023. How to Generate High-Quality Paid Media Leads (Part 1)

One, this is Emilio Garcia from Demand Gen Studio. Welcome to another episode of this series of live stream events and also podcast. I'm really happy for having the opportunity to have a conversation with you today. And we are. Another great thing that I want to share with all of you today is that we are also streaming to what I believe is going to be in Twitter. So we are now streaming live from LinkedIn, from Facebook page, from our Facebook page and now from our Twitter or my Twitter profile. So if you happen to be there, say hi. If you are listening or watching right now, tell me where are you watching from and I will put some comments at the end. Today in our Demand Studio series we're going to talk about how to generate high quality paid leads. This is a topic that came to mind because I found these very interesting document from Google, actually from Google Ads to what they call the growth formula. And it's geared toward different scenarios like if you want to create sales or improve sales or you want to improve brand awareness in general. And they cover a section specifically on quality leads. And I said, you know, this is a great topic to have a conversation about. I'm just going to extend it to not just Google Ads because the recommendations do not only apply or doesn't apply only to Google, it can be applied to any other paid media efforts, just like you know, Microsoft ads or LinkedIn ads or Facebook ads. So a very interesting idea. And generally the fundamental here is we, I understand for, because that happens with most of our clients that every dollar that you paid to create leads or to create traffic matters, right? Especially if you want to scale the effort. And so a lot of people, you know, ask me, well, what is the right way to set up all that effort. And there's a, I will use that same word that Google uses. There's a formula, there's a process that you need to master that would allow you to accomplish just that. So it's going to be a lengthy episode or a lengthy topic. So I probably am dividing it into two sections. So this is going to be part one and there's going to be a second episode, a follow up where I will cover the rest of the idea. Today I want to cover generally the idea of the first two parts which are going to be around the goals and lead to sale journey and also a little bit about the objectives. And in the second part we will cover the actual action plan and how do you measure and adapt the strategy depending on the results that you obtain at the beginning. So I will start with the first, the first section and is, you know, covering their company objectives and mapping your lead to sale journey. So very, very important, right? You, you, you can, if you want to start, just set up or set up a bunch of keywords and some ads or some images, headline descriptions and start a Facebook campaign. Everybody can do that. You don't need a expert to do that, you don't need an agency to do that. But usually that's a recipe for disaster because not because you might not have the right copy, the right keywords, but because you don't have a clear idea of what you want to accomplish. You're just taking action with not a clear plan. And that's really, really important. And that plan doesn't cover just marketing, but it's actually the business, the company. So the first question that you have to ask, especially if you want to improve the lead quality and drive business growth, is what are your objectives? And in those objectives have levels and I will cover each of them. But you have business or company goals and then you narrow it down to your marketing goals and then you narrow it even down or even, you know, deeper or more specifically narrowly into your media or campaign goals. You have these layers that you need to start working from and they are critical to your success. So that will be a big portion of it. And I will try to cover some of those ideas in the next section. But the other important one is that you need to map the path that a lead follows or takes after you get it and up to the point of sale. And this is critical because even for a campaign where you're optimizing for leads, if you just optimize for the lead, but not for what happened after. So if you don't optimize for the fact that that lead will become eventually qualified and an opportunity or sales, you will get just a bunch of volume or leads, but not certainly business. So at the end, if you move a campaign from just traffic oriented to lead oriented, but you never get into the sales component or the revenue component, you're just pushing the problem or moving the problem one step further and that's will take a longer time for you to realize that or to the person that is actually paying for the campaign to realize that, but eventually they will see that there's not impact on the business and you will stop the effort. So critical that you map your lead to sale journey. And what I mean by that is asking those questions, right? What happened after a person filled the form, did I request info? Do they start a trial? Do they set up a campaign? Do they have a conversation with a sales rep, is there a contract involved, all those little steps, you need to map them out and then you assign value to them, right? So you want to understand from the beginning to the end what is the value of it. Obviously value is created at the end, right? It's when person fills a contract or starts a contract or just start spending money in the company. For example, it's a SaaS company or business. So there's going to be very different ways to measure that. It can be one transaction, it can be lifetime value, which what matters is that you assign a value if you have multiple products or services or different paths to conversion, map out all those potential values and you can create an average. And then you work backwards, right? So your average cost per or average value per client might be $10,000. And then based on all the mapping that you did, you decide that the value of an opportunity might be, for example, I don't know, half of that $5,000. And then you go backwards and go to maybe a sales qualified lead or MQL marketing qualified lead, depending on how you set up those internally. And so you take those steps until you have a value that you can assign to the lead, which is what you're going to get out of the campaign if you are setting up a