had been lost.

This helped them to get by during this period of lost sales. However, as you will appreciate if you’ve ever tried to run your own Google Ads campaign, it’s extremely difficult to generate a positive return-on-investment on your advertising spend if you’re not an experienced Google Ads specialist.

Long gone are the days where you can read a quick guide on “How to run effective Google Ads” and start generating sales for your business. Nowadays, if you don’t have a highly experienced paid advertising specialist managing your ads, you could be leaving thousands of dollars on the table.

When it comes to innovative mobility aids and quality electric mobility scooters, they are the leaders in Australia! But they quickly understood that running and maintaining profitable Google Advertising campaigns is a job best performed by a reputable team of digital advertising experts.

So, as you can imagine, we were thrilled when they reached out and contacted our team at Excite Media!

Stage one—understanding the business and uncovering opportunities

We kicked off this exciting project with a strategy meeting with Phil and Alana from Out and About Healthcare, to fully understand their pain points and uncover how we can help them grow their leads and sales.

The brief was simple.

• Fix the urgent SEO issues and recover the organic traffic they had been losing.
• Grow their organic traffic to new levels.
• Take over the paid advertising campaigns and optimise them.
• Grow their online leads and sales.
• Launch custom landing pages to improve the lead generation performance from their paid advertising.
• Redesign their website to improve customer experience and generate more enquiries.

Now that we were armed with the information we needed, we were able to start turning things around for the business.

We always start our process by learning as much as we can about the products and services offered by our clients. This helps us uncover features and benefits that can sometimes not seem obvious to our clients.

The most obvious discovery was that the mobility scooters offered by our client were more expensive than their competitors, but for good reason; they are in a league of their own when it comes to the quality and reliability of their products.

The problem was, it took a lot of digging through the website and conversations with their team before a customer would realise this was the case. Unfortunately, the full truth about their products wasn’t easily apparent on their website and advertising materials, so we knew we had some work to do to make sure the true value of their products was made obvious to their audience.

Stage two—auditing and optimising the paid advertising campaigns

When we onboard new clients, we always audit their existing pay-per-click advertising campaigns and we’ll usually save them money immediately, just by stopping money being spent in the wrong places across the account.

Sounds crazy simple, huh.

That’s exactly what happened with the Google Advertising campaigns that Out and About Healthcare were running.

We checked the Google Ads account and found that the client was spending a whopping $6.41 per click and $322 per lead.

We immediately knew there were plenty of optimisations we could make to SAVE them a fortune on their advertising.

Our Google Ads expert got to work looking for common issues that we tend to find across all new accounts we take over.

The most common issues we find on Google Ad accounts

• Geo-targeting too broadly or targeting users outside of the respective service areas.
• Lost opportunities due to budget restrictions or low keyword bids across the account.
• Bidding on expensive but poor-performing keywords.
• Incorrect usage of broad, phrase and exact match keyword types.
• Account not optimised across different device types (desktop, tablet and mobile).
• Account not optimised for “time of day” and “day of the week” bidding to save budget.
• No testing performed between different bidding strategies (such as CPA-bidding).
• Not pausing low performing ads once enough data has been collected.
• No split test experiments performed to test and measure different ad copy and creative.
• Lack of “negative keywords” set to reduce spend on similar but irrelevant keyword searches.
• Conversion tracking not setup correctly and incorrectly reporting results.
• Not utilising ad extensions to improve ad visibility.

Despite the majority of our changes being made during our client’s quieter Christmas period, we were still able to drive a large amount of traffic to their website and reduce their costs down to $2.79 per click and $112 per conversion within 2 months of making our optimisations.

That’s a HUGE win for us and for them!

Here’s a snapshot of the improvements…

“The numbers look good, but what does it actually mean for their business?”

Well, for the cost they were paying for a single lead, they now get THREE leads on average instead.

Imagine what it would mean for your business if you were spending the same amount of money on advertising but you were suddenly getting three times the number of enquiries

As a thought experiment, let’s say our client has a Sales conversion rate of 20%, meaning out of every 10 leads they receive, they are able to convert two of them into a sale.

Previously, that would have meant they were spending at least $1,610 in advertising cost before they made a sale (five leads required for one sale, therefore 5 x $322 = $1,610). This is known as your CPA (“cost per acquisition”).

