A good website, well utilised, has incredible power in the modern marketplace. With a focus on lead generation and marketing, founders Chris Niebel and Mark Shephard have pushed their business into bold new territory. In the IT Awards from SME News, the team at The Genius Group have achieved remarkable success, proving themselves by helping clients drive over £2.3 billion in sales in the last 3 years. We dig a little deeper to find out more.
Generating traffic is an enormous part of any business model. The more people who see what is on offer, the faster you will achieve your business goals. Thai business, The Genius Group, has mixed the disciplines of marketing, digital strategy, and advanced AI systems to build the support network that organisations need.
Founded by Chris Niebel and Mark Shephard, pioneers of lead generation and marketing solutions, The Genius Group has gone from strength to strength. Their eye for CRO research, marketing optimisation, advanced lead generation techniques, and superbly crafted creative solutions has ensured the delivery of numerous compelling end-user experiences. At the heart of their success, however, is the team’s ability to take brand concepts and ideas, create macro solutions, and turn them into powerful online businesses with digital at their core.
Mark states, “Imagine paying a company whose only job is supplying you clients – not taking any of your monthly spend if they get it right or wrong – but a company who is held responsible for getting it right, and your business only paying a cost per client. Welcome to Genius.” Mark knows that The Genius Group does things differently to the rest and the team understands how to be clever – it’s not just about traffic but it’s about creating a winning strategy for everyone involved.
Pushing the boundaries of what has gone before is one of the reasons why so many turn to this talented team for support. The wealth of experience, and outstanding in-house tech, which is available from both Chris and Mark is very useful to businesses wanting to reach out to new audiences, with inhouse work including building websites, writing copy and headlines, creating sales funnels, e-signatures, CRM backends to handle client data, adverts, social media, and conversion optimisation.
Perhaps the best example of their work, reaping incredible rewards can be seen in the success of their clients. One of the team’s projects saw them working alongside a financial technology and claims company, seeing them grow to roughly £2.7b in revenue over three years, utilising AI, leading digital and social media strategies. Since its establishment, The Genius Group has driven over £5m, having onboarded over 25k clients per day for its customers.
Chris and Mark both come from very different backgrounds, but it is this diverse approach which has secured the success of so many ideas. Chris has been an entrepreneur and blue-sky thinker since the age of 25, creatively and strategically applying his expertise in lead generation to the needs of his clients. His passion for the sector has been instrumental in the successful growth of some of the UK’s largest claims businesses.
In 2011, Chris created bespoke software for SMS marketing, and was able to utilise the PAYG mobile sim packages developing the unique SMS usage, which was 10k texts for £10 top up. This allowed one of the UK’s largest scale-up operations in SMS marketing, resulting in over 2m SMS sent each day, marketing to consumers for different products. In less than two months, the software was generating more than £500k profit every month.
The rules surrounding GDPR saw a shift for Chris as he realised it was time to rethink the way consumers were contacted. He worked on website optimisation using bespoke software from a platform developed inhouse called Flopanda, a multi-award-winning platform to help businesses scale up mass volume of leads using multiple network platforms including Facebook, Google, and native.
Chris also worked exclusively on a financial claims product (PPI) with Allay claims. It was here where he met Mark. Mark and Chris took the firm from a £600k turnover in 2016 to £200m turnover in 2019 and 2020. Collections were in excess of £2.3b in compensations for customers. This was purely by the marketing expertise and conversion strategies and optimisation identified in previous years. Chris explains, “We dominated the networks spending £8m each month on advertising, making a profit of £2.5m each month with no more than five staff members.”
Mark’s strength as a creative genius has seen him celebrate major success with many companies. Mark is the perfect business partner to Chris, bringing an enviable powerhouse in optimisation and SEO to the table. With his ground-breaking marketing strategies, he proved instrumental in the success of building a company worth £600m. After the phenomenal success of Allay, Mark and Chris built TGG, now the biggest advertising company on Facebook. They have continued to drive their successes into two legal firms, numerous claims companies, and developed a beauty e-commerce business with turnover of over £11m in only two years.
Not only did The Genius Group make this possible, but the team also made sure that the company generated over 2.3 Billion and Made over 600 million in 3 years. From a standing start of only generating 600K per year.
Continuing to invest in developing proprietary solutions that deliver, the team has been able to secure their place in the industry. The importance of good traffic generation is clear to anyone in every industry, and the team act as partners throughout to their clients, from e-commerce to technology, operations to brand and data, meaning they can optimise their approach from the very first click through to the final mile. All of the various app and software development has been done inhouse, revolutionising the legal and claims world. All of these innovations, essential to the continued success of the business, are fully owned by Chris and Mark.
When it comes to lead generation, The Genius Group tends to work with law firms, claims management companies, and home improvement businesses, helping them to generate a high volume of consumer leads through social media. It can offer high quality leads, at an affordable price, with a simple onboarding process that is led by its development team. Their marketing processes enable them to create campaigns that reach a large audience, with ads and websites that lead to increased conversions. With implementation and set up being so simple, campaigns can start very quickly and run more efficiently.
Once a lead has been generated, it’s essential not to lose them on the website. Did you know that over 90% of the traffic that goes to a website does not convert, but instead drops off? Of that sizable percentage, The Genius Group has proven able to convert an extra 10% of that traffic by engaging with them in the partial data they have entered on the website and bringing them back into the funnel where they left off. These insight tools are used consistently to adapt to the varying needs of clients.
Perhaps the most important of these is Flo Panda, a product built by marketers, for marketers. This platform cuts through the complex systems and procedures that competitors offer and gets straight to the point of the website issues that are costing businesses money. The tool takes real-time data and shows areas to improve conversions, optimise Facebook and PPC marketing campaigns, and re-engage with people who partially complete your opt-in and order forms. When The Genius Group built and tested Flo Panda, it generated over 4.1m leads over an 18-month period, building up a £600m business.
This data is not only closely interpreted by the team, but also collected as efficiently as possible. The team’s own inhouse data mining team means there is no need for a massive form. Instead, the team data mines third-party data resources and can automate information without relying on the customer. This allows them to ask less questions in their forms, whilst still being able to secure a much higher conversion rate. This automated data is used throughout the business, including in the team’s customer call centre. A pre-populated data field when it comes to emails or telephones ensures a tailored and customer-centric approach at all times.
Behind the team’s success in numbers lies a bunch of hard-working experts who develop stunning websites through the perfect blend of aestheticism and conversion. With plenty of CTA and UX knowledge, the team of experts have been responsible for creating a website which has tripled the conversion rate compared to the industry average (7.09% compared to 2.7%). Indeed, The Genius Group’s Shopify website currently sits in the top 1% of all e-commerce stores in the world, in one of the toughest categories, health and beauty.
By following their own rules and differing from the rest, right now the team generates more consumers than any company in the UK in 3 verticals. Working with companies with budgets over 300,000 for online acquisitions, they have wiped the awards of the best tech solutions online and will continue to do so for the foreseeable future.
The coming years look bright for Chris, Mark and their talented team. In fact, the team seems set to grow, with more inhouse experts always being brought in so that the firm can take on more clients. It seems likely that The Genius Group will continue in its quest to generate even more innovative and automated ways for its clients to generate leads, as it has brought them – and will continue to bring them – such incredible success.
For further information, please visit www.genius.co.uk
