Ultima Cleaning Academy Google / Facebook Ads

BACKGROUND

The Ultima Cleaning Academy is the training arm of the Ultima Environmental Group, which has been providing general and specialist cleaning services for the last 20 years. Experts in their field with experience handling trauma scenes, biohazard removal and pest control, they were well equipped to make areas as safe and clean as possible as COVID-19 spread across the country. 

Traditionally the training they offered had always been face-to-face, but in spring/summer 2020 they decided to start providing e-learning courses. With everyone stuck at home and businesses raring to reopen, Ultima Cleaning Academy created four COVID-19 related e-learning courses to help cleaners get the country ready for the end of the lockdown.

THE CHALLENGE

What Ultima Cleaning Academy was offering was highly attractive. Independent cleaners had been forced out of work due to the pandemic and wanted to get back to business as soon as possible. Ultima Cleaning Academy was offering them a certification showing that they were capable of cleaning to a COVID-19 standard, at a time when businesses were desperate to reopen in a safe way. 

The challenge was getting this message out. Ultima Cleaning Academy was a brand new arm of Ultima Environmental Group and had no major brand to build from, how could they get people interested in something they had never heard of? This was something that needed to be learnt fast. The e-learning course was useful now – no one knew how long COVID-19 would last for or what would be put in place to combat it.

Ultima Cleaning Academy came to us for quick, effective lead generation.

THE WORK

For this project, one of the channels we decided to use was Facebook advertising. The targeting tool that Facebook has is sophisticated, so we were confident we could reach the right people without spending a fortune on showing ads to people they weren’t relevant to. 

We knew from market research that independent cleaners would often promote their services on Facebook, so our audience was there, we just had to get the messaging right. 

We decided to adopt a ‘test and learn’ approach, which came in 2 phases. 

1. Given that the course was at the lower end of the scale when compared with other online courses (£45 per course), and assuming that there was a sense of urgency for these COVID-19 courses (in the context of the global pandemic), we first decided to allocate a small part of the budget to test whether we would get conversions by directly taking users to key landing pages on the website. Here they would get an in-depth description of what the courses are about and what certificate of professional development (CPD) they would receive. 
2. Even though the amount of traffic and time spent on the site indicated interest from the audience, we struggled to get purchases even with a retargeting campaign. Based on what we had learnt we decided to add extra steps to the funnel, giving us more opportunity to educate and nurture the audience into making an informed purchase decision. We did this by implementing a variety of tactics, e.g. lead gen campaign, Facebook messenger ads, and offering a demo of the course to users. 

With no brand or track record to rely on, this two-pronged approach allowed us to generate buzz on a small budget and within a very limited time frame of a couple of months.

THE RESULTS

Within 2 months we were able to generate over 120 leads. The cost per lead began at around £10 per lead, but after some tweaking and campaign optimisations, we were able to get it down to £6 over time. 

In terms of conversions, follow up calls to leads revealed that the price of the e-learning course was slightly out of reach for cleaners who had been out of work for several months. However, this gave the client valuable market insight that they would not have otherwise gained and enabled them to pivot their marketing strategy, which ultimately led to sign ups from bigger businesses. More info on that project can be found here.