024. How to Generate High-Quality Paid Media Leads (Part 2)

From Demand Gen Studio, welcome to another episode of our series of live stream events and podcasts where we discuss demand generation topics for all B2B marketers in the industry. Today we are going to have a conversation which is a follow up on our previous episode. We were discussing how to generate high quality paid media leads and today we're continuing that conversation here. In our previous episode we primarily focus on the importance of setting up objectives and building that creative plan that will allow you to target your audience through paid platforms. If you remember, or if you listened to the previous episode, I based it on a website or a micro site that Google has developed for generating leads, but obviously it can be applied to many other situations if required. So now today we are going to focus on the next two steps which are taking the plan into action, actually launching those campaigns and the nuances on how to do it properly. And the second one will be once you launch, how do you evaluate and expand your efforts towards success? So that will be the focus of the conversation today. As always, if you are watching this live for any of the mediums or streams that we are having right now, please leave a comment, say where are you watching from? And if you have any question, put it on the comments and I usually answer them at the end of the stream of the streaming events. So let us dive right away. The first section will be while you are implementing that plan, the two areas of focus that usually you can have on paid advertising and while I will focus a lot into what that specifically matches for Google, you can use the same idea and apply it to other social media platforms like Facebook or Twitter or LinkedIn for short. But the general idea is that your campaigns can have two focus. One of the two focus can be either capturing existing demand or generating new demand. And so capturing existing demand is usually when you focus on performance metrics and for generating new demand, usually focus on those brand metrics that some people dismiss as soft or irrelevant ones. They are not. It's just that they are not performance. And there's nothing wrong with having both and or focusing on at the beginning, maybe on performance, but not forgetting that brand awareness or creating new demand is as important once you tap the bulk of it. So in my general recommendation here being very specific, usually most of our clients are constrained by budget even if they have money available because there are so many competing initiatives, right? Paid is not the only thing that they're going to do on their marketing program. So if you are constrained by budget, which usually is the case, my recommendation will be to start tapping or investing in capturing existing demand. And there are different levels of that. For example, going particularly with paid, the first bracket or step is that you go after branded search, meaning you target people that are using the keywords that represent your brand or combination of products. So that couldn't be more, you know, capturing the bottom of the funnel because those people are already searching for your product. They already know, you probably already know the solution. And when you use paid advertising, you have a say on how you present yourself, right? So in theory, if someone search for brand, they will find your website or your homepage. However, the meta description and the information that is shown there can only be, you know, one specific one, usually meta description or the main idea of the website. You can tailor it to the person that is doing the search. Give you an example, they might be in a different country, or they might be in a different location, or they might combine it with a different combination on your product. So if you want to be more specific about that, paid is a great way to not only explain better, put a call to action, add some extensions, but actually manage and measure what's going on because you have a help of data. So brand search is the one that I will recommend to start with. It will give you an idea of the, you know, the lowest cost of acquisition that you will have on paid, which is for brand. And after that the other next level will be people already searching for the category of your product or service, right? Not your brand, but the category that you are part of. The only scenario where that wouldn't apply if you have a product or a company that is so different that the category itself hasn't been established. But if that is not the case, and usually is not the case, then it will be recommended that you also create a campaign or a set of campaigns where you are capturing existing demand, but not for your products or services directly, but for the category that you belong to. And in the same way you will find, usually that's what will happen, that your cost of acquisition or you know, all the other metrics will be more expensive generally than obviously your brand. Because you have to convince the person that you are the right solution. Even when they already know that they, you know, they might be searching already for the solution, but they're aware of the problem, but they might not be known or you might not be known to them. And I will insert that the difference that brand makes, right? It's not the same if you have a recognizable brand. If you have invested heavily on brand, when someone search for the category and find Your brand, they will immediately recognize you and that trust will be built. So your paid advertising spending will have a bigger impact if your brand is recognized. If not. And that's usually why some people get, you know, not so good results or not so good return on, on non branded or generic search terms is because their brand is weak or it's not well known and there's not trust established. So It's a catch 22 there, right is you gotta