Key Takeaways
A full-funnel strategy drives real growth. Building awareness, nurturing engagement, and converting at the bottom of the funnel turned flat performance into an 800% MQL increase.
Manual bidding beats automation when managed well. Granular control over spend and audience targeting cut cost per lead by 82% while boosting conversions 1,733%.
Smart lead qualification accelerates sales. Custom LinkedIn form questions and CRM automation filtered out unfit leads and sped up pipeline velocity.
Testing compounds results over time. Continuous A/B experimentation across creatives, CTAs, and formats led to a 51% higher CTR and 264% higher conversion rate.
LinkedIn is a hidden gem for business lenders. Native lead gen forms and professional audience targeting drove higher-quality leads that actually closed.
After years of operating at a healthy, but flat sales trajectory, MobyCap, a specialty business lender, decided to make a change. They wanted to scale quickly and profitably by reaching a highly qualified target audience.
In 11 months of working with Upgrow, MobyCap, increased marketing qualified leads by 800% while simultaneously cutting their cost per lead by 82%. They boosted conversions by 1,733% and improved their conversion rate by 264%.
These aren’t inflated vanity metrics. These are qualified business owners actively seeking funding—the kind of leads that actually close.
Here’s exactly how they did it.
About Moby Capital
Moby Capital is a specialty growth lender that provides business loans and alternative financing across various industries. What sets them apart is their approach: while many competitors rely on automated underwriting systems, MobyCap’s team of dedicated experts focuses on building lasting relationships with clients through a personalized, human approach to funding.
Their flexibility allows them to customize funding options that leverage each client’s unique business strengths, ensuring better rates and terms. Over the past decade, they’ve secured over $1 billion in funding to help businesses thrive.
But like many B2B financial services companies, they faced a critical challenge: generating high-quality leads at scale.
The Challenge: Quality Over Quantity
When MobyCap partnered with Upgrow, their goal was clear but ambitious: overhaul their LinkedIn Ads strategy to generate high-quality leads that directly translated to sales and revenue.
The obstacles they faced are common in the business lending space:
Lead Quality Issues
Not all leads are created equal. MobyCap needed business owners who were genuinely qualified and ready to move forward—not tire-kickers or businesses that didn’t meet basic lending criteria.
Complex Sales Cycle
Business lending isn’t an impulse purchase. The decision-making process involves multiple stakeholders, financial reviews, and careful consideration. The marketing funnel needed to support this complexity.
Limited Brand Awareness
In a market dominated by banks and well-known alternative lenders, MobyCap needed to build brand visibility and establish trust with potential clients who might not have heard of them.
Inefficient Lead Management
Even when good leads came in, the handoff to sales wasn’t smooth. Leads weren’t being properly qualified or routed, leading to delays and missed opportunities.
Need for Scalability
MobyCap wanted sustainable growth—not just a temporary spike in leads. They needed a system that could scale efficiently without ballooning costs.
The Solution: Full-Funnel LinkedIn Strategy
Upgrow started with what every good marketing program should begin with: research.
The team conducted a comprehensive audit of the competitor landscape and analyzed market trends to establish a baseline. The diagnosis was clear: MobyCap needed a full-funnel campaign structure, not just bottom-of-funnel lead generation campaigns.
The strategy focused on continuously expanding and optimizing the entire marketing funnel—from building brand awareness at the top, to nurturing prospects in the middle, to converting qualified leads at the bottom—all while maintaining peak platform efficiency and ROI.
Campaign Strategy
Upgrow set up campaigns using a range of LinkedIn Ads formats:
Single Image Ads: Clean, professional ads highlighting MobyCap’s key differentiators—same-day funding, no hard credit pull, no collateral needed, and customized products.
Video Ads: Engaging content that told MobyCap’s story and explained their unique approach to business lending.
Multiple Optimization Goals: Different campaigns targeted different funnel stages with appropriate objectives—engagement and video views for awareness, lead generation for conversion.
The team continuously scaled top-performing campaigns while exploring new audience targeting opportunities, ensuring consistent lead volume and quality for sustainable growth.
The Data-Driven Approach
Rather than using LinkedIn’s automated bidding (which often prioritizes spending budget over efficiency), Upgrow employed a data-driven approach to budget allocation:
Manual Bidding: Maximized cost efficiency by giving granular control over exactly how much to pay for each action.
Profitability Insights: Budget allocation decisions were based on which audience segments and campaigns delivered the highest-quality leads, not just the most leads.
