Having more high-quality leads than you can handle is every marketer's dream. When it comes to social media lead generation, however, quality definitely trumps quantity. In this guide, we share our tips on how to analyse your campaign performance and optimise your social media campaigns to generate high quality leads and drive ROI.
In this guide:
The “quantity vs quantity” dilemma is as old as time and ideally, you will have BOTH when it comes to lead generation.
More high-quality leads than you can handle is every marketer’s dream but in this guide, we want to stress the importance of lead quality when it comes to social media lead generation.
While it is certainly nice to see an influx of fresh leads, nobody wants to spend a significant chunk of their marketing budget on a LinkedIn or Facebook campaign, only to find that none of the leads generated turn into paying customers.
In this guide, we give you practical guidance on how to define, measure and increase the quality of your social media leads.
SOCIAL MEDIA LEAD GENERATION: QUANTITY VS. QUALITY
Optimising your campaigns for lead quality is the most impactful thing you can do to improve the performance of your social media lead generation.
When we talk about optimising lead quality what we really mean is increasing the percentage of
leads who are likely to buy from you.
In order to improve your lead quality, you first need to have a definition of what a high-quality lead is. That definition needs to be agreed on and used by both marketing and sales.
Depending on your business model you might look at different criteria to determine lead quality. For most B2B companies a lead needs to be a good fit on a number of levels such as company level, opportunity level and stakeholder level. For a B2C company, the process will probably look different.
At Driftrock we believe that the best way to define high-quality leads is to look at your existing database and analyse what the leads that turned into opportunities and customers have in common.
When it comes to social media lead generation having a clear definition of a high-quality lead is particularly important. Tracking the percentage of leads that turn into opportunities and sales for each one of your campaigns, calculating ROI and optimising for lead quality is what sets successful social media lead generation campaigns from unprofitable ones.
Optimising for lead quality is the difference between a successful lead generation campaign and an unprofitable one.
At Driftrock we are dead serious about lead quality when we work with clients. We have a very good reason to feel so strongly about social media lead quality.
Let’s take Facebook’s ad algorithm for example; the algorithm analyses which users convert as leads and optimises delivery for people similar to them. This means that if you are generating
a lot of cold leads you will only be getting more of the same!
Focusing on generating high-quality leads is the most important thing you can do for your social media lead generation.
Take this example:
You might have two Ad Sets live.
• You have a budget of $1000 per Adset.
• Adset A gets you CPLs of $50, and Adset B $75.
• Adset A converts at 20% and Adset B, 45%.
• You make $200 per sale.
• So your Return on Ad Spend to sales is
• 0.8 (a loss) with Adset A
• 1.2 (profit) with Adset B
So now that you have set your lead qualification criteria, what is the best way to increase the percentage of people who match it?
There are two main components to increasing the quality of your social media leads: ongoing campaign optimisation and regular database cleansing. In the next chapter, we will run you through methods of optimising your campaigns and cleansing your lead database.
1. OPTIMISE YOUR CAMPAIGNS
Analyse and track the performance of your Campaigns, Adsets and Ads and use the data to optimise for lead quality.
2. CLEANSE YOUR LEAD DATABASE
Remove any fake or invalid leads from your database so that your sales team only focuses on the most valuable leads.
Our goal is to understand which Campaigns, Adsets and Ads perform the best for cost per qualified lead so that you can optimise your
campaigns. Here’s how to create a simple analysis in a spreadsheet to track the performance of your campaigns, adsets and ads from time to time.
Facebook has a handy feature called Offline Conversions.
It allows you to upload a set of conversion events like sales, and match them back to the ad they came from. This allows you to optimise campaigns, adsets and ads quickly within your Facebook Ad Manager reports.
In this case, you can hijack the feature to track and optimise for quality leads. Simply take your leads, delete all but the quality ones, then upload them back to Facebook.
You can upload your quality leads back to Facebook manually, or automate this process in real-time with Driftrock for live reports!
Taking a step back and comparing lead quality and ROI across multiple channels is the best way to inform future strategies and find the channel mix that works best for your business.
Use a spreadsheet that tracks your campaign performance across all lead generation channels or use a tool like Driftrock to easily drill into the data you need for each one of your channels.
Database cleansing is one of marketers’ most mundane but crucial tasks.
Research shows that up to 38% of the leads that enter your database could be invalid or fake. Lead validation and cleansing is not only good practice, it’s an essential aspect of improving the performance of your marketing campaigns.
You can either periodically remove invalid leads manually or use a tool like Driftrock that will do that for you automatically.
Driftrock lets you set quality criteria for your leads and automatically removes leads that don’t meet the criteria. Driftrock will also automatically correct false addresses helping you only store accurate information.
Click here to see how the tool works
Here are a few top tips from working with our clients, across lots of verticals:
1. Offer a true value exchange
In return for the customer sharing their details, create compelling content that adds real value to them or their business.
2. Add a welcome message
Facebook Lead Ads have the ability to add a welcome message to the form. This gives you a valuable chance to educate and explain why they should complete the form.
3. Ask more questions
Don’t be afraid to ask more questions than you might with a web form. Quality is higher, and the algorithms find more people, likely to fill out your form, so CPL doesn’t increase too much.
4. Optimise targeting and creative
Make sure you can track the number of quality leads or sales from each Campaign, Adset and Ad. You’ll find different targeting has a big impact on lead quality.
5. Educate first
We found that a customer who has watched a brand video first, then filled out a form second converts better downstream than a cold lead. This can be done with Facebook Video View Engagement Audiences, then retargeting these with Lead Ads.
6. Give multiple options
For example, “I’d like a quote”, or “I’m just looking for more info” offers some insight into the stage they are in the lifecycle to that you can serve them better. It also helps people understand the context of the form.
ABOUT DRIFTROCK
At Driftrock, we’re lucky enough to have worked with some of the world’s leading brands; from international brands like BMW and Open University, to hundreds of automotive dealerships and small businesses.
Driftrock is an award-winning marketing technology platform and the team helping brands big and small drive sales through social advertising.
By connecting people-data to social platforms Driftrock helps turn audiences into customers, and customers into advocates from the world's largest advertising platforms.
If you’re interested in learning more about Driftrock or need help managing your campaigns, get in touch and we’ll arrange a time to chat.
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