campaign ad for that. So you need those little steps. And, and the reason you want to have not just the final value but the auto steps is because you can optimize for those two eventually. Maybe at the beginning you can't, but you need to have that figure out from the beginning so you can start measuring and eventually discover what is the return on investment for your campaign. And you know the other thing will be how big the effort has to be so you can get the results that you're looking for, right? So mapping the lead to sale journey and assigning value is critical. Very related to that is you need to understand your pipeline, right? And what I mean by that is you need to understand your sales cycle, how long it is and where are you storing the information that you are collecting from your prospects or leads. Is there a CRM in place? Are you updating that information is correctly segmented? Is sales following up? So those parameters are important so you can have that clear idea. Keep in mind that once you do that you will discover that most of the time what matters is quality over volume. And what I mean by that is that in reality you don't need leads, what you actually need are paying customers. So it makes no sense to get, you know, you say, I have a great campaign because I get tons of leads, but if most of them are not closing, then you are just putting work on yourself. And there might be other strategies that will be more profitable where you will not have to, you know, swipe over many, many leads to just get one opportunity and, and have success. So that process of mapping the lead to sales process or the lead to sales journey will help you to understand or see or discover that usually you should concentrate on the channels that bring you quality over volume, right? Even if it's inexpensive. Now, once you have map out that path, then it's time to move into the objectives, right? So here, as I was sharing at the beginning, you want to make sure that you follow the process of mapping your business, marketing, media and campaign objectives. So business objectives, you start at the very top. Usually they fall into three potential camps. So you either want to increase market share or for your service or product, you want to increase total revenue for your product or for your company, or in other cases, you want to increase profit, right? It's not necessarily revenue, but more if it's having more profitable engagements for the volume that you have. Usually it's a combination of the three, right? You want to increase market share, you want to increase revenue, and you want to have more profitable engagement. Whatever the combination is, what matters is that this objective should be smart, right? What is called smart, meaning that they got to be measurable, they got to be bound to a timeline. And you should have a clear way to understand if you accomplish the goal or not. If you accomplish the goal or not, you can envision business objectives are the goals that your CEO or the business owners have, right? So that's the way that you know that you're talking about business objectives. And for example, it can be, you know, we want to increase our revenue in 20% for the next year, or we want to increase market share by 5, 10% in the next 12 months. Once you have that one, then you go one layer down and map out your marketing objectives. And the reason I say map out and not transform or just convert is because sometimes they don't completely align. And that's okay as long as they have some alignment, right? Those will come from your CMO or from the person responsible for the overall marketing effort. And it's the same idea. They got to be smart, they got to be measurable, and they should be time to do a timeline. But obviously these ones will be more around, you know, for example, qualified pipeline or amount of MQLs or amount or for example a percentage of sales that will come from online efforts, right? Because not all leads will come from the online efforts. You might have some offline efforts that you want to focus on. So you just want to be. You want to make sure that your business goal can be accomplished with some of the marketing goals. If not all, then you lower down a little bit more. And then you have your media objectives that are usually drive by the digital marketing team. So this market in general marketing goals, some of them will have to do with branding, for example. So those might be outside of your, you know, scope. If you are in the just in the digital marketing team, driving performance or just brand awareness. So those will be more about, you know, I call means to an end. They are not necessarily the end, but those objectives can help you accomplish those, those, you know, marketing and business goals. Some idea is that you can break them down into two big camps. You have the performance objectives, right? Those are the ones that most people care about most of the time. Like actual actions that people is taking on the website or offline. It can be phone calls, it can be forms being filled, it can be trials started or demo requests. And then you have the other ones that are brand objectives. Sometimes they call it soft goals which are harder or less tangible like ad recall or brand awareness or brand interest. One important thing here, and it's actually something that have changed in my own mind over time, is that there's nothing wrong with brand objectives. Actually they're quite relevant or quite important because always brand goals or brand objectives eventually help and they should help the performance objectives that happen. So my recommendation is that even if your organization is driven a lot by performance, you shall allocate at least some amount of your efforts to build your brand because that eventually drive performance. And it's like working on your fundamentals. It really drives performance up eventually if you have the right setup to measure that. And it's possible to measure, for example, if you do any brand effort. One critical or easy way to spot that you are going in the right direction is that your branded search volume should increase because people is searching for your brand directly instead of searching for the generic definition of your product or service. So really important there. Now obviously once you have defined those media objectives, then you go to the campaign ones. So these are the specific goals that you set up on the