Historical Performance Metrics: Past performance data guided ongoing optimization, ensuring the team doubled down on what worked and cut what didn’t.
This approach allowed MobyCap to maximize engagement and impact where it mattered most, driving significant growth in their bottom line. The result? A 51% increase in Click-Through Rate over the 11-month period.
The Optimization Process: Continuous Improvement
Once the foundation was in place, Upgrow focused on two key areas of ongoing optimization.
A/B Testing & Experimentation
Using LinkedIn’s audience insights, the team continuously identified new testing opportunities:
- Messaging variations: Testing different value propositions and pain points
- CTA testing: Experimenting with different calls-to-action to find what drove action
- Ad format testing: Comparing performance across image ads, video ads, and carousel formats
- Campaign objective testing: Finding the optimal objectives for each funnel stage
This systematic testing led to stronger ad relevance and greater campaign efficiency, increasing MobyCap’s visibility and competitiveness in LinkedIn’s ad auctions. More relevance meant lower costs and better placements.
Dynamic Retargeting
Upgrow implemented a sophisticated retargeting strategy that moved prospects through the funnel:
Top-of-Funnel (TOFU) Campaigns: These campaigns were optimized for Engagement and Video Views—cost-efficient goals that raised brand visibility and built awareness. But they served another crucial purpose: building remarketing pools of engaged prospects.
Middle-of-Funnel (MOFU) Campaigns: These campaigns nurtured the engaged audiences from TOFU, providing more detailed information and building trust.
Bottom-of-Funnel (BOFU) Campaigns: Finally, the warm, engaged audiences were retargeted with lead generation-focused ads designed to convert. Because these audiences had already been exposed to the brand and engaged with content, they converted at much higher rates and lower costs.
Expanding TOFU and MOFU campaigns didn’t just build awareness—it dramatically improved the volume and efficiency of generating Marketing Qualified Leads (MQLs) at the bottom of the funnel.
The conversion rate increased by 264% over 11 months, demonstrating the power of this full-funnel approach.
Examples of LinkedIn Ad Creatives used for Moby Capital
Lead Flow Automation: Accelerating the Pipeline
Great ads and campaigns are only half the battle. The other half is what happens after someone converts.
Upgrow implemented marketing automation designed to drive sales efficiency and set MobyCap’s team up for success.
LinkedIn Native Lead Generation Forms
For bottom-of-funnel campaigns, Upgrow utilized LinkedIn’s native lead generation forms. This approach offered several advantages:
Reduced Friction: Users could convert directly within LinkedIn without leaving the platform or filling out lengthy forms. LinkedIn auto-populated their information, making it effortless to submit.
Higher Conversion Volumes: The lower friction meant more people completed the forms.
Better Conversion Rates: Overall CVR improved significantly because the experience was so streamlined.
Smart Lead Qualification
But volume without quality is useless. That’s where smart qualification came in:
Custom Qualifier Questions: The forms incorporated specific questions to assess fit—loan amount needed, time in business, revenue figures, etc.
Automated CRM Integration: Third-party tools were integrated to automatically funnel leads into the appropriate CRM stages based on their responses. Highly qualified leads were routed immediately to sales. Marginal leads went into nurture sequences. Unqualified leads were filtered out entirely.
Accelerated Pipeline Velocity: By automating the initial qualification and routing, MobyCap’s sales team could focus on the best opportunities immediately rather than wasting time on discovery calls with unqualified prospects.
This focus on lead flow automation accelerated the velocity of MobyCap’s sales pipeline, driving faster, more efficient lead management. The cost per Marketing Qualified Lead dropped significantly while MQL volume soared.
The Results: Exceptional Growth
Over 11 months, MobyCap’s LinkedIn Ads program delivered extraordinary results:
+1,733% Increase in Conversions Not a typo. MobyCap saw a seventeen-fold increase in total conversions from their LinkedIn Ads program.
+800% Increase in Marketing Qualified Leads Even more importantly, the percentage of leads that were actually qualified increased by 800%. The program wasn’t just generating more leads—it was generating dramatically better leads.
-82% Decrease in Cost Per Lead While volume and quality both skyrocketed, costs plummeted. MobyCap was paying 82% less for each lead than when they started.
+264% Increase in Conversion Rate The funnel became progressively more efficient, with conversion rates more than tripling over the course of the program.