build the brand, but at the same time you wanna get some demand. Just gotta be patient there. Now once you start with, you know, what you believe in is the way that most people is searching for your product or service. After a little while you will discover there are some other possibilities that you can extend to, right still bottom of the funnel, but maybe different ways that people search for your product. Maybe complementary services or products that go along with your service too. And obviously the other idea is someone searching for your competition. That's the toughest in my experience because they are really looking for your competition, not for you. So it's not even generic, they're looking for someone else. So just as you will be very strong on brand on your own terms, you will be the weakest on your competitors terms. However, this is still worth trying again thinking on that layer. If you capture as much traffic available for your brand first, then you can extend to capture all available or most of the available inventory of people searching for your category or product. And finally you can, if you still have budget available for the, for the demand or the capture demand portion, you can focus on your competitors for sure. One idea or recommendation that I have in terms of how you can improve the overall performance is that you could take advantage of all the additional ways that you can convey value, right? So take advantage of extensions like call to actions or if they're existing or call tracking features, call outs. If location is important to you, put your location. And again it varies depending on the platform. But the general idea is for capturing demand is that you can, you should offer as many channels as relevant to your business, to your clients. So people can go and visit, call, message you, chat with you or just fill a form. So try and again has to have to make sense for your company. If you have a chat but nobody's answering, then that will be a bad user experience. So focus on the channels that you really take care of, but offer as many as you can. So that will be the general recommendation for capturing demand on the, on the bidding side. The other big recommendation that I have on how do you Bid or how do you spend your money, how you optimize for conversions. In the past I for many many years we at Boundy5 focused on a lot of manual bidding strategies because the algorithms will not smart enough to really learn from conversions. So there was a lot of inefficiencies but but just with anything that AI or technology touches, the level of increments and improvement has been staggering, has been amazing. And so lately we rely more and more in automated strategies if we have good data. And that's the big caveat here. Automation works greatly. But if you feed the right information, if you feed enough conversion data. So usually my recommendation is if you want to, you can start manual just to get a sense of the bidding cost, either for impressions on social media or for clicks on search. I usually recommend though that you just maximize something that is below conversion like maximizing clicks or maximizing reach or maximizing impressions just to get a sense of what's going on. But as you remember we discussed it in the previous episode, your web analytics foundation has to be wonderful, right? It has to be great. And what I mean by that is that you have a clear definition of ideally one key conversion that usually for generating leads are forms or phone calls. Better yet, if you have some micro conversions like engagement with the page or time and all that. So to give you a reference, not to optimize, but at least to give you a reference of what's going on for different keywords and ads variations. And the best world will be if you're able to pull data from your CRM and quantify the value and the amount of not just lead, but marketing qualified leads opportunities and ideally clients and revenue value. So that's easier to implement in E commerce implementations. But to some extent it's possible to do two on the CRM for example. So in the sense that you have that data, then you can optimize based on that. The usual path will be again maximizing for a more kind of like ad oriented metric like impressions or clicks just at the beginning while you build up data. And usually either you will have the information, you will have enough information to do this shift on your own, or. Or the ad platform itself will recommend you that it's time to migrate to a more advanced bidding optimization strategy. Initially usually it's just maximizing your conversions and so that conversion will be your forms or your phone calls or a combination of those ideas. Eventually though, while you build up your CRM information and ideally if you have this previously discuss with the team and you have, you know, Years of information on the CRM, you will be able to judge how much a lead is worth to you, right? So you can come up with pretty much going back to this is the lifetime value of the client or the customer. And we will discuss a little bit about that later on the episode. But you back down from that into, well, this is how much is the opportunity worth. And then go back to marketing qualified lead or qualified lead in general, however you define it. And then you go to the lead and you translate that to conversions. So you can start saying, well, I'm willing to pay X amount of dollars per lead. And if you input that into the ad platform, then you will not just try to optimize to get as many conversions as possible because some of those conversions might have a different value from you. For an example, a form might be worth more or less than a phone call, depending on the number of fields and the kind of questions that you're asking. And the same goes for a chat conversation, so. Or different forms, right? A simple form with just subscribing to a newsletter will be worth way less than form when