Plancorp
Plancorp, based in St. Louis, is a nationwide financial services firm specializing in wealth management and financial planning for corporations, individuals, and families. The company’s primary goal is to simplify complex financial situations and bring their clients peace of mind for the future.
Plancorp has been a Lynton client for four years.
The Challenge
In late 2022, Plancorp asked Lynton to help improve lead quality and top-of-the-funnel contacts. Plancorp wanted to focus on its main persona — high-net-worth clients — but was having trouble finding and reaching the market. Leaders were also looking to expand and establish the Plancorp brand and services outside of just the St. Louis area.
Plancorp’s marketing team needed support in putting a strategy in place to attract these clients, and they weren’t sure how to best spend their marketing budget to support this mission.
The Solutions
Lynton acted as a strategic partner in educating Plancorp on what we could do to meet lead gen goals — chatbot, forms, emails, website updates, content — and then implemented and executed those plans as follows:
Content Creation
Our strategists and account managers compiled a comprehensive content calendar and pillar page strategy that included all-encompassing keyword research. By producing keyword-optimized content, we boosted blog views by 2% YoY when projecting 2023 versus 2022.
Our content strategy also improved website sessions by 26%, making Plancorp a destination for financial news and information. Content included:
- Newsletters
- Pillar pages
- Email nurtures
- Promotional emails
- Blogs
- Updated webpage copy
Customer Tools
In addition to content, we created helpful tools for clients looking to get a better understanding of their financial situation.
Financial Analysis
Before the financial analysis was updated, Plancorp didn’t have good insight into who their customers were or what financial shape they were in. We helped clear it up with smart content and tracking. In two minutes, clients answer 10 questions about themselves and are then emailed tailored personalized financial recommendations.
How it works:
Every question segments Plancorp’s audience into different email nurtures depending on how they answer. The CTA for each question is tracked and allots each participant points based on how they answer dependent on how it matches Plancorp’s ideal customer profile. Using these points, the participants are then placed in either top-of-funnel, middle-of-funnel, or bottom-of-funnel email nurtures contingent on “how ready” they are to speak to someone from Plancorp’s team. Read more about the nurtures below.
ESPP Calculator
In alignment with a pillar page on Employee Stock Purchase Plans, we created, designed, developed, and implemented an ESPP Calculator that clients could use to understand the performance of their stock. When clients use the calculator, that gives Plancorp’s wealth managers an in for a later conversation with that client.
Resource Gating
Lastly, all of Plancorp’s premium content was previously ungated, meaning they weren’t capturing valuable data from any downloads. Lynton worked to build gated landing pages with forms to capture the information Plancorp is looking for which indicates a marketing qualified lead (MQL).
Email nurtures
We mentioned email nurtures under Content Creation, but they deserve a separate section because of their multifaceted nature and sheer size.
Using the points collected from the financial analysis, each person is placed in a corresponding funnel bucket: top, middle, or bottom. From here, they are served content related to their financial situation.
For example, someone at the top of the funnel (TOF) will receive emails promoting resources they could try on their own, like a cash flow worksheet, estate planning memo, goal planning worksheet, and more. As they download assets, they are allotted points again, and once they meet a certain number of points, they are moved to the middle of the funnel (MOF) nurture which may be more resources like pillar pages or white papers.
Each email is delayed by seven days, with the last email prompting them to subscribe to Plancorp’s blogs or schedule a call to speak with someone.
“With Plancorp’s ICP being high value and niche, it felt important to take advantage of the plethora of content at our disposal and to meet people where they are in their buyer’s journey. Additionally, we’re able to qualify these people through the analysis which helped us create dedicated personalized nurtures resulting in an improved number of leads created and conversion rate.”
- Sara Sprenger, Director of Agency Services at Lynton
Website efforts
In addition to everything listed above, we gave the website copy a facelift and added a few new pages. It was important that we created clear user journeys throughout the site for a rich, seamless experience.
- New pages: We added a more robust About page that details exactly what and who you can expect to work with at Plancorp. We also created an Our History page about Plancorp’s 40 years in the industry, establishing the company as a trusted thought leader.
- Homepage updates: Plancorp requested an overhaul of its homepage content and design. From the jump, we made it clear who Plancorp’s ideal clients are in the hero image animation. This was an intentional decision meant to illustrate the types of financial situations Plancorp’s clients are in and how Plancorp can help.
In the middle of the page, we added typical scenarios everyone faces where finances could change and provided helpful resources and calls to action. Further down, we listed Plancorp’s accolades using trust symbols, and we link to where you can meet the Plancorp team.
- Pillar pages: We created five new pillar pages, with a sixth in production: Estate planning, equity compensation, Invest by Age series, employee stock purchase plans, wealth management, retirement planning, and financial planning (in production). These pillar pages are the main hub for finding everything you could want to know about these topics. They can also be downloaded as PDFs.
- Overall navigation updates: Plancorp’s site navigation got a significant upgrade and is now divided along service lines and into personal and business solutions. Each dropdown also briefly describes what you can expect to find on those pages.
We also created improved placement of links, clearer conversion points and updated overall site structure to make crawlability better.
The Results
More detailed statistics reveal:
- 5% increase in website sessions
- 8% increase in contacts
- 91% increase in leads
- 2% increase in blog views
- 56% increase in SQLs (2022 total vs Jan-June 2023)
- On track to increase organic search traffic by 16% in 2023
Hear from the Team
“We wanted to find ways to reduce friction and help visitors seamlessly navigate their way around the website while also increasing the reach of new visitors to the Plancorp website. We focused on highlighting keywords that were paramount to Plancorp’s core offering and explored ancillary opportunities for targeting their niche demographic.”
— Cristina Cristea, Digital Marketing Strategist