+51% Increase in Click-Through Rate Ad relevance and engagement improved significantly, indicating that MobyCap’s messaging was resonating with their target audience.
These results weren’t just good for the marketing team’s dashboard. They translated directly to revenue growth and business impact.
What You Can Learn From MobyCap’s Success
MobyCap’s transformation offers several crucial lessons for B2B financial services companies and business lenders:
1. Full-Funnel Strategy Is Non-Negotiable
Most lenders make the mistake of focusing exclusively on bottom-of-funnel lead generation. They want immediate conversions, so they skip awareness and consideration stages entirely.
This approach has three problems:
- Your audience pool is limited to people already familiar with your brand
- You miss the opportunity to educate and nurture prospects before they’re ready to convert
- Your cost per lead stays high because you’re always competing for the same warm audience
MobyCap’s success came from building a complete funnel. Top-of-funnel campaigns built awareness and created remarketing pools. Middle-of-funnel campaigns nurtured these audiences. Bottom-of-funnel campaigns converted them. Each stage fed the next, creating a compounding effect that drove results.
2. Platform-Native Features Reduce Friction
LinkedIn’s native lead generation forms made a massive difference. By allowing users to convert without leaving the platform, MobyCap removed a huge point of friction from their funnel.
Whatever platform you’re advertising on, use the native conversion tools when appropriate. They’re optimized for the user experience on that platform and typically convert better than sending people to external landing pages.
3. Lead Qualification Saves Your Sales Team
Marketing’s job isn’t just to generate leads—it’s to generate qualified leads that sales can actually close.
By incorporating qualifier questions into the forms and automating the routing based on responses, MobyCap ensured their sales team spent time on the right opportunities. This improved close rates, shortened sales cycles, and kept the team focused and motivated.
4. Manual Bidding Beats Automation (When Done Right)
LinkedIn’s automated bidding is designed to spend your budget, not to maximize your ROI. In Upgrow’s hands, manual bidding allowed for precise control over costs and targeting of the most profitable audience segments.
The caveat? This requires expertise and ongoing management. Automated bidding is better than poorly managed manual bidding. But expertly managed manual bidding beats automation every time.
5. Continuous Testing Compounds Results
The 1,733% increase in conversions didn’t happen overnight. It was the result of continuous testing, learning, and optimization over 11 months.
Every test that revealed a better ad, a better audience, or a better funnel stage added incrementally to performance. Those incremental improvements compounded month after month into extraordinary results.
6. LinkedIn Is Underutilized for B2B Financial Services
Many business lenders default to Google Ads because “that’s where the search volume is.” But LinkedIn offers something Google can’t: precise targeting of business decision-makers based on company size, industry, job title, and seniority.
For MobyCap’s use case—reaching business owners and decision-makers who need funding—LinkedIn was the perfect platform. The professional context meant higher-quality leads who were in a “business mindset” rather than a personal browsing mode.
What MobyCap’s General Manager Says
“Partnering with Upgrow has been amazing! They’ve helped us generate not only a significant increase in qualified leads but also improved conversion rates and cost efficiency – at scale! Thanks to their ongoing optimization and thoughtful campaign structure, we’ve seen a positive impact on our overall business growth. Upgrow truly understands the power of paid media and how to leverage it for maximum results.”
— Chad Crandall, General Manager, Moby Capital
Ready to Transform Your Business Lending Marketing?
The business lending market is competitive, but it’s not impenetrable. What separates winners from losers isn’t budget size—it’s strategic sophistication.
MobyCap didn’t succeed by outspending their competitors. They succeeded by building a smarter, more efficient system for generating and qualifying leads.
If you’re a business lender, alternative financing company, or B2B financial services provider looking to scale your lead generation efficiently, the strategies that worked for MobyCap can work for you.
The key is having a partner who understands both the technical aspects of paid media optimization and the unique dynamics of B2B financial services marketing.
Ready to generate more qualified leads at lower costs? Learn how Upgrow’s data-driven approach to LinkedIn advertising for business lenders can transform your lead generation program. Our team specializes in B2B financial services marketing and knows exactly what it takes to generate leads that actually close.
Schedule a consultation with our paid media experts to discuss your growth goals and discover how we can help you achieve results like MobyCap’s.
Upgrow is a growth marketing agency specializing in performance-driven paid media strategies for B2B financial services, business lending, and fintech companies. We help lenders and financial services providers build efficient, scalable lead generation programs that drive real revenue growth.
