Are your lead generation
strategies beginning to fall off? Is that old AdWords campaign you’ve had running in the background since 2014 just not delivering anymore?
Maybe your salesteam is struggling to convert leads from traditional cold calls? If you think you could be doing better in your lead generation strategies, you’ve stumbled across the right article.
Lead generation – quite simply – is like a menu that offers way too many options. Maybe you go for the extra mozzarella on your Fiorentina and satisfy the need for cheese and carbs, or maybe the Mexican twice-cooked chicken tastes as good as it sounds, sating the greed for a little spice
Lead gen it’s the same. Where do you start? Cold calls, cold emails, investing in inbound marketing
All options are probably going to fill you up and satisfy that hunger. But for how long?
Every strategy pays off to a certain degree. But is that enough? Or the best and most profitable outcome?
If long-term, sustained growth is the aim, then you want affordable leads that turn the best ROI.
And that’s what we’re going to analyse in this article: the best bang for your buck and a bang that bites, and a bite that turns into a catch. (Sales puns!)
Let’s get into it – onto the nitty gritty:
What are the options?
You’re probably already using one or two methods in your Lead Gen strategy. You might be:
• Cold calling
• Cold emailing
• Attending networking events
• Developing referral partnerships
But how effective are any of these for your business?
To properly analyse this, firstly we’re going to look at the sources of Lead Gen – Inbound & Outbound.
And let the fight commence:
What’s the difference between inbound and outbound?
Inbound leads:
are customers who come directly to you. They may have stumbled upon you over the web, called your company to find out more, or picked up the scent of your services from word of mouth. By calling you, they’re indicating heavily that they’re in the market for your solution – ready to buy and chomping at the bit. Inbound leads typically have a shorter sales cycles and a higher close rate than outbound leads.
Outbound leads:
Are leads that you proactively go out to find. You have to create the demand for your offer or service by showcasing how life will be different with you on-board for the ride. These leads generally aren’t already in the market for your solution, so it’s a tougher turn-around.
You might think that the fight is over before it has even began – a bit like Mike Tyson vs Harry Potter in a bout
Although logic suggests that Inbound Leads win hands down in terms of effective conversion rate, the chances are you probably won’t have enough inbound leads to sustain you. So, while inbound leads might be easier to convert from query into sale, for smaller business inbound leads can sometimes be like coming across a Unicorn. While outbound can provide that constant steady stream! It’s important to embrace both if you want to truly scale your business. Why not have both firing on all cylinders?
Let’s look into these categories a little more.
Inbound
Facebook Ads
Facebook Ads have changed the global business landscape. Period.
Emerging in 2008, Facebook Ads have taken the world by storm, allowing businesses to target potential leads in previously unprecedented ways. Think about it: everytime you respond to a friend’s post you tell Facebook something really specific about your preferences. You can tell your friend (and, in turn, Facebook) that you Like a post, you Love it, you find it funny, are amazed by it, feel saddened or angry about it. And with each interaction tells Facebook a little more about you.
When you go to a concert and upload a photo, you tell Facebook what type of music you like. You tell them that you enjoy nights out at entertainment events. You probably also tell them that you like curry and drink wine and that you use an Uber to get home (if you log into Uber through your Facebook account). As soon as you comment or share or Like a political post, they know how you’re going to vote. They know if you spend your time watching Rick & Morty or share ill-researched articles from The Daily Mail.
They know everything about you.
It’s a bit stalky, isn’t it.
Don’t panic!
This is good.
Kind of.
For marketing purposes, this is brilliant.
Facebook is THE most valuable online resource we have at our disposal – because they have individual profiles of their 2.32 billion users; that’s 30% of the population of the planet.
If you’re selling a brand of make-up, you can be pretty certain that Facebook knows who watches make-up tutorials. If you provide a house-cleaning service, Facebook knows who has a full social and business life with plenty of disposable income to spend on home help. If you sell T-shirts aimed at 23-year-olds who enjoy Parks and Recreation and alcopops, Facebook are going to have a section in their little-black-book that ensures that you advert hits the right timelines. It’s amazing. And it’s pretty hard to deny its value.
You can target your advertising by age, gender, interests, location, website interests – basically, anyone you can think of – they have demographic information to reach them.
The Bottom Line:
PROS
• You can target your advertising to an extremely specific target audience – people who are very likely to interact with you.
• You offer them something they want. Win win.
• It’s completely trackable
CONS
• Reaching saturation point (to a certain degree). People are becoming wise to the algorithm and getting ‘advertising blindness.’
• Requires some technical skill to get it right. You have to invest the time to become an expert or hire someone great.
• Becoming more expensive everyday.
• More suited to the consumer market than B2B.
The average cost of a lead:
According to Marketing Charts’ summary of a Hotspot report, the average cost for a B2B lead for in 2017 (from all channels) was $172.72 (USD).
Bearing in mind that this figure was established in 2017, it’s probably a higher in 2019.
Google Ads
Google are another company that own a wealth of information about their users.
Google’s AI algorithm, RankBrain, has taken machine-learning to a whole new level.
