How TMGM Boosted New Account Conversions by 30% with AdRoll
⚙️ AdRoll features and services leveraged: Managed Services, Retargeting, and Brand Awareness.
Businesses sometimes have the sense that marketing departments spend a lot of money but can’t always prove results. And when marketing departments use traditional marketing tactics, this sentiment can be right.
TMGM wanted to build something that defied traditional marketing strategies and changed people’s perspectives by offering a transparent, trackable system. To do that, we needed a new platform.
TMGM was born out of the frustrations the founders experienced while trading. Solving the roadblocks and pain points of the industry led them to develop a leading trading platform. Today, TMGM offers over 12,000 trading products in seven asset classes, including forex, shares, indices, and futures, for a total trading volume of over $220 billion. We engage in continuous research and development to empower our clients with an exceptional trading environment.
I came to TMGM to restructure and rebuild their marketing team to best achieve the results the TMGM board wanted. Our 25-person team covers various marketing roles, including SEO, social media, and programmatic advertising. I continue adding pieces to create a more comprehensive marketing puzzle.
Transcending the Limitations of Traditional Marketing
TMGM’s marketing strategy used to be completely different, focusing on traditional branding and promotion. My vision was that marketing should be much more of a sales-driven tool, which required a change in perspective. I specialize in digital marketing, and my new team and I wanted to build something where our marketing activities would be much more trackable, so marketers and the rest of the business can see how marketing efforts lead to results. We wanted the numbers to do the talking.
One of our focuses is programmatic advertising, handled by my colleague, Kristin Zheng. And as part of the marketing rebuild, we wanted to engage a programmatic platform to help us overcome the limitations of our media outreach, particularly contacting media vendors. There are 24 hours a day, and even if we don’t eat or sleep, our team can only connect with so many vendors in that time frame. With a programmatic platform, that wouldn’t be a limitation anymore.
As members of the financial industry, we are also bound by specific regulations. We are based in Australia and regulated by the Australian Securities and Investment Commission, which controls—among other things—how we engage in marketing activities. Apart from looking for a platform with robust capabilities, we also needed a platform that would ensure compliance.
We came to AdRoll through what almost felt like a referral; this is a small industry, and we knew some of our competitors used the platform. When we did our own research, we found AdRoll to be the self-driven programmatic platform we needed. Their approach to data and tracking suited us perfectly, and I was convinced AdRoll would give marketing the numbers we needed to talk to the rest of the organization.
The platform UI was simple and easy to understand, and AdRoll offered various integrations to make the entire process more seamless. Because the platform is so flexible, it’s easy for people to move things around to focus on what they want to see.
Forecasting Lets Us Start With Our End KPI in Mind
Our use case consists of two parts:
- Branding: Using display ads to introduce us to people who haven’t engaged with our brand before.
- Retargeting: Continually connecting with people who have already visited us, using cookies to keep our ads in front of them—wherever they are.
Once we purchased AdRoll in 2021, our account manager, Sophia Luu, helped introduce us to the platform. She explained how to set up our campaigns, establish the proper tracking parameters, and what the numbers represent. Since then, we have performed a lot of optimization based on her feedback. We always want to try new ideas around the design and content of creative assets, but we engage AdRoll in these discussions, too. AdRoll wants us to be successful because that makes them successful, too. Our relationship is a win-win.
Two of our primary metrics are our click-through rate (CTR) and end-goal conversion. The ultimate goal of all the branding and retargeting ads, all the impressions, and all the click-throughs is that people open an account with TMGM. Since using AdRoll, those conversions have increased by 30%. And, just as we expected, the numbers spoke volumes. When the board saw these results, they began coming to marketing with greater needs, which is why we have started hiring people dedicated to specific regions, such as Southeast Asia and Europe.
Before using a programmatic platform, my team did their best and hoped for the best. If we launched a webinar, we tried to make it as attractive as possible, but we couldn’t predict the results because we didn’t have the data to forecast activity.
Now, we can make assumptions based on historical data: if we spend X amount of money to advertise on Y platforms, we will likely have Z result. We can use that information for more accurate forecasting and to calculate backward from our desired KPIs. If we know we have a certain period of time to achieve specific results, we can then break that down into detailed tasks. AdRoll is how digital marketing should work: Data enables the marketing team to understand their efforts and work more efficiently.
Collaboration and Expertise: The Human Side That AdRoll Delivers
We currently have two AdRoll users on the team, but there is a collaborative element to the platform and how it enables communication between teams. If something isn’t working, we can go into the platform to pinpoint the problem. Then, they can take those findings to our account manager, and we will work with our creative team to optimize the creative and placement.
Our success is largely due to the joint effort between TMGM and AdRoll to manage the campaigns. We rely heavily on AdRoll for their expertise and feedback, and they contact us when they see something we can do better. That positive relationship is one of the reasons we continue working with them.
AdRoll also acts as a mentorship vehicle, allowing my team to learn best practices and absorb new ideas. The traditional way of contacting media vendors is a slow way to buy ads, and figuring out everything by yourself is a slow way to learn. Having a mentor whose expertise we can draw upon fast-tracks that learning process.
AdRoll Helps Us Get Where We’re Going, Faster
As TMGM expands into new markets, AdRoll will save my marketing team a ton of time. If we were engaged in more traditional marketing, we would have to learn the nuances of various markets, contact local media vendors, and maybe even work with various agencies to negotiate deals in new markets—all of which would be slow and tedious. AdRoll knows us and our goals, so we can launch ad campaigns quicker and get a foothold in these new markets.
The numbers don’t lie. AdRoll allows the digital marketing team at TMGM to connect our activities to results, proving to everyone that our efforts positively impact the business.
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