Lead generation has three undeniable truths:
It’s easy to drive leads.
It’s hard to drive quality leads.
If you deliver poor ones, your sales team won’t be happy.
Nearly every lead gen brand that approaches my agency struggles with driving the right leads.
Despite digital marketing’s constant evolution over the past 20 years, the issue persists.
My recent presentation at SMX Next honed in on how to address this problem by focusing on the initiative to drive better PPC leads.
The core principles of this approach remain consistent:
Basic lead qualification infrastructure.
Fluency with media levers.
Strategic creative.
Advanced data management and integration.
Let’s take a closer look at each.
Lead qualification infrastructure
As a starting point, make sure you’re set up to do at least manual lead qualification in a CRM instance that captures UTMs and click IDs.
This will give you the basic information about where your leads are coming from.
Part two of this is using a lead scoring tool to identify MQLs and implementing a system that moves the right users through the stages of the purchase journey set up in your CRM:
SALs (sales-accepted leads).
Opportunities.
Customers.
And whatever the nomenclature is for your business.
Most companies rely on platforms like HubSpot or Salesforce for lead management.
Often, the challenge is ensuring sufficient data density to effectively distinguish strong leads from weak ones.
While some third-party tools can automate lead scoring, ChatGPT offers a practical alternative for evaluating lead strength when manual scoring is time-consuming.
Once you can parse the good leads, you can train the algorithms to find more of them.
Here, we’ll stick with the primary B2B lead channels, Google and LinkedIn.
The main Google levers for successful lead gen are placements and integrated data.
To start, take raw queries and group them tightly by theme.
If your account has any history, it’s essential to break out all queries, including evergreen and high-performing queries.
Then, run an analysis incorporating the CRM data tracking your leads through more advanced stages.
The result: you’ll be able to go beyond CPL and see where to spend your budget if you want to grow your pipeline:
Several other considerations are involved in running effective lead gen campaigns on Google, including saving your budget for the placements most likely to draw quality leads.
First, check your networks on Google.
Do not get sucked in Search Partners unless you’re absolutely maxed out everywhere else.
The platform is hard to manipulate. While you will get leads, they’re almost universally poorer quality than what you’ll find elsewhere in Google search.
You can make a similar case for mobile – plenty of leads, relatively low quality.
But this is due in part to the nature of the platform. It’s harder to read content, which doesn’t lead to deep research.
With mobile, consider lowering your investment until you get the efficiency numbers you’re targeting for later-stage lead activity.
Other campaign types, including Performance Max, display and Demand Gen campaigns, have the same issues: leads are abundant but often fraudulent and bot-driven.
Despite Google’s, at times, heavy-handed encouragement to use PMax, it just isn’t ready for prime time.
You can improve performance by using brand/query exclusions and down-funnel conversions optimization. That said, I recommend leaving it alone for now and focusing your budget elsewhere.
As for LinkedIn, the conversation about driving higher-quality leads starts with the platform’s unique targeting. I recommend you look at:
Company size: Don’t target small companies for enterprise products or vice versa.
Titles: Even within the right companies, try to limit sales/business development people because they live on LinkedIn sourcing leads.
Stay tightly aligned with your client (or in-house teammates) to spot opportunities to refine your targeting across channels.
This often involves evaluating lead quality based on geographic location (there can be a ton of variety by geo) and finding small pockets of opportunity specific to the brand.
For example, if a brand has an amazing cluster of salespeople in one geo that makes each quality lead likelier to close, factor that into your strategy.
Dig deeper: Paid search for lead gen: Tips for new accounts with limited budgets