someone has commercial intent and explain, you know, details or share details, financial details, for example, if you, for whatever reason, I'm looking for some numbers. So the moment that you have that information, you can start optimizing to a target. But better yet, if you eventually are able to translate or bring the information from CRM in terms of revenue lifetime value, then you can use the ultimate optimization conversion or optimization bidding, which is roas, which is target return on ad spend. And that's the best. Usually the only accounts that I have seen that implemented well will be E Commerce. And even those, they have to really have a lot of information, a ton of conversion data to really work well. But that will be the goal, right? So the general recommendation will be start with manual slash maximizing something simple like clicks, Learn from that, maximize for conversions, learn from that, then jump into this is how much I'm willing to pay for a conversion or for a lead or for an opportunity. And ideally, eventually you have the customer, the value of your customer. And you can say, I'm willing to spend this percentage of the value of my client into bringing new one. So that will be the return on ad spend. And that's what people ideally want, right? Or the expectation that most people have have that, that idea of if I spend $1, I will get two or three dollars in revenue or gross profit, if that's another number. And it's possible, but it requires great implementation on the Web analytics requires great discipline in the part of the sales team to feed the right information on the CRM and obviously requires a great technical knowledge to import or sync that information and feed it back to the platform in the proper way. So you optimize for the right reasons. But however, again this will be kind of like the ideal. But if you implement that, you will be in this stage where you are capturing most of the demand that matters to you. So that will be the first stage, the second stage and you can start this on, you know, at the same time if you want to. But the next one will be there's a point where you will capture most of your most of the people that is willing to buy right now or that it's entertaining that idea. But usually of the overall addressable market for your company or the products that you are trying to sell, only a small fraction is ready to buy right now. Even when the rest might be the right target. This might be 1%, 2%, 3% of people at any given moment is looking to purchase from you or to purchase your product or service. The rest are in different stages of that point. Can be they are looking, they might be looking to solution in the future. They know they have a problem but for whatever reason they cannot get out of it like they're in a contract or there are a lot of integration in the case of software or any other reason. So they know that they need to act but it's not going to be right now. The other obviously the other scenarios will be someone already have the problem but is not aware of the potential solutions. And even some they just showing up the symptoms. They have no idea that that they have a problem or that there's a solution in the market. They might just think that there's nothing to be done. So this will be the stages of your typical funnel or the buyer's journey. And you can use pay media to be present to that population more from a brand perspective. So in those cases the context will be completely different because they will not be searching for you. And so in particular for Google Ads, that's where you have your display, that's where you have your YouTube ads, that's where you have your newly or kind of recent discovery ads that show up in Google properties and for other social media or for other platforms, mainly social media, that's where you will have your campaigns are not geared toward conversion and more toward engagement. So with your page likes you will be your engagement on the pay on post and comments video views. So there's nothing wrong with those kind of campaigns, they are quite effective, but not poor performance, usually because your audiences will be cold, meaning they are not searching for you. And so your metrics should be different and your goals should be metric should be different, right? In this case, probably you're going to go up for reach, right? Trying to reach as many people or many people as possible. You are going for ad, recall that they remember the ad and for that usually you manage frequency, right? Usually you don't deliver one impression, you deliver many across a long period of time. And you can also go for more, you know, more tangible metrics like engagement, followers, comments, video views, people saving your ads in the case of posts, and similar, similar effects. So you can explore many ideas here. Just be mindful that usually that spend will be down the road for the future. The only confusion or the only thing that I want to clarify that is that not because it's brand, it means I will not affect performance, it's just that it will do it eventually over time, it will compound over time. And usually that's the hardest part to attribute directly to conversions, right? Is that a scenario that I would explain before that if you have the effect of brand campaigns is that when you have a performance one, usually if you have a strong brand, your performance campaigns work better. So at the end of the day, what will happen is that you invest on branding, you invest on brand efforts or top of the funnel, or generating new demand, making new people aware of your brand. What will happen is that your performance campaigns will improve upon time and you need to make sure that you understand the difference. Because sometimes that can be confused with, oh well, I'm just optimizing my performance because I'm delivering better ads or I'm very more narrow on the audience. That definitely will help. But a component of that