First Foundation: The One That Got so Much Press, We Had to Stop Advertising

The Challenge

In 2015, First Foundation was approached by a client looking for layoff insurance. Their brokers had never even heard of this kind of protection, but quickly realized its potential to be of real help to Albertans struggling with the recession. The company asked Bluetrain to create a special campaign that would:

• Raise awareness about this brand-new product
• Drive relevant traffic to online assets
• Generate leads for First Foundation in the form of insurance application submissions

Our Solution

Bluetrain proposed a multi-channel campaign that would seek to inform the public about this new insurance product, educate them about how it worked, and inspire people to learn more or submit an application.

How Did We Do It?

First, we built both a product page and campaign landing page so that visitors could quickly learn more about layoff insurance and easily contact First Foundation. As the campaign wore on, we continued A/B testing the landing page and used the incoming data to make small but powerful changes that would help increase form submissions.

Paid Search traffic to First Foundation’s layoff insurance landing page now has a 15.6% conversion rate (compared to a Google AdWords industry average of just 2.7%).

Next, we encouraged First Foundation to create an educational blog post about how layoff insurance could bring peace of mind to Albertans worried about losing their jobs.

We then converted this blog post into a press release and submitted to Alberta media; the press release was promptly picked up by several news outlets including CTV, the CBC, the Edmonton Journal, Calgary Herald, and Corus Radio.

From there, we created Facebook and Google ad campaigns that piggybacked off the success of the press release and helped spread the word about layoff insurance.

Finally, we ensured brand alignment by describing the product in similar terms across channels and by consolidating traffic to a single landing page.

Our Impact

In the end, this campaign generated 977 leads over a three-month campaign! In fact, First Foundation received so much interest in response to campaign efforts that we were forced to temporarily turn off advertising for staff to catch-up.

Now that it is running again though, this campaign continues to bring in new leads every day.