Riverbend Bank: $600,000, 240 Leads, Almost No Conversions

The campaign had no middle. Money went in at the top (radio, billboard) and the only measurable event was an account opening at the bottom, with nothing routed, scored, or owned in between.

• Undefined lead. "Form fill" was never tied to a qualification standard, so the bank cannot say whether 240 was a good number. Without a definition of a qualified business prospect, the figure measures curiosity.
• No routing or SLA. Leads landed in a CRM that surfaces only at opening. Nobody was accountable for a 24-hour follow-up, so response time was effectively infinite. Business owners who fill a form and hear nothing do not complain; they open somewhere else.
• Media with no linkage. Radio and billboard can build awareness, but at 70% of budget with no response capture, they consumed the money that should have created the measurable tier.
• Relationship managers outside the loop. Six RMs saying they never see leads is a process failure that no amount of spend can overcome.

The fix is structural: define a qualified lead, assign ownership with a response-time standard, instrument the path from first touch to funded account, and only then decide channel mix. Fixing creative on an unplumbed funnel would reproduce the same result with better-looking ads.

First, look at the economics honestly. 350 accounts × $1,850 first-year revenue = $647,500 - barely more than the $600,000 spend, and revenue is not margin. If the bank's contribution margin is 40%, year-one contribution is about $259,000, so the campaign only works on a multi-year lifetime value. State the LTV assumption explicitly; if average business checking tenure is five years, the math is defensible, and if it is eighteen months, 350 accounts at $600K is not.

Proposed allocation:

• $180K - existing base. The 3,100 tagged business owners are the cheapest accounts available. Email and RM outreach, sequenced.
• $150K - digital response. Paid search on high-intent terms plus LinkedIn geo-targeted to the footprint. All of it trackable.
• $120K - RM capacity and enablement. Appointments, materials, and a follow-up SLA. If RMs cannot absorb the leads, stop buying them.
• $90K - targeted local sponsorships and out-of-home in two or three business-dense corridors only, with a distinct URL and phone number so it is measurable.
• $60K - reserve released at week five to whichever tier is producing qualified leads.

Set the goal as 350 qualified accounts plus a stated qualified-lead-to-account conversion rate. If conversion is 25%, the bank needs 1,400 qualified leads, and that is the number the media plan should be sized against.

Be straightforward about what 90 days can and cannot prove, then design to the limit.

Defensible: a pre/post aided and unaided awareness survey in the two targeted corridors versus a matched untargeted market, with a minimum of 300 completed interviews per market at both waves. That supports a directional read on whether the campaign moved awareness where the money was spent. Add share of search for the bank's name and the product category, branded search volume, and direct and organic site traffic - free, continuous, and directionally useful.

Not defensible: claiming brand lift from a single post-wave survey, from ad recall among people who saw the ads, or from impressions delivered. Impressions measure spend, not awareness.

Practical warning on sample and timing. A 90-day window on a modest budget in two corridors will produce a small effect size; pre-register the threshold for "we saw lift" before fielding, or the result will be argued about rather than used. Also flag that the four-week compliance review is the binding constraint: build the creative and the measurement plan in parallel, and lock tracking URLs and the survey vendor before launch, not after. Brand measurement added late always looks like rationalization.