But now, the cost per acquisition has dropped to just $560 because of the optimisations made on the Google Ad account (5 x $112 = $560).

That’s a cost saving of $1,050 per new customer!

The best part? You now have an additional $1,050 to put back into advertising, which at the current rate will pay for 1.8 new customers!

It becomes a virtuous circle and your business grows very quickly

Oh and don’t forget, that’s just to acquire a new customer. The lifetime value of your customers will be much more than the initial sale if you sell additional products and services to them in the future.

For our client, the value of their customers is much more than the initial purchase. These customers come back and upgrade their scooters regularly, not to mention the additional revenue from add-on’s and accessories!

Our Google Ads expert still has many more optimisations to make on the account, but so far he’s managed to completely turn around the results of the live campaigns.

From too few leads to too many leads!

After re-launching the Google campaigns at the beginning of 2020, we received this email from our client (he he!)

Stage three—launching new re-targeting campaigns

One of the lowest hanging fruit in online advertising is to run retargeting campaigns.

On average, you need to have 7-12 touchpoints with your potential customers before they make an enquiry or a purchase. That’s 7-12 interactions with your brand, your ads, your website, your content, your messaging and so on.

A retargeting campaign (also known as a remarketing campaign) is a method of creating more touchpoints with your potential customers and continuing to reach the 98% of visitors who don’t convert into a lead or sale right away.

It works by running tailored ads to visitors even after they leave your website, by tracking them after their first visit. You can do this through Google and popular social media platforms such as Facebook, Instagram and LinkedIn.

This means you can stay front of mind with your audience if they don’t make a purchase or enquiry on their first visit.

How we generated even more leads with Facebook Ads

Prior to working with Excite Media, our client had only scratched the surface on the full potential of social media marketing.

So, we kicked things off with a re-targeting campaign, designed to target potential customers who had visited their website before but decided not to enquire at the time.

At the same time we were running this campaign, we were also feeding more and more data points into Facebook about their customers, which helps the Facebook AI better understand the target market.

Doing this can be a GOLDMINE  because with all this new data you feed back to Facebook, they can now more accurately profile and predict the people on their platform who are most likely to become one of your customers.

This means you can spend your precious advertising budget targeting the right people, based on tons of sophisticated data points, instead of hoping to reach your customer with some basic demographic information about their age and location.

So, we developed some new creative and got to work

The results were AMAZING  

Our ads achieved a click-through rate (CTR) of 5.62% and we drove over 1,400 users to the website at a low cost of 53 cents per click.

The cost per lead came in ridiculously low at just $18.24 per lead

Stage four—designing new direct-response landing pages to further improve the conversion rate

A custom landing page can have profound effects on your conversion rate.

When you’re running online advertising campaigns with a specific goal in mind, it can be super beneficial to create a custom experience on your website for those visitors to be sent to.

Think about this customer journey…

You do a Google search for “mobility scooters”

You see a compelling ad all about mobility scooters so you decide to click.

You land on the homepage of a mobility aids website. That’s good, right?

Well, not exactly.

You see, the homepage doesn’t just have product information for mobility scooters…

…it also promotes wheelchairs, beds, chairs and other accessories!

You now have to spend your time wading through the irrelevant content to find the mobility scooters, even though that’s exactly what you started your journey on Google searching for.

After 5 seconds, you give up and leave. Yep, just 5 seconds.

That’s roughly how much time you have to capture the attention of your visitors and convince them that they’ve come to the right place.

What if, instead of landing on the homepage, they landed on a page that ONLY contained information about mobility scooters.

It would mean the page was consistent with their Google search, and with the messaging on the ad that they clicked on.

Seems simple enough, right?

Well, it is simple!

And yet the effect it can have on your conversion rate is INCREDIBLE.

So, that’s exactly what we recommended for Out and About Healthcare.

Getting even better results from direct-response landing pages

At the beginning of April 2020, we launched two new direct-response landing pages for the Mobility Scooters products and Electric Wheelchair products.

Mobility Scooter Landing Page (click image to enlarge)

Wheelchair Landing Page (click image to enlarge)

Here are the combined results of the two campaigns…

Yet another HUGE improvement was made by sending visitors to a landing page instead of the main website. The cost per lead dropped by nearly HALF (42.29%).

