Case study · Financial certification 01
CFP Board needed a national movement to pull college-bound and college students toward financial planning as a career. Our team designed, built and ran "Future CFP Pro": an integrated, omni-channel campaign that beat its lead goal by double, at a fraction of the cost.
At a glance 02
"Future CFP Pro" ran from September 16 through December 31, 2024 against a single, hard KPI: 3,000 leads. Real students handing over their contact information to hear more about a career in financial planning and CFP® certification. The mandate was to design, develop and deploy an integrated, omni-channel campaign that made the profession genuinely attractive to a generation that had never considered it.
We treated the whole thing as one connected system: strategy, media, creative, landing pages and analytics moving together, rebuilt in-flight as the data came in. The result wasn't just more leads. It was dramatically cheaper, higher-intent leads, at national scale.
See the approach →
Future CFP Pro · 2024
The national certifying body for CERTIFIED FINANCIAL PLANNER® professionals.
Sept 16 – Dec 31, 2024, delivered across two go-to-market phases.
College and college-bound students nationwide, plus the parents who shape their choices.
Paid media, creative, web/landing pages, CRM intake and analytics. One team.
The challenge 03
Going in, CFP Board's own research told an uncomfortable truth: among high-school and college students, consideration, interest and favorability toward financial planning were all low, lowest of all with high schoolers. Most had never pictured themselves in the profession at all.
Financial planning wasn't on the consideration set for most students. We weren't competing for share of voice. We were creating demand for a career from a near-standing start.
Not impressions, not "engagement." 3,000 actual leads by December 31. People who raised their hand and asked CFP Board to keep talking to them about the path.
This is a certifying body with a profession watching. Messaging had to attract newcomers without ever feeling flip or off-brand to the credentialed planners who carry the mark.
The approach 04
The plan was never to set a media buy and let it ride. We launched a full omni-channel campaign, read the results in real time, rebuilt the whole engine around what was actually converting, and then did it again.
Phase one went broad across Google Search, Meta, programmatic, Snapchat, Twitch, Spotify, YouTube, LinkedIn, TikTok and out-of-home, to find where intent actually lived. Every channel was instrumented in GA4 from day one so the data, not opinion, would set phase two.
The data was blunt: Search, Meta and Snapchat drove qualified leads at a fraction of the cost; OOH and several social channels didn't. So we cut the noise and poured budget into the winners. Search funding alone grew more than 3x going into phase two.
We A/B-tested a long lead form against a short one on Meta and Search. The short form completed at 94% versus 66% and at a lower cost per lead, so we rolled short forms across the campaign. Fewer fields, far more finished leads.
We built lookalike audiences off first-party lists of real converters, collapsed fragmented sub-interests into stronger combined segments, and leaned into the niches that overperformed (gamers and remarketing pools chief among them) to lift volume and drop cost together.
Message and format fought it out in-market. Short-form video and carousels beat static; an impact-and-earnings story beat everything. "Want to make an impact?" became the single highest-converting headline of the campaign, so we made more of what worked.
When some credentialed planners pushed back on early playful creative, we didn't get defensive. We moved. Within days we paused the affected assets, replaced them with on-brand carousels, refined audiences, and excluded existing professionals so the campaign stayed pointed at newcomers.
The moment that mattered 05
Early creative used playful career framing, and a segment of established CFP® professionals felt it made the profession look like it was for the unmotivated. For a certifying body, that's not a small thing. It's the brand's own community questioning the message.
This is where an integrated team earns its keep. We didn't hold a week of meetings. We paused the affected assets immediately, pulled the static units, deployed updated carousel creative with new on-image copy, tightened age and parent targeting, and applied a first-party list of existing professionals as an exclusion audience across every relevant channel, so the message reached the people it was for, and no one it wasn't.
The campaign came out of it sharper, safer, and converting better than before. That's the difference between a vendor and a partner: we fix it while it's still moving.
The results 06
By the close of the flight, "Future CFP Pro" hadn't just hit its 3,000-lead target. It had blown through it, at a year-over-year cost efficiency that reset what CFP Board could expect from a career campaign.
Lead volume
Efficiency
ConversionWhy it worked 07
None of this came from a single clever ad. It came from running media, creative, landing pages and data as one feedback loop, and being willing to rebuild the plan the moment the evidence asked us to.
The same senior hands that planned the buy ran it daily, so a learning on Tuesday changed the spend on Wednesday, not next quarter.
Channels, audiences, creative, and the form itself were all live experiments. The 94% short-form result alone reshaped the back half of the campaign.
For a certifying body, protecting the mark is part of performance. Fast, on-brand course-correction kept trust intact while leads kept climbing.
Qualified leads at the lowest defensible cost. Every decision laddered to that, so "good engagement" never got confused with results.
"Want to make an impact?" won because we let it win in-market. We then scaled the message and formats the numbers picked, not the ones we loved.
Every learning fed a clear set of recommendations for the next year, so the gains compound instead of resetting each flight.
A note on attribution 08
This is work members of our senior team led, with parts of it executed during prior agency tenures. We present it as a credential (the experience and judgment you'd be hiring), not as a Zoned Marketing client logo. We'd rather tell you exactly what we did, and how, than over-claim it.
More proof 09
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Tell us the goal and the constraints. We'll tell you honestly whether we're the right partner, and if we are, exactly how we'd build the system to get there.
