“You’ve got to do more with less.” If you’re running a small business or marketing agency, this isn’t some theoretical paradox or Goblin King riddle—this is actual advice you’ll hear on how to grow your revenue. The fastest way to scale up is to take on more clients and customers. But somehow you have to do that without taking on more expenses or sacrificing on the work you’re already delivering.
Sounds impossible, right?
Maybe not. Conversion Intelligence is helping to level the playing field for small business owners and savvy marketers alike. You might not have the same resources as those bigger, enterprise companies you’re competing with—but you do have access to AI and machine learning tools that can help you deliver higher-converting campaigns with fewer resources.
This is something that Mats Moy, digital marketing consultant and founder of Moy Consulting, knows from experience. For years, Mats has been helping roofing companies generate online leads and become authorities in their local markets. But as a one-man show, he has had to spend a lot of his time juggling multiple different clients and projects, while also being responsible for the marketing of his own business.
Around November 2019 though, everything changed for Mats. (Dun, dun, dunnn.) Since then, he has seen his business grow five times larger with the help of Unbounce landing pages and our AI-powered optimization tool, Smart Traffic. And this level of success is something Mats says he’s still coming to terms with…
I haven’t heard too many people speak about this feeling. Have you seen the meme of Elon Musk watching his spaceship launch? Just to see your baby take off and become what you hoped it would become. That’s the feeling that you get. Personally, it’s been life-changing.
This is how Mats is feeling right about now.
So how did Mats do it? Keep reading to hear more about the lead gen method he used to grow his consultancy, and how he’s been able to keep his operation lean and high-converting with tools like Unbounce.
Lots of Opportunities, But Limited Resources
A single conversion on a roofing landing page can drive anywhere between $6,000 and $10,000 in revenue. That’s a lot of shingles—er, I mean singles!
When Mats first started his marketing consulting business, he immediately saw the benefit of getting his clients to use landing pages. A typical roof replacement will normally run somewhere between $6,000 and $10,000, which makes every PPC ad click incredibly valuable.
Traffic-wise, this is not an industry where you’ll see thousands of hits a day. Roofing clicks are very expensive, right? Your typical paid ads campaign from Google might be like 10 cents, 30 cents, or maybe a dollar for a click. But in roofing, some [in this industry] are paying like 60 bucks or more per click. So it’s quite pricey.
By creating landing pages that targeted specific local keywords (e.g., “affordable roofing in Calgary”), Mats was able to help his clients earn more revenue from their ad spends and dominate their local markets. It was a super-effective strategy—he could test and optimize much faster on landing pages and get higher conversion rates compared to competitors who were still sending traffic to their websites.
But there was a (metaphorical) ceiling that blocked how much Mats could grow this business. He simply couldn’t be everywhere at once, and hiring loads more people wasn’t an option for him at this stage.
What were my resources like? Well, I was by myself. A one-man show doing absolutely everything. And I think I was juggling maybe like four or five clients at a time doing all the work using landing pages. You gotta move really quickly when you’re first starting out.
Mats knew that something had to change if he was ever going to expand his business and grow his revenue. So, he started brainstorming some of the different ways he could generate leads to attract more roofing clients—without giving him a ton of extra work on the side.
Late last year, I set a goal for myself. ‘We’re going to reach X amount of customers.’ And step by step, I set out to make it happen. And it was just bull at that stage, it was just an idea. But then you start working on it and over time you slowly start to see … Whoa, this is working.
A Lead Generation Training Course Powered by Smart Traffic
To attract even more clients, Mats decided to turn his agency model on its head and start teaching roofers how to market for themselves. He figured that if they could use a mouse, they could build a landing page in Unbounce.
I needed a tool that would be easy not just for myself, but also for my clients to use. Because when it comes to roofers with computers… it just scares them. Like someone could barely copy and paste or turn on a computer, but here we are creating Unbounce landing pages!
