About Underground Elephant
Who
Underground Elephant is a Performance Based Boutique Ad Agency. Our primary focus revolves around commoditizing information via web-form collection. Our main interests are in the Education, Cash Advance, and Financial areas of traffic and lead generation. Our mission is to bring an ever increasing market population down to a more manageable size for our clients. Our ability to deliver large amounts of self-driven traffic without the use of non-controlled sources, ensures a quality experience for the customer and the user.
The difference between us and the competition is that we create a value exchange not just for the advertiser and consumer, but everyone involved in the process. This spider web affect ensures success by making the designer of the landing page just as important in the process as the user of the data. That intrinsic value from the designer creating a successful campaign or the distribution team weeding out less attractive traffic produces a daisy chain of paying it forward. It is a win-win for everyone.
What
That rumble that you hear below the surface is the movement of our traffic. The size of the elephant represents our reach and the underground represents our ability to find quality traffic sources through long-tail key word search terms. Staying behind the scenes is our mantra as we connect searcher and servicer together like a match-maker. That relationship begins with honesty and consumers are not lured with empty promises or incentive. We only create the bridge for the buyer. The sale is never made before you contact them and there is never any premise. That ability to control the process from start to finish ensures your time is managed better. That opportunity cost is the true value we provide daily to satisfied clients across verticals.
Where
Underground Elephant resides in the prestigious Simon Levi Building of the downtown distric of San Diego. Just as Levy brought vision and innovation to San Diego a hundred years ago, Underground Elephant has it's headquarters nestled in one of his oldest buildings. The brick office is strong and holds our ideas and values. The city of San Diego is considered one of the best places to live in the world. With a temperate climate and proximity to the beach, clients and employees enjoy the surroundings of Southern California.
Why
The movement began because we wanted to do things differently. It seemed there was a disconnect between web user and client. Mountains of spam messages and overload of choices created interference. The Elephant needed to be large enough to be relevant, but small enough as to survive a drought. With marketing budgets shrinking and web users turning to more niche channels the strategy needed to move underground.
No longer could we fight a traditional marketing campaign and compete. The tactics needed to be sharp and fast moving, appearing out of no where and then being gone again; as the consumer traded his interest for another distraction. With larger networks forced to create a better source of traffic, only those who were guerilla survive. Our methods are non-traditional but we are winning the war on interest. And we promise to fight for you.
Case Studies
A client approached Underground Elephant looking for a solution. They were settled in the Payday Debt Consolidation space and were
looking for candidates for their program. They had purchased leads previous but only ended up with unsecured debt leads which were
not what they were seeking.
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The company had also tried telemarketing leads but could not reach the cost per close goal to meet their needs to grow. They had a
set number in mind and most companies fell far from short.
Like any problem there are many ways to approach it. At first our inclination was to create micro websites and research keywords
for a paid search campaign. We also reached out to one of our trusted email partners who was in the payday space. We asked them
to send a approved ad creative to their list of previous cash advance clients. Both tests running side by side would give us some
data to go from.
The client provided us access to their CRM so we could watch in real-time what was working and the status of the account. We
monitored both pipes of traffic and the response. Overall, the contact rate was high and people seemed interested in the product.
However, at the cost per lead we quoted the company was falling short just like it had in the past. We were faced with the similar
issues our competition faced. At this point we needed an underground effort.
We tried a real-time SMS auto responder on a payday list and were surprised to see that most people did not respond. We tried a
click to call campaign as well and no one answered. We did however notice that people were calling us back to see who called them.
When we told them why we called them many of them were interested then in the service. While we could not service them, we called
our client and passed them forward.
We noticed that they were closing at a higher rate than all the other channels. We were determined to find a solution for our
client and they were pleased with the calls. They also gave us back a number of what they could pay for the leads which was nearly
half of where we started. We could provide them leads at that cost or cancel that part of the campaign. Faced with losing the
client and working for free, we made the decision to keep the lead campaign running until we could improve the conversions. The
client promised to raise the lead bounty based on conversions and we could track them in real-time.
It took trust on our part to work on this model but since we were generating the traffic we knew we could optimize the campaign to
lower costs and improve quality by monitoring what was working. We also needed a way to generate more calls without going against
our business model of using outside traffic sources or call centers.
The team gathered and thought about replacing the submit button with a phone number and tracking the calls. The bounty per call was
higher and more profitable than leads and the client wanted to lower cost per close. So we replaced the submit with a phone number
but the volume wasn’t there to support the effort on either side. We needed a way to allow our trusted mailers to send traffic to
the site and generate more calls. We also faced the time constraint of when calls could be generated. Our client wasn’t open
twenty four hours.
The team agreed on a one page email submit and to provide the email back to the mailer in exchange for the traffic which we managed.
There was also a bounty for each email to the mailer. We tracked the emails to make sure it backed out to a cost per action model
and started generating calls. The client was happy and so were our mailers.
To cover the time and cost of running mail more than just a few hours a day we redirected the page after hours with the consent of
the client and mailers generating leads. The result was a win-win situation for all parties involved.
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Companies were approaching us to generate education leads for them and we were very interested in entering the space. The dilemma
was that it was already crowded and a company needed robust technology to serve options to the web user.
Read More
The elephant needed a value exchange and niche to also generate leads at a competitive price in order to proceed. After
careful research the team agreed that while most people are interested in returning to school or attending there was simply
not a way to pay for it. They needed a loan, but most adults were saddled with debt.
The Movement began by creating a directory for scholarships an providing a value exchange for the user. The second part was
finding long tail keywords and building break-out pages to capture web users with a basic interest. The second part was to
study that data and create a campaign to generate paid search traffic.
To compliment and be profitable, The Elephant allocated a team of search engine maestro’s to start building natural traffic
with articles and linking. Pretty soon the organic traffic started to compete with the paid.
A star was born and clients were happy with the traffic we generated with our new website Scholrshiplink.com It was another
win-win situation and has launched Underground Elephant into the mainstream space of education.
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We offer the ability to make your phone ring without becoming part of the sales process. And we make it simple for potential clients to reach-you and use your service.
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We generate calls with the use of the internet instead of call centers. Call us crazy, but we believe in reactive instead of
proactive marketing. Instead of calling and persuading, we simply place a phone number on our ads instead of a submit button. The
user who sought us through a search campaign has only one way to interact and that is to call. These calls can be golden as they
increase the contact rate to 100% and are usually priced around the same as a lead.
Your company’s phone number is placed on the ads and we run campaigns only during business hours to ensure you are not paying for
voicemails. Each call is tracked using our technology so it is easy to see how well your campaign is performing.
We offer the ability to make your phone ring without becoming part of the sales process. And we make it simple for potential
clients to reach-you and use your service.
Would you like to call us and see how it works?
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