campaign in whatever platform they're using. So that's when you go for your maximize clicks or have a specific target impression, share if you're going for brand or reaching a specific amount of people or making sure that a specific amount of impressions are delivered per person or per user. And obviously you have all the performance ones like cost of acquisition, so optimizing for conversions or having a target. And ideally you want to have return on ad spend. And that's the hardest one to have because you really need to bring to the platform that you're using your definition of value, right, and have a clear understanding of the amount of value that you are creating out of the campaign. So you can say, well, I'm willing to spend $1 to get $2, or $1 to get 1.5 or 2 or 3, whatever makes sense for you. And that's the harder one. But at the same time is the one that you eventually should strive for, right? Even if you cannot do it from the beginning. Now, the other critical element here is that you really need to understand your customers. How do you find them and use that information to cater or transform the way that you, that you present your creatives, right? So once you have understood your journey and the goals that you want to accomplish, then you want to set up the right fundamentals to have a successful digital advertising effort. So you start with your data, right? Some quick recommendations is that it's important that you use your first party data and avoid third party cookies or third party information. Mostly because nowadays with all the privacy efforts around, you know, advertising in general, that information will be less and less accurate and you will not be able to rely on it as easily as in the past. And also because the, you know, the real value and understanding of your clients is probably just in your CRM. It's just that you need to find a way to extract it and present it in a way that the ad platform can make use of it. So a couple of very quick things that you can do here should making sure that you have your global site tag in the case of Google or Pixel or Script for depending on the platform that you're using across all your website, you're making sure that you're measuring your website visitors, obviously disclosing that you are collecting cookies, you are collecting information, all that to whatever extent you are doing it, but having it implemented and then on top of that is critical that you import your CRM data. So depends on the CRM. The whole idea again here is to bring the information that you already have collected through forms and even just the transactions that happens on the CRM and bring it to the app platform so you can have a better definition of your audience and create similar audiences out of that. It's not just that it's just that also usually the data that you have on the CRM is better segmented than anything that you can have. You will have information about leads and opportunities and current and past clients, and you can create segments out of all that information and then have more specific campaigns and tailor your campaigns, depending on brand awareness or performance, to what you want to accomplish. As I was telling you before, the other great thing, the other important thing you want to do is to actually map out what are the valuable actions that people can perform on your website. So taking that idea of the lead to sale journey, once you have defined those steps, once you have defined the value you need to create the conversions or the valuable actions inside that app platform, assign those values so you can start preparing the foundations to improve your bidding in this case, or the way that you budget for the campaign. There are many reasons you want to do that, but let me give you a couple of examples. Obviously, the first one is in general attribution. So there are different models that you can use and different platforms have different ideas. But in general, what you want to accomplish is that you want to make sure that if someone sees an ad or someone clicks on an ad, that that action or friends a form or eventually becomes an opportunity, that action is attributed to some level to the campaigns that you're running, right? So one quick thing that you can do is to make sure that you're not running what is known as last click attribution, where you just give credit to the last interaction that a user had before filling a form. For example, you want to have something that is either linear or, or they can adapt based on the information. And the general idea is that that will allow you, but especially the ad platform itself, to understand what works and what doesn't. So the more that you can input those valuable actions, the better. You can start with simple things like people visiting the pricing page or people visiting the contact us page and then evolve into more complex and robust conversion actions like the forms being filled, phone calls being made, chat conversations being started. And as I was telling the beginning, if you really connect your CRM properly, you will be able to bring actions like marketing, qualifying leads, or when the sales rep create an opportunity and bringing the action and the value will allow you to move from the very simple automation mechanisms like maximize click to more robust ones like maximize conversion or even return on ad spend, right? So that's critical action or that's a critical reason why you want to define those valuable actions. And inside the platform. Next, you want to make sure that you use automation very related to that one, right? Once you have understood your actions, then you can, I'm so sorry here, then you can start unlocking the benefits of automation. Automation on app platforms works great, right? As long as you have defined those valuable actions from the get go. So for example, here one recommendation that I have is at the beginning, you can use very simple algorithms like just maximizing clicks or maximizing impressions or maximizing or having the most landing page views, for example. And you start collecting data that will give you a sense of the cost per click, that will give you a sense of the cost per impression, that will give you a sense of how competitive the market is. Because you will look at your impression share. But once you start accumulating data on your conversions, right? The ad platform itself will share with you some of the insights where you