As a reminder, the original cost per lead when we first audited the Google Ads account was $322. So overall, we’ve improved the cost per conversion by 284%.

In other words, the client now gets 3.8 leads (almost QUADRUPLE the leads) for the same price they were paying for ONE lead before we started.

Stage five—a complete redesign of the existing website

We now set our sights on possibly the MOST exciting project for Out and About Healthcare, the website.

Something we regularly recommend to new clients who need to see results quickly is a direct-response landing page, just like the one we designed in the previous stage.

This allows them to start generating leads and making sales while the larger website project happens in the background, as that takes more time to deliver.

This is what happened in this particular case too. We actually started working on the website around the same time we started working on the new landing page.

From wireframe to design

Most web designers will re-design a website and do a fantastic job of making it look pretty. However, they neglect strategy and conversion principles.

If your website looks great but doesn’t hit the mark with your audience, say goodbye to a return on your investment!

We always start with strategy when we design websites, and then we turn our ideas into a wireframe before having our team of expert marketing experts critique it and make final changes.

Only then, do we move from wireframes to design.

Drag the slider below to see the transition from wireframe to design.

Key changes we made with the new website design

There’s a lot of thought and consideration that goes into a website, and ultimately the market will decide if we hit the nail on the head.

Your website doesn’t “finish” the moment it launches. Quite the opposite, actually. Once you launch and start sending visitors to your website, you can monitor your audience, gather insights and adapt to their needs to improve your conversion rates even more.

In saying that, to give our clients the best chance of achieving a high success rate with their new website, every decision we make is customer-centric.

Below, I’ll break down some of the key changes we made and why:

• We added NDIS and MyAgedCare logos to the header—one of the most common questions their potential customers have is whether they are a registered NDIS provider, yet this wasn’t obvious on the original website, so we made that very clear on the new one.
• We added the unique selling proposition (USP) above the fold—the previous homepage jumped straight into showing me the full product range. This is tempting to do as a business owner, you want them to see and buy your products so you give them the most prominence on the homepage. But consider that your visitors don’t even know who you are yet and you’re already pitching them your products! It’s kind of like turning up to a blind date and immediately saying “your place or mine?” So, we redesigned the banner area to instead display relevant messaging to the audience and give them the opportunity to “get to know” the business before we introduce the products further down the page.
• More authentic imagery—the original website was using quite a lot of stock photography, which has been proven to lower conversions over real images of your customers, team and product range. Fortunately, the client has lots of authentic imagery and videos of real customers, so this allowed us to give the site a much more authentic feel.
• New video banner—we saw a great opportunity to subtly “show off” the high-quality scooters to potential customers by using a video background in the homepage banner instead of a static image. This is a great way to capture attention from your prospects and show them your products in situ. You’ve heard the adage “a picture is worth a thousand words”, well a high-quality video is worth a million!
• Call-to-action placement—we’ve been much more intentional about placing call-to-action buttons strategically throughout the pages. You’d be amazed at how many people won’t proceed to the next step of the customer journey, simply because you haven’t asked them to!
• Reviews and happy customer evidence—one thing we uncovered in our research is that Out and About Healthcare have exceptional customer service, which has led to them getting an amazing reputation in the form of online reviews. However, unless you Googled their name, you’d never know all the amazing things their customers have said about them. So, we decided to make a big deal throughout their pages about the 200+ 5-star reviews they have, along with video recorded stories from real happy customers, and the written testimonials. If you’ve got it, flaunt it!
• Additional credibility builders—if you assume every person who visits your website doesn’t trust your business, it forces you to look at your website through a completely different lens. In this case, we noticed that there weren’t any elements on the page that demonstrated that our client is trustworthy or credible. This led us to include logos from trusted partners prominently on the homepage. These partners are well known and recognisable organisations in the industry, so it gives a lot of credibility to the business.
• New panel for the Australian team—when you’re looking to make a sizable investment into a product or service, you want to be sure of the company you’re dealing with. In the mobility scooter industry, there are a lot of companies based overseas who make it look like they are Australian-based, so we wanted to make it very clear that the team at Out and About Healthcare are based here in Australia by showing a team photo. This demonstrates to potential customers that they can always chat to a real person, right here in Australia, for after-sales enquiries or additional support.
• Custom-designed for mobile devices—during our initial research, we discovered that over 60% of visitors to the website were using tablet and mobile devices, yet this version of the website hadn’t been reviewed with the same level of consideration that the desktop version had. So, we made sure to re-think the entire mobile experience when we came up with the brand new website design.

