How to Generate High Quality Converting Leads on a Budget
One of the biggest challenges that business owners face with lead generation is that they are not able to generate high-quality leads at a low cost.
When business owners want fresh leads for their business that convert into sales, they usually depend on a Facebook Ads or Google Ads campaign to generate the leads.
Business owners complain that Facebook ads give low-cost leads but it does not convert. And some of the leads from Google ads are high quality leads that convert, but the cost of the leads are very high.
There is no magic formula to reduce the cost of the leads and increase the quality of the leads at the same time. The only way to achieve low-cost leads is to plan in advance.
Planning for Leads
When you are not planning in advance about how many leads you want for your business, you might end up spending a lot of money if you are running campaigns in the last moment.
As a general rule, if you want leads very fast, the leads are going to cost higher. This is one of the biggest reasons for unsustainable lead costs for businesses.
There are two main factors in lead generation that business owners have to consider when they are acquiring leads.
The first factor to consider is the cost of the leads. If business owners can acquire leads at a very low cost then their cost per customer acquisition will also go down. The second factor is the quality of the leads.
When business owners are focusing on the low cost of leads they should also keep in mind the quality of the leads. Even if you are getting leads at a low cost but if the leads are not going to convert then the leads are of no value.
There are only two major ways to generate leads. One is organic content marketing and the other one is paid advertising.
Most of the businesses do not take content marketing seriously for generating leads for their business because content marketing takes time and people do not have the patience to wait.
An article that I wrote 5 years ago in my blog is still generating leads for me today and they are very high-quality leads. Content marketing takes time and it can take anywhere from 2 to 5 years to start getting high-quality traffic to your web pages.
This does not mean that you have to start taking content marketing seriously and wait for years before you can start generating leads.
I recommend a hybrid approach to your lead generation process. First, identify all the keywords that people are searching for in Google to find your products and services.
Keyword research is one of the most important processes in creating a lead generation campaign.
So first let’s discuss why keywords are important and how to go about doing the keyword research process.
Keyword Research
Keyword research is really important because it gives an insight into what your prospective customers are searching for in the search engines when they are trying to find you.
When you are getting started with your business you can actually find out if there is a real demand for the products and services that you are planning to create depending on the results of your keyword research.
There are many different keyword tools in the market that will help you find out what people are searching for in the search engines.
Going in-depth to all the different types of Keyword research methodologies and the keyword research tools might be beyond the scope of this particular article.
You can search for the top different keyword research tools, watch some video tutorials on how to use these tools and get started with your keyword research.
One of the simplest ways to find out what people are searching for is to look at the Google auto suggest keywords. If you search for something and let Google auto-suggest the keywords you will be able to find out the keywords that people are actually searching for.
For example, if I search for the keyword “digital marketing” I can see suggestions like “digital marketing courses”, “digital marketing training” and so on.
So when I look for the keyword “digital marketing” I can also find out that people are actually searching for keywords like “digital marketing courses”.
If I search for “Digital Marketing courses” and let Google auto suggest keywords for me I would see keywords like “digital marketing courses in Bangalore”, “digital marketing courses in Mumbai” and so on.
If I try to publish an article on the keyword “digital marketing” it might be impossible for me to rank on the first page of Google because the competition for this particular keyword is just so large.
The best way to easily rank on google for high quality and high intent keywords is to target the long tail. For example “digital marketing courses in Mumbai” is a long tail keyword.
The amount of competition and the search engines for this particular long tail keyword might be a lot less than short tail keywords like “digital marketing.”
So I published an article on “top digital marketing courses in Mumbai” a while back on my blog. And this article has helped me collect more than 2000 leads in the past 2 years.
If you look at the total value of the leads that I have got from this article the cost per lead is just around 1 Rupee lead. I did not write this article myself and I outsourced the writing of this article at 2000 rupees.
So just by the act of publishing it in my blog I have been able to generate leads at a very low cost over time.
One of the reasons that this strategy will not work for all the businesses is that it takes anywhere from 6 months to 2 years for getting a return on investment from the articles published.
So I recommend splitting your marketing budget into 50% for Organic content marketing and 50% for paid advertising. Over the long-term, you can allocate more of your budget to organic content marketing because you will always get higher returns with content marketing.
Research shows that organic listings on Google get 100 times more clicks than the paid listings. It is clear proof that content marketing and SEO is still a major traffic driver for most of the websites on the internet.
Start with Paid Ads Campaigns
Since as a business owner you might want to start getting leads right away for your business to find customers for your products, I recommend that you get started with some paid advertising campaigns.