And because Mats was a part of the Unbounce Partner Program, he was able to offer any roofers who took his training program a 20% discount off their first three months using Unbounce. In exchange, he would earn 20% recurring revenue for every referral.
I launched [the training program] back in November, and that’s been my sole focus. It shows them how to set everything up for their marketing, and that includes using Unbounce landing pages.
It seemed like a super-smart approach for someone as busy as Mats. Rather than get bogged down in the day-to-day management of each new client, he would be able to set them up with the skills, strategies, and tools to be successful online (and then offer his services to help them keep scaling). Like the old adage says, “Give a roofer a fish, and you feed them for a day. But give a roofer a crash course in landing pages, and you feed them for life.”
To get the word about his new training program, Mats decided to use a series of Facebook Ads that would specifically target roofers. He used long-form storytelling to get their attention, and then routed them to a registration landing page to sign up for more details.
Mats uses long-form storytelling in his Facebook ads to get the attention of roofers.
But Mats wasn’t sending roofers to any old landing page—he was sending them to a landing page powered by Unbounce Smart Traffic. This was key because Mats was still juggling a lot of responsibilities in his role. He had to run the training course and manage his clients, so he didn’t want to be running small-scale A/B tests on his lunch break, too.
What’s the Smart Traffic advantage? Using machine learning, Smart Traffic boosts your conversion rates by automagically sending visitors to the landing page variant that’s most relevant. These split-second routing decisions are more accurate than a human-powered test and eliminate most of the manual hassles—and long wait times—marketers associate with traditional testing. Learn more about how Smart Traffic works here.
Instead, Mats whipped up a bunch of different variants to test new headlines and imagery on the page. Then, he used the Unbounce machine learning algorithm to automatically route visitors to the version they were most likely to convert on. No muss, no fuss.
Some of the different headlines Mats is testing with Smart Traffic. For more testing ideas, check out how to create landing page variants and optimize with AI.
I just leave it up to the AI to do its thing. If you’re really busy, or you don’t have that optimization experience, Smart Traffic will be your new best friend. It’s using machine learning to help you get those better results.
Blowing the Roof Off With 5x Growth in 6 Months
Six months later, Mats has gone from having 15 clients to over 80. And while this type of breakneck growth might have been unsustainable for him before, the lead gen training course has proven to be a reliable source of new leads for his business. He’s netting an 8% conversion rate on the registration landing page and seeing a conversion lift of over 35% with the help of Smart Traffic. (In other words, he’d be getting less than a 6% conversion rate if he were running these variants in a traditional A/B test.)
This has given Mats the confidence to grow his team and bring on four other marketers to assist with Moy Consulting. (Which means he can also finally put away his juggling gloves, because this is no longer a one-man show.)
Clients are happy with the program. I have people raving about it. So they’re seeing leads. It’s unlike anything that’s out there. And that’s the best part, knowing that your success comes from the success of your clients. That’s awesome.
Mats is seeing a conversion lift of over 35% (!!!) with Smart Traffic.
Speaking of client success, Mats is also using Smart Traffic on his clients’ roofing pages too. In some cases, he’s been able to bring the cost-per-lead down from $160 to as low as $40, and get conversion rates as high as 19% (with an incredible 70% lift from Smart Traffic). That’s well above the 2.6% median for the home improvement industry, according to the 2020 Conversion Benchmark Report.
You can hear it in my voice… I’m pretty damn proud of some of the metrics that we’ve been able to gather and get from these campaigns.
For marketers still on the fence about Smart Traffic, Mats says he gets it. These are still early days for machine learning and some folks will still need more time to shift their mindsets and come around to this new way of optimizing and testing. But as a busy marketer with a lot on his plate, Mats has found a ton of value in his new AI sidekick. Smart Traffic is augmenting his natural marketing skills and running in the background to optimize his campaigns with a speed and accuracy humans can’t match.
Smart traffic has given me back so much time on a day-to-day basis, instead of having to constantly split test different landing pages. Especially since I had so many other tasks on my plate. AI is absolutely the way of the future.
Read more: unbounce.com