Digital Marketing Insider (I.A.N.5): 2-2-24

🎉 🎊 Greetings, Marketers! 🎉 🎊

Welcome back to the heart of our "Internal Author Newsletters" (I.A.N.), your Friday beacon of marketing insights, released faithfully at 5 am ET. Your warm feedback from last week fueled our excitement! 🙌

Today's spotlight? 4 Secrets From A Lead Gen Agency on how to Improve Lead Quality 🌐✨

Our seasoned guide on this lead generation journey is none other than Alex Swope, our Director of strategy. A true maestro when it comes to unraveling the intricacies of boosting lead quality!

Every Friday, let's unravel the brilliance together.

Stay engaged, stay inspired.

How to Improve Lead Quality: 4 Secrets From A Lead Gen Agency

Why Does Lead Quality Matter?

If you’re in the lead gen game you know there’s one thing that can sink your brilliant new campaign (that’s bringing in tons of leads for a fraction of the price) faster than the blink of an eye: your sales team tells you all the leads you’re generating are shit.

🙁

Gumming up your sales pipeline and BDRs with crummy leads ultimately gives them a lot less time and energy to do the followup and high-touch nurture necessary to make sales. So, how do you improve lead quality — fast?

Let’s start by saying that increasing your lead quality doesn’t mean doubling your CPA (though it may mean recalculating your allowable CPA). We can still get good quality efficiently, if we get clever.

One more thing complicating this whole picture is how ad platforms like Meta and Google have pushed advertisers to use more and more automated bid strategies that often seem to limit the targeting that marketers can do. Gone are the days when Facebook let you directly target all kinds of personal attributes.

Wow, we’re up against a lot! But fear not — here are some actionable tips on how to increase your lead quality, so you never have to worry about bogging down your sales team with low-value prospects ever again.

1. Increase Lead Quality By Asking More Questions

Marketers are often scared to make updates to forms, especially if it means adding more questions. Mo’ questions, mo’ problems! I generally expect adding a question to decrease conversion rate ~10%, so why would you do it? Because knowledge is POWER.

Assuming you aren’t just targeting poor quality audiences or search terms, you are likely talking to the right people. There are just a lot of wrong people in there with them. And that makes sense, right? Even these advanced algorithms have a hard time telling who is in-market for a medical SaaS or whatever it is you’re selling. 

So how do you identify lead quality before they have even converted? Just straight up ask them if they are qualified with questions like:

1. Do you currently have a medical management solution

2. Do you have a marketing budget of at least $500,000

3. Are you retired?

To know what questions to ask your prospects, first ask yourself: What defines a good lead? Ideally, you’ll work with your sales team to come up with one, or at most two, qualifying questions to test out on your lead gen form. These should be questions that allow you to clearly differentiate qualified leads from unqualified ones.

Now you can filter out bad leads, don’t even send people to the sales team unless they pre-qualify by answering the form questions right. You get to be your own bridge troll, asking riddles and only letting the good prospects through.

Whoever is managing the ad platforms can also use that lead data to see if a particular campaign is driving a higher % of qualified leads than another and at what cost. Now we’re talking! You can now give the algorithms not just a CPL but a CPMQL to judge ad performance off of.

2. Using Selective Conversion Signals To Improve Lead Quality

This one is more technical, and you’ll need help from your development team most likely, but this is the 🔥 that drives scale most effectively.

What’s always been true is that adding layers of targeting increases CPMs. The more defined the audience you want, the more you pay to get in front of them.

Now, however, ad platforms are encouraging and rewarding BROADER targeting. OK, so how would broader targeting lead to better quality? 

Spoiler alert: it doesn’t.

Not unless you are selectively firing conversion data back into the platform to tell the algorithm ‘go find me more people like this’. Here’s more details on how that works, but long story short is: don’t tell the ad platform you got a conversion unless the conversion was qualified.

NOW you can take advantage of the true power of automated bid strategies: broad targeting and algorithmic training to find highly qualified prospects within that broad audience at rock bottom prices (since, again, your targeting is still very broad).

As you send more conversion data, the algorithm will find more and more qualified leads without you having to touch any targeting settings. And since your audience is very broad, you can scale without adding new audiences, just increase the budget and let the platform spend that money on more ‘good fits’ in the sea of all users.

3. Using Qualifying Creative To Improve Lead Quality

Here’s one that takes much less technical skill, and has had a transformative effect on our clients’ performance.

Instead of adding friction to the form with more qualifying questions, what if you could stop bad fits from even clicking on your ad? This is going to cut tons of wasted spend and help train the algorithm who your best prospects are in a VERY SHORT time (since we are firing many more signals on ad clicks than conversions). You’ll also likely see conversion rate skyrocket as your site visitors become more and more qualified for your specific offer.

What do I mean by specific? Here’s one of my favorite ads of all time. When I first saw it, I was in awe.

3 times they reiterate: for people thinking about retirement with $500k. How bold is that!? If you run an ad like this, you will instantly see a massive increase in the rate of people with more than 500k clicking on your ads. How do I know? Because I immediately started incorporating qualifying call-outs in our ads when I saw what Fisher was doing, and it worked for us too. 

Is your offer only for enterprise? Only for people on an existing framework? Only for people in a specific industry? Leverage that with a design that EXCLUDES everyone else. This works even better on PPC platforms because you stop them before they click (and you pay).

4. Improve Lead Quality By Gating The Real Offer Behind A Qualifying Form

Here’s another one that is a little on the technical side, but only requires some simple logic to send people to 1 of 2 thank you pages after they fill out your form:

1. Thank you page for people that aren’t qualified - you can offer them entry into your nurture until they are qualified. Or just say ‘thanks!’

2. Thank you page for people that ARE qualified - here’s where your REAL offer is - the demo, the discovery call, the consultation, etc.

Never again will the sales team get a meeting booked from an unqualified prospect! Unqualified prospects literally don’t even get the option to move farther down your sales funnel.

The funny thing about this tactic is how well it works. I call it a ‘Thank you page upsell’ and I was honestly skeptical at first. We just got them to download a content offer, how likely is it that they will want to immediately book an appointment?

But, book they did! Especially when we crafted a message tying into the content they just downloaded: i.e. ‘Questions about the guide? Schedule time to discuss with an expert’.

That tie in actually made the user feel like they were getting a highly personalized offer - you can even tell the user that they are a good fit, right on the page ‘Clients like you have a lot of success with our strategies, so we’d like to offer you a consultation’. That kind of thing. 

Ready to improve lead quality?

Let me know if you implement any of these strategies and find success! If you’d like to talk about how to implement some of these ideas in your own campaigns, reach out to schedule time with one of our marketing experts.

Let’s talk.

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