In a blog earlier this week called, 5 Traits of a Strong Lead Generation Strategy, we said that lead generation was the lifeblood of any growth-minded business.
Generating the leads you need to grow is critical. However, tracking and then managing what each individual lead costs your business in time and treasure is an equally important yet often overlooked aspect of marketing success.
Let's take a look at how businesses can reduce their marketing cost-per-lead. Here are a few tips to ensuring the leads you generate make sense within the context of your bottom line:
Yes, this is a topic our blog drills home time and again: businesses need to have mechanisms in place to know what's working and what's not.
A Facebook ad campaign might produce some leads and your inbox might have several new inquiries. To know if this campaign actually worked with your margin or bottom line, you need to know the following information:
The above are just a few examples of items you need to track, review and analyze in order to fully understand if any marketing strategy is producing at a rate that's in line with your margins and bottom line.
If you don't have accurate tracking and reporting, you can't know if your marketing strategy is really working.
Being over-lenient on outbound marketing tactics like direct mail, print advertising and radio campaigns, to site a few examples, will generally result in higher cost-per-lead.
Finding the right mix is crucial to managing cost-per-lead. And adopting a more integrated approach to marketing can certainly help reduce costs, particularly if you adopt a more digital approach to reaching prospects where they spend their time online.
When your business truly understands the behaviors and needs of its audience and personas, it can reduce the cost it takes to generate a qualified lead.
Knowing your buyer's journey allows for highly targeted marketing that requires less cost to do much more.
Matching your marketing efforts to the buyer's journey should compress the time to qualify leads and close them, thereby reducing the time and treasure spent.
Generate great content consistently. Blog, post to social media, leverage fruitful keywords. Streamline your URLs and Google search titles. Get backlinks. Guest blog.
While there are initial hard costs to building your website and enabling blog functionality, consistent content generation and improving your organic search results by building your company's online presence will generate significantly lower cost-per-lead numbers.
You'll incur soft costs in billable time from staff, but the hard costs are virtually non-existent after a period of time. High quality, organic leads from search are the gold standard for any company.
We offer valuable tips and insights like this multiple times each month via our blog and our monthly newsletter. We hope you found these tips useful.
If you'd like us to take a look at your marketing program and offer you some immediate impact recommendations, sign up for our Immediate Impact Audit today — you'll be happy you did.