One of the most frustrating things that you may experience as a business owner is not having an effective lead generation campaign. Even if you have the best of products or the most efficient of services to offer, without valuable leads your business will not be generating any sales – and this of course will affect your profit and your bottom line.
Many start-up business owners however do not have enough resources that they can use to invest heavily in marketing and advertising unlike big corporations or multinational companies. Many simply rely on word-of-mouth advertising or use available digital marketing techniques to increase brand awareness for a more effective lead generation campaign. A recent survey by Webmarketing123 highlighted SEO, Pay-Per-Click advertising and Social Media Marketing as the top digital marketing tools that are most effective for lead generation for both the B2B and B2C markets).
The survey pointed at Search Engine Optimization (SEO. as the tool with the biggest impact on lead generation goals, but as we learned here in Digital Marketing Philippines, the nature of PPC Advertising makes it a more effective tool for generating targeted leads that have the most likelihood of converting into sales. From a sales perspective, the use of PPC advertising can be a better choice if you need to generate valuable leads within the shortest possible time, which may not be possible with SEO.
That is why it is very important for business owners and digital marketers to pay close attention on their PPC campaigns as this tool has the strongest potential of helping you achieve your goals. It would be wise to keep in mind that PPC is a paid advertising channel, so it would be wise not to waste any of your investments and ensure that you get the results your PPC ads were intended to generate using these 8 secrets that can boost your lead generation campaign.
1. Direct Prospects to a Landing Page – Not Your Home Page
One of the biggest mistakes digital marketers make in their PPC advertising campaigns is to link their ads to their main websites and direct targeted traffic directly to their home page. If you want to get the most from your PPC ads and generate valuable leads that may spell the success of your business, then you should direct your prospects to a well-designed landing page instead.
Although your home page may tell the most comprehensive information about your brand, product or service, landing pages were specifically designed to generate a direct action from a website visitor that will convert them either as a business lead or a paying customer. The key here is to go direct to the point and focus everything there is in your landing pages with one end goal in mind – lead generation.
2. Your Content Should Match Your PPC Advertisement
Online users who clicked or responded to your PPC advertising did so because they wanted more information about a product or a service your ad was talking about. They would expect that the landing page they will eventually be brought to after clicking on your ads will provide them with the answers they need. It your ad focused on a certain keyword or topic, it should be expected that your landing should provide more information about that particular keyword or topic.
Don’t let your landing page visitors wonder whether they have arrived at the right web page or not. They would expect something more about the keyword or topic and would definitely be turned off if your landing page content talks about something else entirely. Your content should be primed to entice landing page visitors to become a lead or a customer, so make everything count as very relevant to their needs or what they are looking for.
3. Optimize Your Lead Generation Form
The contact or lead generation form that you have included in your landing pages is created for one particular but very important purpose, and that is to collect important information about a web page visitor and convert them into valuable leads. That is why it is very important to have your forms designed with lead generation as its primary focus. It would not be wise to add embellishments on your forms as these would only create distractions for site visitors.
Just take for example the Captcha field which is basically not really appealing for many web page visitors. It would be to your greatest advantage to have your forms focused only on the most important items that you need to know. Avoid including form fields that would ask a bunch of questions that are really not that relevant enough for your purposes.
4. Give Rewards or Offers When Visitors Sign Up on Your Lead Generation Form
Hand-in-hand with your lead generation form, you should include rewards and offers that you would most willingly give site visitors in exchange for their sign-up information to a blog or newsletter. There are lots of rewards or special offers that you can give your lead generation prospects. This includes eBooks, whitepapers, presentations or videos.
These giveaways should also be well-designed to give your web visitors something of value that will entice them to know more about what your brand, product or service has to offer. It would be wise to place your offers in a prominent location near your lead generation form, with customized graphics and text that will entice people to make a response to a particular call-to-action.
5. Provide Evidences to Support Your Advertising Claims
To make the text of a PPC Ad more enticing for targeted prospects, digital marketers will embellish them with claims intended to create a wow factor and make people click on your ads. However, it would be wise to support these advertising claims with enough evidences that will gain the trust of your targeted audiences.
One of the more convincing tools that could support your claim as a reputable product or service is the customer testimonial. Aside from that, you can also try using or incorporating other tools that would help convince your site visitors even further including slideshows, white papers and eBooks. To top it all up, you should also feature prominently trust seals from organizations or agencies that will definitely increase your credibility and gain your targeted audiences’ trust.
6. Address Every Possible Objections Prospects May Have About Your Products or Services
If you are offering a particular brand, product or service, you should expect consumers to throw all sorts of questions or even objection centered around what you have offered them. These inquiries will include everything including your prices, difficulty in setting your products up, and other sort of questions born from their uncertainty of availing of your product.
It would be to your greatest advantage to answer all these questions right away even before the questions or objections have been casted out. Side by side comparisons with other similar products or an F.A.Q. (Frequently Asked Questions. list will dispel any doubt or objection they may have that is hindering them to sign up as a business lead or even a customer.
7. Provide Easy Ways for Prospects to Contact You
Even in an online marketplace, many people are still more comfortable talking directly to a person who can answer their inquiries about your product or your service. With many scammers out there, people are finding ways to distinguish the real deal from those who are not and contacting them directly through phone would be a good choice for them to take. By putting in a contact number, you can help further dispel any doubts or apprehension they may have about your product or service after clicking on your PPC Ad.
If you are not comfortable providing a contact number, you may opt for a live chat facility instead. Like talking through the phone in real time, live chat can definitely increase your conversion rates exponentially. The only drawback here is that websites are available 24 hours a day and 7 days a week, so it would only be logical to have people available to man the chat fort each and every day. If this may be beyond your resources, you may opt to specify periods where chat is available much like having operational hours in a mall or a store.
8. Track Conversions
This is probably the most under-utilized but also very important tool when doing lead generation via PPC. There really is no excuse to not make use of conversion tools offered by different providers to track the conversion rates of your lead generation efforts via PPC. Major PPC networks like Google Adwords and Facebook Advertising also offers conversion tools of their own to help you track your lead generation efforts, whether it’s giving you the results you need or not. There are lots of reasons why you should track your conversions but it’s beyond the scope of this post. For now, let’s just simplify that if you don’t track your conversions you are not getting the clear picture of your lead generation campaign and that can make or break your business.
BONUS – The Thank You Page
When people do sign up for your blog or newsletter or download an eBook and provided their contact information, it would be a great strategy to lead them to a thank you page once transactions have been completed. This applies to both lead generation and sales. Doing so can increase brand awareness as you can add more info about your products or services on this page together with the confirmation codes that are used to signify their subscriptions. You can also use thank you pages to upsell other products or lead them to your social network group or community – which can solidify your relationship with your prospect or customer even more.
Pay Per Click (PPC) advertising is a very effective digital marketing tool for generating targeted leads that have a greater than average possibility for conversion. There are many ways on how you can generate leads using PPC but these 8 little secrets Digital Marketing Philippines have just shared with you can definitely put you on a highly-targeted path towards Internet marketing success.
Jomer B. Gregorio is a well-rounded expert when it comes digital marketing. Jomer is also known as a semantic SEO evangelist and practitioner. Check out our Digital Marketing Services today and let us help you in achieving positive and profitable results for your business.