Facebook ads might not give you a lot of high-quality leads but Facebook delivers leads at an extremely low cost. Facebook Ads to not scale very well if you want more leads.
I recommend that the best strategy for Facebook ads is to put a low budget every day and let the campaign run for a long time bringing in the leads at a very low cost.
The percentage of conversions from these leads into actual paying customers might be less, but if you are having a very low lead cost it will still work out for you.
Apart from being able to generate leads at a low cost, Facebook is also great for brand recall. you can run Ads for your website visitors so that people who have visited your website remember about you when they are on Facebook.
I cannot recommend the exact monthly budget for your Facebook ads because that depends on your total revenue, profit margin and the amount of budget that you are ready to allocate for marketing.
I spend around 50,000 rupees a month on Facebook which is approximately equal to $750. I have a mix of engagement campaigns, retargeting campaigns and lead generation campaigns.
I run ads targeted mostly to my custom audience – which is defined as the people who have visited my website in the past 180 days.
You might have noticed this yourself. If you have visited my website recently you will also start seeing some of the ads that I run on Facebook.
It is important that you install the Facebook Pixel on your website so that you can create a custom audience out of the visitors to your website and run ads targeted for them.
Since Facebook is not something that you can rely on getting high quality converting leads, your next option is going to be Google search ads.
Even if you have a good budget for content marketing and if you are ready to get a lot of leads in the long term, I would still recommend that you run Google ad so that you can harvest a lot of new keywords.
Earlier Google Analytics used to show the keywords that people search for when they are trying to find your website. But right now they have removed that option and they have put it in the category of (not provided).
Since you do not get any data from your organic search traffic to find out what people are searching for on the search engines the next best option is Google ads.
When you start running your campaign, set a low daily budget and start running the ads with some broad match keyboards. When you run the campaign for a few days you will be able to get precious data in the “search terms” report which shows what people actually search for to look at your ad and click on your ads.
These are the keywords that people are searching for – and this will give you a lot of ideas for creating content that will get traffic.
Most of the articles that I have written on my blog, I got the topic Idea by looking at the search terms report on Google ads.
Content Marketing
There are two important factors to consider when you are trying to generate high-quality leads at a low cost. The first factor is getting the traffic at a low cost to your pages. The second factor is having high conversion ratio from the traffic.
If you are using paid advertising medium such as Google ads or Facebook ads, the cost of the traffic is not under your control. You have to pay for the charge for and there is no other option.
When you are creating content and getting traffic to your site via the search engines, in the long term the cost of your traffic will be extremely low.
Not only the traffic will cost you less but the kind of people who visit your website will be a higher quality audience because they are actually looking for specific content instead of clicking on the ads.
It is a known fact that long tail keywords mean that people are looking for something specific and the quality of the internet user will naturally be high.
So I recommend that you get the keyword ideas by running paid search ads, and then use the keyword ideas to create content for your websites.
Over time, if you have hundreds of pages on your blog targeting different long tail keywords, the total amount of traffic all these keywords are going to get is going to be much more than what you could achieve with paid advertising.
Converting Visitors into Leads
As we have discussed before, the first factor is trying to get traffic at a low cost, and the second factor is trying to get a high conversion ratio on the landing page.
When you are using paid advertising medium to drive traffic, it is best to send the traffic to a landing page with a lead magnet.
You can check out my landing page at www.LearnDigitalMarketing.com. This is the landing page that I use to convert paid traffic into leads.
The traffic is converting into leads because the offer is very specific and I am mentioning that I am giving 25 free tutorial videos on digital marketing. Such landing pages are great for converting paid advertising traffic into leads.
This landing page is converting at little more than 20% for me and I have collected 10,000+ leads just in the most recent campaign.
You can also link to these landing pages from your content pages in your blog. The conversion ratio on this landing page completely depends on how relevant the offer is for the internet users visiting that page.
If I am looking for advice on marketing automation and if I land on a landing page which gives away a free ebook on marketing automation, there is a high chance that I would enter my name and email ID to download the ebook.
If you are using content marketing to get traffic from the search engines there are two ways you can convert the traffic into leads.
You can have an exit pop-up on your blog where people enter their Name and Email ID to get something in return. The lead magnet could be an e-book or a free course.
Here’s how the exit popup looks on my blog on a desktop or laptop computer.
The other way to convert organic traffic into leads is to link to the landing pages from different areas of your website.
Since you are going to create landing pages for the paid marketing traffic any way you can use the same landing pages to link from your content as well.
Conclusion
I hope this article gave you an idea about how to get high quality converting leads on a budget.
If you have any questions about how to create paid advertising campaigns, how to create landing pages and how to create an organic traffic machine please leave a comment below!