5 Ways to Generate More Sales Leads
Let’s cut to the chase: we’ve come up with a list of ideas for increasing your online flow of sales leads. If you have a sales department, and you are using online marketing channels to generate leads, then the following advice will almost certainly apply to you. If your lead generation efforts are purring along like a perfectly tuned Ferrari, and you think you’ve tapped every possible source of online leads, even better. We’ve ferreted out some commonly untried tactics, and it’s likely there’s something on our list you haven’t tried yet. Read on to see where you may be missing out:
Click-to-Call
Adwords’ Click-to-Call program, which was launched a few months ago, allows mobile phone users to dial directly into your business by clicking on a phone number in your paid search ad. Rather than paying for a number of clicks, you are charged a flat fee of a dollar for each call. The benefits of this are two-fold: you circumvent several steps to get the lead directly on the phone, and the cost per lead essentially amounts to a dollar. In most cases, this dramatically beats out the cost per lead generated from a typical PPC ad. In addition, you are supplying an option to users who would rather call you directly than navigate through a website or fill out a form.
Mobile Device Specific Campaigns
Adwords provides a setting to advertise on mobile devices that is available in all types of campaigns; however, we recommend creating a campaign specifically for mobile devices. Few advertisers are advertising on mobile devices, so CPCs are very low for the moment, despite the fact that space on the page is limited. Include click-to-call in your campaign and provide a mobile device accessible landing page, and you have a recipe for higher conversion rates.
Retargeting (aka Remarketing)
Retargeting, which has long been available in content networks such as Yahoo! (at champagne prices that most businesses cannot afford), has come to Adwords in the last year. A retargeting campaign is similar to a content campaign, in that it shows advertisements to users across various sites within Google’s content network. The difference is that it targets advertisements to users who have visited your site recently, based on a cookie inserted into their browser. You can set the campaign to advertise strictly to users who have visited specific pages of your site (e.g. users who have visited your form page, but have not visited your thank you page). You can also configure your campaign to send specific advertisements to users who have visited specific pages of your site, thus customizing advertisements to users within different stages of your funnel. The best part is that your advertising is directed at users who have visited your site, and have thus qualified themselves as a relevant audience.
Geography Specific Campaigns
It pays to make use of geography settings for your marketing campaigns, especially if you have lead buyers concentrated in certain areas. We recommend paying close attention to where your leads are selling and where they are selling most profitably, and then either 1) Limiting your campaigns to those areas or 2) Creating campaigns specially targeted to the most profitable areas with higher bids.
Day Parting
It’s probable that your customers are seeking you out at certain times more than others. The most common division is between b2b and b2c customers, where business customers conduct most of their searches during weekdays, and private consumers search most often on evenings and weekends. More specifically, you can imagine that a customer seeking a sleep deprivation solution would be aptly targeted in the wee hours of the morning. Day parting enables you to run your campaigns during times and days of the week when they are most profitable. If segmentation is your game, you can even create multiple campaigns targeted to different times and days of the week, with bids set accordingly. We recommend delving into your day and time of week reports to see if day parting makes sense for your account.
These are just a few of our more popular tactics for increasing lead flow. Much to our delight as marketing geeks, the search engines are constantly innovating their advertising options, providing new means of segmenting and more precisely targeting search campaigns, and offering new tools (such as click-to-call) for improving click through rate and conversion. It’s our business to stay on top of new developments within Google and MSN, and we can provide even deeper insight on how to utilize the latest tools to increase your lead volume. Contact us today at SearchMarketing@360partners.com for more ideas.