can move into and start automating. Like you can start moving into maximize conversion, for example, and some time pass by and you will start getting a sense of how much a conversion cost, right? You will be able to say, well, this is how much a conversion cost. And because you have defined all those attributes, then you might start looking at, well, now I want to automate even more and just optimize for a target that I have, right? If you say, well, my forms are worth $50, then that's how much I want to pay for one, right? $50. That's better than just maximizing for conversions. But eventually you want to optimize for return on ad spend. And what it means is that it's especially important in E commerce, but it can be used to some extent on B2B, right? Is that not all actions are created the same or are valued the same. Maybe you say, you know, a phone call for me is more valuable than a form or vice versa. So you define a different value and you say, you know, I'm willing to spend $1 to get $2 out of value. So you will be willing to pay more for a phone call than a form being filled, depending on your situation or the other way around. And that final stage is probably the one that is like the nirvana of automation based on attribution. It requires a lot of discipline and it requires to keep the model updated all the time because you will be pretty much working on averages unless you have very detailed data on the CRM and you are able to pretty much transfer each of your transactions into the app platform just like you will do on an E commerce website. But it's possible if you start from the basics like just measuring Valuable actions and then assigning value and moving later into those other ideas. Now finally, definitely you need to start thinking about how to create effective creatives, right? So really, really important. I always said that if you have to choose between choosing the right audience and choosing creatives, I rather choose the right audience first. That for me is important, right? That you are aligned with the kind of person they want to hear from you. But once you have, once you have that define clearly, then the next thing that will differentiate you from the competition will be how do you present yourself, right? And so here you go. For things that are well known and in this case are probably the part that has the biggest impact are your headlines. In all the different platforms you have a form of headline or big value proposition. So that's the one where you want to invest the most in terms of copy because. Because that's the one that people remember the most. And you go definitely for what makes you different. The benefits thinking always on what your potential client or customer is looking after. And rather than trying to present it in the way that about you or your company. You also want to make sure that if your ads are going to use images or videos, they don't really cater to the platform and, and to the time span that you have allowed. Usually videos got to be short because you have a small time frame to show compelling information. And in the case of images, one thing that I recommend a lot is that try to minimize the amount of text that you overlaid on the image or even logos and some that because nowadays most of those ads that you can create, they have specific portions or areas where you can put your logo, where you can put your copy. And so the image is more of attracting and creating something compelling to stop and read, right? Not certainly put the text on it. So that's my general recommendation. And the other big one that has improvement over the years is that you want to make sure that you use whatever each platform call it. In the case of Google they call it responsive. But the general idea is that you can auto test different ideas, right? Having multiple headlines at the same time on one asset or having multiple descriptions, having multiple texts on the case of social media, that's a fantastic idea because it allows you to have tons of combinations, right? If you have five headlines and you have five descriptions and five different images, imagine how many combinations you can create out of that. So you're talking about hundreds of combinations that can be tested in real time and you probably will discover that there's not such a thing as the best ad what really you have is that there's an ad for a different, for specific kind of person that will be interested in a specific combination and that combination will be relevant for them and, and it will not be relevant for someone else. Right? So invest a lot of time on developing those creatives and think of them holistically, thinking on, you know, what are the different headlines that I want to test? What are the different descriptions that I want to test? Images and video and put them together on these responsive assets. So you can let the platform, based on the data that you are providing from the CRM to start to discover what combinations work the best. Right. So in summary, for today's episode we cover as you can see things on figuring out your planning objectives, right? Going from the business goals to the marketing goals to the media goals to the campaign goals, really looking alignment on that to understand what you want to accomplish and really also important to pay attention to that combination of performance versus brand or and brand and making sure that you don't cater to just one of them. And the other important thing is that don't think that brand will never become or influence performance. It always does. And finally, on the strategy itself, it's obviously important that you define your creatives and that you feed data from your CRM into the out platform so you can start measuring at the beginning and then optimizing based on value. So with that foundation, we will be able to cover in our next episode. How do you take action, right? How do you implement those campaigns? How they look like depending on the different combinations and how do you measure and optimize and improve upon based on performance? I hope you have find this episode valuable and Jesus, nice to hear from you from our eight and yeah, I look forward to our next conversation in a couple of weeks and if you have any comments or any questions, please feel free to reach out. I'm mostly active on LinkedIn and now Twitter, so it will be a pleasure to have a conversation with you all. Have a great day. Bye bye.