Awareness spend that never reached a buyer
The Panasonic x RebateM8 programme connects a corporate air conditioning brand to a network of independent Victorian installation dealers. The brand had reach, but the advertising sat at the top of the funnel: broad awareness campaigns that built recognition without ever putting a ready-to-buy homeowner in front of a dealer who could quote and install.
That left a structural gap. Demand for split system and ducted air conditioning is highly seasonal and intent-driven, yet the spend was not timed or targeted to the moment a household decides to act. There was also no clean way to route an enquiry to the right partner, so even the interest that did surface was at risk of going cold before any dealer could respond. With jobs worth A$3,000 to A$15,000 each, every lost enquiry was an expensive miss.
Move the spend to intent, then route every enquiry to a dealer
We shifted the budget from top-of-funnel awareness to bottom-of-funnel intent capture on Meta. Rather than paying to be remembered, the spend now targets households showing the install triggers that precede a purchase: people who are problem-aware, in season, and close to making a decision on a new system.
To find those people at a workable cost, we built precision audiences around problem-aware and install-trigger signals, then tested creative and offers against the jobs that actually convert. Each enquiry was qualified before it counted, so the programme optimised toward dealer-ready leads rather than raw form fills.
The second half of the work was the plumbing behind the lead. We built a centrally captured, redistributable enquiry system: every enquiry lands in one place and is then handed to the right installation partner by location and job type. That gives the brand a clean, consistent buyer experience while making sure no qualified lead stalls before a dealer can act on it.
Underneath, the economics were modelled before scaling. With a known cost per enquiry and a known job value band, the question became how many enquiries the network could absorb profitably, and at what acquisition cost the maths still worked. The programme was tuned to that ceiling rather than to vanity volume.
89 dealer-ready enquiries at A$89 each
In the first three months the rebuilt programme delivered 89 qualified enquiries at a cost of A$89 each, every one captured centrally and redistributed to an installation partner. Against a job value of A$3,000 to A$15,000, the acquisition cost is a rounding error: even at the low end, a single converted enquiry returns more than thirty times what it cost to generate.
- 89 qualified enquiries in 3 months. Bottom-of-funnel Meta capture aimed at buyers in the moment of intent, not at reach.
- A$89 cost per enquiry. A dealer-ready lead for the price of a fraction of a single install.
- Every enquiry captured centrally and redistributed, so leads reach the right installation partner instead of going cold.
- A$3,000 to A$15,000 job value per conversion, putting the acquisition cost at well under 3% of the work it unlocks.
- ~30 dealer-ready enquiries a month, on average, giving the partner network a steady, predictable flow of in-season demand.
Buy intent, not attention, then close the routing gap
Awareness spend is only worth what it eventually converts. By moving the budget to the bottom of the funnel and targeting genuine install triggers, every dollar bought a person who was close to acting rather than a passive impression. The central enquiry engine then made sure that intent was not wasted: capturing each lead once and routing it to the right dealer turned interest into installed jobs. Against a five-figure job value, an A$89 enquiry is not a cost to manage down, it is a margin to scale up.