is how well are you known on the market. And even some efforts that are not digital will contribute to performance. As I was explaining in the previous episode, if you are present in trade shows, if you are present on, you know, your sponsor to events, or you are present where your potential buyers are in the physical world, that will have an impact on your performance. Digital efforts so really important there that you pay attention to those and you experiment. And usually you have a mix. If your efforts are geared toward improving revenue in the short term, then usually your mix is going to be more on performance. And I don't know, maybe 80%, 70% of your ad spend will go there and just 30%, 20% will go to brand. Don't neglect it. That will be the overall recommendation or be conscious of the fact that if you are just beating performance, then you are depriving yourself of the opportunity to improve it over time because you are not developing your brand. And trust issues are going to be a big factor for your performance. Now, once you start capturing demand and generating new demand, how do you go about improving performance? What strategies are available to you? We talked about a little bit the one that is ideally you want to move from manual efforts on bidding and focus on the strategy, focus on providing a lot of creatives because that allows the algorithm to test variations. So in the past, used to be that you have to come up with many variations on individual ads. Nowadays different platforms call it differently, but the idea is that some of them call it responsive or dynamic. But the general idea is that you provide a relevant mix of headlines, for example, and descriptions and other types of copy and assets like images and videos, and you let the algorithm mix and match depending on the specific situation in real time. And that's something that humans cannot accomplish, right? It's not about the, it's not about the mix themselves. It's not about the variations themselves. It's about the fact that if you can think of scenario where if you have enough headline descriptions and images, there might be a combination that is better fit for a particular person that will not work the same for another one, right? So it's not, I don't believe in the, you know, in the aggregating theory, there's such a thing as this is the best version of a headline or this is the best version of a description or the best version of an image. On the aggregate, you can say that on average this is the best asset. But I believe that in reality is more of this combination of headline, description and image work best for this kind of person or for this particular individual. So my general recommendation for optimization how to improve results is that you focus more on clearly defining your positioning what makes you different, what makes you unique, on providing real, really attractive images, videos that convey what you do in the best way possible and then just feed that to the algorithms and let them figure out what works best. And so. And the same goes for the bidding, right? Rather than optimizing for a particular cost per click or cost per implication impression, provide information about what's value to you and let the algorithm spend as much as possible within the parameters that you have that is, you know, profitable for you. Obviously in the, in the, in the process of doing that are some things that you can do. Another, another great tip would be and applies more to Google Ads than anything else. Is that you I recommend highly to play with the attribution models for the same reasons that we were discussing before previously for many, many years the only attribution model and the one that made sense because there was no way to track otherwise was a variation of last click or last action attribution, right? So I will attribute a conversion to the last channel that touch a person before completing the action that I wanted to accomplish like a form. So if a person found me organically and then click on an ad, the whole form of the whole conversion will be attributed to the ad to the paid channel and the organic portion will be ignored. And nowadays there are more advanced conversion algorithms or attribution algorithms that allows you to use different ideas like providing more or giving some attribution to the first channel that touches a person and also to the last one and anything in between. And that's quite helpful especially for brand efforts, right? So usually display video, they are not the final action, they are not the last channel that a person interacts with before taking a decision, but they contribute. And while it's not necessarily possible to capture all of it shifting into attribution models that have that multiple touch idea, Google uses something like data driven and position based and the other platforms will have a variation on that. And in your analytics you can look at it too will be very helpful to again not over consider or estimate the impact that performance have and really give brand a chance to also be present on the mix. Another idea obviously is that and this is another great feature of paid advertising versus organic information in general is because you are paying usually you have access to more detailed and granular data about who is interacting with your ads either in terms of the queries that you're using for search or the kind of in market audience affinity in the case of LinkedIn Industries job titles seniority. You have all that wealth of information. So usually you use that information at the beginning to optimize because you might discover that in your initial target it's included some sections or fractions of your population that it doesn't matter if they convert, they might not be a good fit for you down the road. Quick examples excluding industries where you are not allowed to do that for indiscriminate discriminatory reasons are age or gender or location or income