Context
A debt resolution practice running the same offering in two markets, the United States and Ukraine, helping people reduce or settle debt, mostly credit cards and missed payments.
They came to me with a specific request: set up Meta ads. They were already running Google Ads and LinkedIn.
Diagnosis
LinkedIn was the giveaway. Debt resolution is a mass consumer service, and LinkedIn is where people go to look employed. Running one on the other means the channels were picked without anyone having a picture of the customer. The audit confirmed it: no strategy, no real audience analysis, and nothing underneath the spend explaining why any of it was happening.
The audience turned out to be enormous. Credit card debt is common enough that the range ran from 20 to 70 years old, so nobody needed educating about the problem.
Reach was never the hard part. Trust was, and the research made that specific. Every funnel stage had its own version. At the top: "I’ve never heard of a company like this, I didn’t know it was possible." In the middle: "it might be a scam, I’ll waste my time." Near the decision: "rude service, they won’t call back, nobody explains anything."
One line in the persona work governed everything after it. She doesn’t want to be frightened by advertising, because she has enough fear in her life already, and what she responds to is being shown a way back. That rules out most of what this category does: debt advertising defaults to alarm.
Decisions
- Dropped LinkedIn and made Meta the primary channel, matching a mass consumer audience instead of a professional one
- Built the funnel in four stages, each with its own barrier, message, and KPI
- Led with hope instead of alarm: the promise was returning someone to a life they recognise
- Set response time as the operational constraint, because at this lead cost the limit is how fast a person picks up the phone
Results
The original records document more than 3,000 leads a month at under $1 each.
Volume got high enough that the firm’s lawyers went into extended proceedings with a large share of these clients, and some of those matters are still being worked today. The engagement didn’t produce a spike in enquiries. It produced years of legal work.
Handling it took a dedicated call centre and a five-person sales department: round-the-clock cover, and a target of reaching every new lead inside three minutes. That answers the barrier the research found at the decision stage. "They won’t call back" stops being a reason to hesitate when somebody calls back in two minutes.
Active management ran about five months. Now it’s a strategy session every six months or so.