Using digital to generate quality leads at scale

In a lead-based business, the primary marketing goal is to generate leads that will move down the sales funnel to eventually convert into loyal customers. However, the theory that generating more leads will bring in more sales does not always hold true. Broadening your potential customers list can contribute to more sales, but the leads are worthless to the organization if they are not qualified enough to make a purchase. In this article, we will define what quality leads mean and how to drive them at scale.

Define What a Quality Lead Means for Your Organization

There are several things that can help determine which leads have the highest value for your business. First, it is important to understand customer intent. By using first-party data, organizations can uncover a lot of meaningful information and audience signals that already lives in their CRM. To hone in on who your highest quality customer is, analyze the existing data for signals that are significant to your business and create customer lists based on your most valued audience.

To make sure the information in the database is accurate (as well as relevant) a business can incorporate better measurement signals. Measuring and tracking audience signals as far down the funnel as possible and as close to the desired outcome will help generate the best results and is the fastest way to improve your lead quality. Prospect calls, newsletter subscriptions, offline purchases and lead form submissions are the type of activities you would want to look for and measure.

Although the majority of product or service research is performed online, around 90% of sales are still performed offline. Every step in the conversion funnel is important and tracking what contributes to your bottom line is what matters the most. Consider implementing offline conversion tracking in Google, which will allow you to import offline data back for analysis to determine what drove the actual sales in the funnel.

Focus on Driving Quality Leads

Now that you have defined what your high-value lead looks like based on the actions they take on your website, you can focus on using that information to find more of them. Here are a couple of things organizations can do to help them generate leads:

Focus on delighting your visitors with a strong visual experience. Create a landing page that provides a clear value proposition above the fold for potential customers. Keep it clean and user friendly by having only one call to action or goal per page, using legible fonts, providing educational videos, adding more options to explore the site and/or placing reviews to gain trust and credibility.

Make sure the user experience is as strong on mobile as it is on desktop. Today nearly 60% of the searches are done from mobile devices, which is why it is important to focus on enhancing user experience on mobile pages as well. Implementing Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) is one way to enhance your visitor’s experience with mobile landing pages. AMP helps your web pages to load faster, which helps to minimize bounce rates and improves your site performance. Improved site performance leads to higher conversion rates.

Additionally, consider spending more time on overall strategic opportunities. Today organizations invest 80% of their time on dealing with low-value manual tasks while only 20% of their time goes to working on bigger picture strategic initiatives. For instance, spending more time on choosing the right automated bidding strategy for your business as opposed to managing that manually can help free up time in the long run to focus on more valuable tasks. Furthermore, automation has been a big theme over the past year with new solutions rolling out for digital marketers on an ongoing basis. Bringing more automated solutions into your day-to-day activities, such as using dynamic creative campaigns (like Google Smart Display or Facebook Dynamic Creative), is a great way to automate your creative combinations to find the best performing assets without managing multiple A/B tests and creative variations.

Driving Quality Leads Efficiently (At Scale)

Quality leads are great, but it can become challenging to generate them at scale and maintain a sustainable level of performance. The first thing that prospects see when interacting with your brand is your ad copy. To make the lead generation process easier and more efficient, advertisers should use the potential of search campaigns to their fullest. Including pre-qualifying messaging in the ad copy or creative can help to ensure that only high intent prospects will click through.

Although search is a powerful place to find qualified leads, there are other numerous advertising channels where you can find quality leads. Around 85% of people who are using Google search are also using YouTube daily. In order not to miss out on an opportunity to attract quality leads, organizations need to be in the right place at the right time. Scaling beyond search campaigns to other channels can help to reach audiences that are making purchase decisions that are highly relevant to your brand.

And lastly, do not hesitate to test and implement new things! Digital advertising platforms are constantly rolling out new solutions for advertisers to help them to reach their right audience. Just last year Snapchat introduced their own dynamic ads format, Microsoft rolled out responsive search ads and new smart bidding strategy, and Google added new audiences for Google Search and discovery campaigns that run on multiple Google properties. To make sure you run a proper test, follow these simple steps: define your test objective, outline which things will be measured and define the audience you are planning to test.