brackets and or for example in the case of for B2B entry level employees or companies of certain sizes. So they might show interest, they might even convert in the form of forms and all that. But you might discover that they are not, they don't have great numbers in terms of actual opportunities and customer created and lifetime value. So as you learn through the process of running the campaigns, you can start making exclusions and that will give you an edge because you will not waste money where you know you will not have the highest impact. So you that that's something that you can do to help the algorithm, right? You actually exclud section instead of waiting for the algorithm to figure out that a specific conversion is not as valuable as another one. Another great tool that is available to you in general to these platforms is that and another great feature of paid advertising for someone that is figuring out the market is that you can do experiments. So you can experiment at keyword level, of course, trying different match types. You can experiment at ad level, as I was describing, not just the traditional way of putting two ads to compete, but I highly recommend that you actually just on a single ad put multiple variations on headlines, multiple variations on descriptions, images, video is allowed. And obviously you have multiple formats or ad formats. So you have images, videos, carousel. So explore all those ideas and put them on the mix and see, you will find pros and cons. Some of them will have higher impressions, some of them will have higher engagement. But at the end of the day, if you're optimizing for conversions, you will find that what really works. So you put them on the mix and experiment with them. So there will be some ideas on how to optimize. And finally the last component to improving the results is and I usually get this question all the time, so what will be an appropriate budget, right? Not just a mix between performance and brand, but also the question is how much will I spend? And a great way, it varies from platform, but a great way to explore that in the particular case, for example of search is something known as impression share. And the general idea is that at any given moment there are just so many people searching for whatever keyword interests you, right? It might be hundreds of people per month, it might be thousands, it might be tens of thousands of millions. So that inventory, because you are capturing what is already there, you can't create. There's limited, that's limited. And that's the reason Google uses the bidding structure for pricing, because that available inventories offer to whatever person is willing to bid for. And so you are competing against other advertisers that are willing to pay for being present for people searching there. And that way Google maximizes obviously their profits and the prices reflect that. So impression share usually means the Percentage of all available impressions or in this case searches that you were able to capture through your combination of bidding and budget. And so if you start with the idea of capturing existing demand and you want to know how much you should spend on brand, look at your impression share. If you are capturing 50%, then you still have opportunity. If you're capturing 85%, 95% of the impression share, probably you might be even overspending a little bit. There are two basic ideas on how you can improve your impression share. One is obviously having relevant ads and that's not just your creatives, but actually the intent. As I was describing, you can have the most beautiful ad and the best optimized landing page. But if you are targeting a competitor, there's, it's going to be really hard to capture 100% impression share unless you are willing to put a lot of money into it because you are not so relevant to the search. So there's an extent that you can work out on your own, right? Improving your ads, having compelling copy and images. But at the end of the day it will also be a combination of budget. And so if you have a low impression share and that campaign or that effort is, is something that is bringing value to you, you can put more money on it. Usually the growth or the increment will not be linear, right? So if you are spending $100 and getting 100 leads and you spend double that amount, $200, you will not usually get double the amount of leads unless you have a very low impression share. And the reason is pretty much because to get the next level you have to outbeat your current competitors, right? Part of the reason you don't have the 100% is because someone else there is bidding higher than you or have a more relevant ad. And so the only way to capture that portion that you're missing right now is that you go higher than that or become more relevant or a combination of that. So usually that means that you will have what's known as diminishing returns. And that's okay as long as it makes sense in terms of cost of acquisition. You can just keep going higher until a point where you are not getting much value and you stare at that level. And so you can extend that idea of the impression share to your non branded terms to campaigns on competition. And obviously you can extend it to top of the funnel. Probably on the top of the funnel is where you have the largest opportunity. It's for display. And YouTube is also called, you know, a variation on impression share. I think it's either impression share or display share or something like that. But it's the same idea is in all the banners and all the properties that Google is able to put ads. You have so many users that are loading videos and loading websites. So you have in a sense an inventory too. It's just that that inventory is by definition larger because there's not necessarily depending on who is searching. It's just a matter of either the website you want to target or the properties you want to be present and, or the people that you want