Freeman Brothers

What we did

Challenge

Freeman Brothers is a respected funeral directors’ service, known for their compassionate approach and commitment to providing dignified and personalised services. With 4 offices across West Sussex, they’ve been a trusted part of the community for over 169 years. With an increasing need to appear to potential customers online, they turned to Tomango to refine their Google Ads strategy and achieve better results than their previous supplier.

Despite running Google Ads campaigns for a few years, Freeman Brothers found their results underwhelming. Their campaigns generated traffic, but conversions were inconsistent, and no clear return on investment was being demonstrated. They came to us with some primary goals in mind:

• Increase the number of enquiries and leads.
• Significantly improve their local market share.
• Maximise the efficiency of their Google Ads budget.

Solution

As a first step, we performed an in-depth audit of Freeman Brothers’ existing campaigns, identifying inefficiencies in keyword targeting, ad copy, and bidding strategies. This resulted in us suggesting a complete overhaul of their strategy and essentially starting from scratch (not something we suggest unless absolutely necessary).

We then developed a new strategy which focused on grouping campaigns into 4 key segments:

1. Short-tail keywords tightly geo-targeted to the office locations.
2. Long-tail keywords that focused on nationwide searches with local intent.
3. Separate campaigns for specific services such as funeral payment plans and direct cremations, to capture highly relevant search intent.
4. Office-specific performance max campaigns for brand and community awareness.

The idea was that this would appeal to various audiences across their customer funnel without too much crossover. Meaning – with continued tweaking and optimisation – we could quickly identify the services that provide the best return and impact on market share.

Results

The impact of Tomango’s work was felt almost immediately, as Freeman Brothers began seeing substantial improvements in their Google Ads campaigns compared to the previous year. By carefully refining their approach, we helped Freeman Brothers achieve the below in their first year working with us:

• An 18% increase in average market share: When measured against ONS statistics, we saw a jump in the percentage of local funerals being conducted by Freeman Brothers from an average of 38% to a new average of 45% – with some months being as high as 54%.
• A remarkable 98% growth in conversions: By properly tracking conversions across several key metrics and conducting ongoing optimisation work, we managed to streamline the ad spend to drastically improve the number of enquiries delivered by their website.
• Achieve an average 22% impression share: When taking over the account the impression share was <10%, which meant we had to work hard to demonstrate authority and engagement. This work has resulted in Freeman Brothers’ campaigns now achieving over double the impression share they were seeing.

Perhaps the most rewarding result was the newfound confidence Freeman Brothers had in their digital marketing. They no longer felt their budget was being inefficiently spent. Instead, we have been able to evidence tangible results, helping them support greaving people and communities across the South East while strengthening their online presence.