Driving High-Value Leads with Call Heavy Strategy

CLIENT SNAPSHOT

Generator Supercenter (GSC) of St. Louis is a generator sales and service company, with the franchisee managing the greater St. Louis, Missouri metropolitan area. The franchisee’s primary business goal was to significantly increase the volume of qualified leads, as the results from their previous marketing efforts were insufficient to support their growth.

CHALLENGE

The team at GSC St. Louis faced two primary challenges. First, the previous effort was not delivering leads at a significant rate. Second, the franchisee had some logistic promotional challenges associated with their marketing, hindering the St. Louis team's visibility or input. This led to making phone calls and walk-ins the team's most effective conversion actions.

IDEA

If GSC St. Louis could re-engineer their funnel, it could generate the most valuable conversion type for their franchise: phone calls. This audience-first approach recognized that in St. Louis, older, affluent homeowners preferred speaking directly to a professional rather than filling out lengthy online forms.

STRATEGY

Call-Heavy Conversion Optimization: Shifted campaign focus entirely to phone calls, defining a qualified lead as a call lasting over 60 seconds to ensure conversation quality.
Audience-First Platform Prioritization:Reallocated budget heavily (65–70%) to Google Ads, recognizing that users actively searching for generators were “warmer” and in a buying mode, leading to significantly better conversion rates than Meta.
Hyper-Localized, Seasonal Messaging:Developed ad copy with a “St. Louis neighbor” tone, specifically leveraging the “rumor of the storm” to create a sense of urgency and preparedness, driving more engagement than post-storm messaging.
Strategic Budget Scaling:Used Cost Per Lead (CPL) as the key scaling metric, increasing the ad spend budget by 65% only after confirming the CPL remained low, maximizing lead quantity without sacrificing efficiency.

RESULTS

Telephone Calls from Ads Up 27% and total phone calls (including SEO) up 37% over the prior period (January 16th to October 30th).
Form Submissions Up 55%, despite being a secondary focus, showing improvements across all major metrics.
Cost Per Lead (CPL) Maintained at $10–$24, dramatically outperforming the industry average of $30–$60+.
High Average Engagement Time on the site was observed, validating the quality of the targeted, homeowner-focused audience.

TAKEAWAY

Aligning a digital strategy with the client’s operational strengths and the target audience’s preferences is powerful. By moving beyond generic metrics and optimizing for the local team’s most effective conversion action—the phone call—Black Raven was able to deliver a huge boost in highly-qualified leads, directly supporting the franchisee’s need for business growth.

27%

INCREASE IN TELEPHONE LEADS

Driving High-Value Leads with an Audience-First, Call-Heavy Digital Strategy

How Black Raven transformed the digital ads performance for a new Generator Supercenter franchise by prioritizing phone calls and leveraging local seasonality.