The Company

Summit Wealth & Retirement Partners is a full-service wealth management firm located in the very affluent San Francisco suburb of Danville. They’ve got about half a billion in assets under management, so they’re not the biggest guys out there but they’re by no means small. They work with all sorts of folks from retired CEOs, professional sports players and various families that have done well for themselves over the years.

The Challenge

When they approached us, they had already identified that their current site was doing nothing for them. 99% of their new business was coming from referrals. They had been using one of the “canned” financial services web marketing companies out there, but found time and time again that their content was just fell flat and did nothing to tell their story in a way that was meaningful (or conversion inducing). Their content bored them and they’re a bunch of ivy league finance guys.

They had also identified a niche market in working with women going through a major financial change. Sometimes that was divorce. Sometimes that was losing their husband. That was women going through career changes and more.

How We Got There

Create Content for Their Audience, Not Finance People

As always, we started off with a series of detailed buyer personas – really digging into what their ideal client looked like. We had enough pre-written content for this project that we knew the SEO-side was going to be relatively straightforward, at least to the point where we could get some early wins. Our immediate priority was simply indentifying a tone and voice that would resonate with their ideal client and then completely rewriting their existing core content to get there.

Conversion Rate Optimization

Our second priority was to help them increase their conversion rate. We helped really zero in on why their customers chose them and then wrote fresh content that hammered that home without being an in-your-face sales pitch. They had an extremely strong close rate. We simply had to get folks in to meet with them.

They agreed to offer a fairly detailed financial plan at no cost to the consumer. If the potential client was happy with what they saw, they could hire SWRP to implement the plan, look for another firm that might be a better fit or go the DIY route. We then built a series of calls-to-action around this to funnel the user into an appointment request. We added a number of custom event tracking features to allow us to A/B test these different CTAs and see what was driving click-through.

Paid Social

We were pretty confident that the social piece would be a slam dunk. The other firms in the area that were doing socials ads were using incredibly dry ad creative – exactly the opposite of what we were working towards on the content-side. We created a series of both top-of-funnel and middle-of-funnel landing pages and launched an arsenal of social ads through Facebook – testing multiple variants. We’ve been averaging 9X the industry average CTR and a much stronger conversion rate.

Adwords Campaigns

On the Adwords side, CPC was expensive but the numbers added up based on our forecasts. We’ve continuously tested a number of different ad formats and ad copy.

We were initially very happy with our CTR, but our conversion rate left a lot to be desired. That was odd considering the vast conversion improvements we had seen organically and through our paid social work.

We ended implementing a couple of different call-tracking features to measure offline conversions – initially Google’s platform and more recently, the CallRail platform. There it was. We instantly our conversion rates jump multiple percentage points. Our Google Ads were much more likely to convert with a phone call. We’re testing an assumption now that the demographic from Adwords is older than that of our social ads. It’ll be interesting to see if that’s the direct correlation – older folks are more likely to pick up the phone.