Case study
How We Helped MidwestOne Bank Drive 456% More Website Visits and a Stronger Leads Pipeline
MidWestOne Bank (now Nicolet Bankshares) is an Iowa City, Iowa-based community bank serving customers across Iowa, Minnesota, and Wisconsin, with home lending as a core part of its consumer banking business — providing construction loans, HELOCs (home equity lines of credit), and first-time homebuyer financing.
In a market crowded with regional and national lenders, MidWestOne Bank needed to grow its home lending offering — driving more qualified website visits and leads for their new Home & Construction Loan offering pages.
Our campaigns resulted in an estimated 456% increase in website visits, thousands of qualified visits, and a lead pipeline that outperformed other company offerings.
Project scope:
Paid social strategy, ad creative multivariate testing, new product launch, multi-market ad strategy
Platforms:
Facebook Ads
Markets
Iowa, Minnesota, Wisconsin
The Before
The After
Drove 7x More Clicks Compared to Previous Campaigns
MidWestOne needed more qualified visits and leads in a competitive market and against other offerings. We tested creative, headlines, placements, and markets against each other, then scaled what worked.
Business Challenges
Results
- Tighter marketing budgets than national and regional competitors.
- Home & Construction competed internally against the bank's higher-volume HELOC program for that budget.
- Limited creative, messaging, and ad-copy testing in prior campaigns— leaving little benchmark data on what actually converted.leaving little benchmark data on what actually converted.
- No performance history for the newer Home & Construction Loan offering.
- Grew website visits to MidWestOne's home loan and first-time homebuyer pages by 456%
- Home & Construction campaigns outperformed concurrent programs with more traffic, clicks, and higher landing-page opt-in rates
- 4.74% click-through rates (CTR) on Home & Construction — over 7x higher than concurrent campaigns
- Ads resulted in 70% landing-page completion rate
Kind words
From client
"My offers sell with ease & I finally feel aligned with my business goals."
— Emily, Health Coach
The Before
The After
Drove 7x More Clicks Compared to Previous Campaigns
Business Objectives
MidWestOne needed more qualified visits and leads in a competitive market and against other offerings. We tested creative, headlines, placements, and markets against each other, then scaled what worked.
Drove 7x More Qualified Visits Compared to Previous Campaigns
Business Objectives
MidWestOne needed more qualified visits and leads in a competitive market and against other offerings. We tested creative, headlines, placements, and markets against each other, then scaled what worked.
Business Challenges
Results
- Tighter marketing budgets than national and regional competitors.
- Home & Construction competed internally against the bank's higher-volume HELOC program for that budget.
- Limited creative, messaging, and ad-copy testing in prior campaigns— leaving little benchmark data on what actually converted.leaving little benchmark data on what actually converted.
- No performance history for the newer Home & Construction Loan offering.
- Grew website visits to MidWestOne's home loan and first-time homebuyer pages by 456%
- Home & Construction campaigns outperformed concurrent programs with more traffic, clicks, and higher landing-page opt-in rates
- 4.74% click-through rates (CTR) on Home & Construction — over 7x higher than concurrent campaigns
- Ads resulted in 70% landing-page completion rate
Our Approach
Audited existing campaigns to find why traffic wasn’t converting into qualified, high-intent visits.
Tested multiple creative, headline, and audience to identify best converting ads and audience combinations.
Developed a go-to-market ad strategy by market — using performance data and audience insights from each region to build campaigns relevant to Iowa, Minnesota, and Wisconsin.
Shifted budget toward what proved out, driving down cost-per-click while scaling qualified traffic
Winning Ads
- Emotional. Simple. Clean.
We tested hundreds of ad variations against each other to find what actually resulted in high-intent website visits and leads. Some examples included:
- H1 — Lot and Construction Loans Made Simple
- H2 — New Home Dreams? Make Them Come True
- H3 — Simply Better Financing for Lot and Construction Loans / Simply Better Construction or Renovation Financing
- H4 — Make Home Dreams a Reality
Emotional, simplicity, and minimalist ad creatives beat more complex variations tested.