to be present doesn't matter where they are. So your inventory for top of the funnel is usually way larger than your inventory for people searching for anything in particular. So there usually you will have a largest opportunity. So if you deplete your ideas or budget for capturing demand, then your next bucket is going to be brand awareness. And usually there you will have a very, very big scope. And the same applies for social media. It works different because it's not necessarily called impression share, but the way that you can judge your impact on the inventory will be a combination of reach and frequency, right? So if at the beginning of your, of your campaign you had a population of, let's say 100,000 people, which is pretty large, and your current campaign is reaching on a monthly basis just 5,000 people, then you have a lot of opportunity. However, if you have an audience that you define very narrowly and it's just a thousand or ten thousand people, and at the end of the month you have already reached 75,000, for example, then what it means is that you probably are capturing most of the available audience. Not all of them are on social media at any given moment all the time, and that will be an indicator and the other one will be frequency, right? If in any given time someone is watching your ad on average a couple of times, that would be okay, right? Not everybody remembers them all the time, but if a person is watching your ad 10 times in three or four days, then that's too much and you have saturated the market. And there's not, there's nothing wrong with it. You will be quite present, but maybe you can divert your efforts to something else. So the way that you judge if you have opportunity on social is that you just that combination of am I reaching a high percentage of the people that I'm interested in to present my, to put my brand forward and or am I showing up too frequently to them or not? And that way you can judge how much money should you put on that? That's one leg because the Order portion will be the value that spending more brings to you and that goes back to that portion of having a right analytics in place over time, as your campaign builds up and as your data on the CRM builds up, you will get an idea of your, I call it your numbers, right? It's what percentage of the visits that you have translating to leads and translating to opportunities and translating to customers. But the most important number on those are how much is a customer worth? And usually that answer is not how much they buy from you the first time. Usually even if you don't have something that is recurrent like SaaS subscription or you sell by project or one time, usually people will buy again over time. So if you start accumulating that, that will give you the customer life lifetime value. And so initially your ROAS implementation on a campaign might be based on the first purchase. But if you really want to be more aggressive, you can expand that definition and say, well, I will not judge the success of the campaign based on just one purchase, but in the value that it brings over time. Because yes, this campaign might have just yield this amount of dollars for the first purchase or for the first engagement, but I know based on my data that once I have a customer such a great experience with such a great product that people will continue to buy from me for the years to come. And that's valuable, right? So that really dilutes that cost of acquisition and make it way smaller than the value that customer brings. And that's how you can justify a larger investment. So the other leg into that conversation of how do I optimize once I have launched my campaigns and focus on capturing existing demand and leveraging new one is working on what's available in terms of inventory, right? So your impression share or your display share or the reach and the frequency that you have already and compare it to the value that the channel is bringing to you. And usually that will allow you to do a more strategic process in terms of ad spend allocation. Because it's not necessarily about how much a lead costs you on Google Today or in LinkedIn today, it's more about how much would you spend in another channel, even one that is not digital. If you are having way more success on something that is not digital, right? In terms of cost of acquisition or the value of the customer, then put the money there. But if you are having more success on digital, yes, you want to question or always optimize, right? Always optimize and reduce, keep that cost down. But if you're really being successful, profitable, right you have really that one 5x and you still have opportunity. Just put more money on it and that machine will feed itself. But to really feel comfortable doing that, as you can see web analytics having a great understanding of if your campaign is performance brand or you have a mix on that will be, you know, a requirement to accomplish it. So I think I have come to the end of the episode. Just a summary. Remember for if if there's a few things that you might remember here is that once you have a plan, once you launch your campaign is key to track performance to over time. Feed more and more bottom of the funnel information in the terms of leads, opportunities, revenue, et cetera. And definitely to learn from the campaign. Run them for a long period of time so you can learn what works and what kind of people is interacting with your ad. So you can make exclusions and based on that you find new opportunities and what portion of the inventory are you targeting and how much are they worth to you will help you define how much you should invest. So with that I would like to finish. I hope you have enjoyed this episode. I really did too. This is something that you probably can hear. I'm very passionate about and I look forward to sharing with you some more information about demand generation in the next one. Have a great day. Bye bye.