We can’t wait to see what kind of results we’re able to get compared to the existing website experience!

Unplanned Stage—the COVID-19 disruption

As you’re aware, the coronavirus impacted a lot of business all over the world. For Out and About Healthcare it was no exception.

You could say the market was no longer “out and about”.

The daily lead volume for Out and About Healthcare declined by 80%+ in a matter of weeks.

Their potential customers were no longer comfortable about visiting the showroom or requesting an in-person product demonstration, due to the fears of the fast-spreading virus.

This was especially daunting for this particular demographic, who are generally in the high-risk category of COVID-19, due to their age.

On top of that, lockdown restrictions meant that most people wouldn’t be able to leave their home anyway. So, it made sense to put their plans to buy a new mobility scooter on hold until the situation got back to normal.

This was bad news for our client, who saw their sales drop very quickly.

The pivot that turned it all around

As soon as the pandemic hit, our team at Excite Media got to work on a response plan.

We developed a COVID-19 resource to help all of our clients create an action plan for not just surviving through the pandemic, but THRIVING through the pandemic.

We called it the Thrival Plan.

Using some of the ideas from our Thrival Plan, we spoke with the team at Out and About Healthcare and made the following key changes to the digital strategy.

• We all agreed that the company needed to offer a virtual product demonstration service to their customers, which meant their prospects no longer had to visit the physical showroom in order to check out the range and ask questions.
• They created a video for their potential customers to explain the process of the virtual demos, and encouraged them to book.
• We quickly created a separate booking page on the website to show potential customers how simple it is to book a virtual demo and led them through the booking system.
• We updated all the Google and Facebook ads with new language around the virtual demonstrations and drove traffic to the new page.
• We updated all the call-to-action buttons across the website to “Book a virtual demo” instead of “Book a test drive”.
• We added a sitewide notice prominently at the top of the website to explain that virtual demonstrations were now available to all customers.
• The Out and About Healthcare sales team were briefed to pivot to the new offer of booking virtual product demonstrations live with their prospects.

After this quick pivot, our client saw a jump in their lead volume and the virtual demonstrations were a hit with their audience.

Shortly after these changes were made, they were even able to rehire one of their sales staff.

The team at Out and About Healthcare knew that they had to make big changes to their digital strategy if they were to survive through the pandemic, and that’s exactly what they did!

They are an amazing example of a company who adapted to meet their customers needs and weren’t afraid to get their hands dirty.

Leads and sales now appear to be back to normality for Out and About Healthcare as we come out of the other side of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Thanks to their quick-thinking and execution, they are once again helping their customers get “out and about!”

Key takeaways

• Make big structural website and domain changes with extreme caution. The wrong change can see you disappear from Google overnight. Always seek advice from a trusted SEO agency.
• Some of your biggest selling points may not seem like a big deal to you, but they could be a HUGE deal to your customers (e.g. local Australian team, registered NDIS provider, 200+ 5-star reviews, superior quality products, after-sales support etc). Talk to your best salespeople about the common objections they get from your prospects, and address them throughout your website. You’ll see amazing results!
• It’s very easy to overpay for clicks on advertising platforms, like Google and Facebook. An expert paid media specialist is worth their salt and they’ll save you thousands of dollars by optimising your campaigns the right way from the beginning.
• Never stop optimising and improving your customer journey and sales process. It took multiple improvements and optimisations of the customer experience to achieve an overall improvement of 284% Imagine if we had stopped after the first 10% improvement!
• A direct-response landing page can have an immediate impact on the volume of leads you can generate through your digital marketing campaigns. Don’t underestimate the power of a well crafted landing page
• Staying customer focused and having the humility to pivot your business to meet their needs is a sure fire way of coming out on top (even during a global pandemic). I’ve got little doubt that if our client hadn’t pivoted their sales and marketing strategy to meet the needs of their customers during COVID-19, they’d no longer be in business.

If you would like Excite Media to help grow your business, just like this one, chat to us today to get the ball rolling.