If you’re spending thousands or even hundreds of thousands a month generating leads online and you’re frustrated that lead qualities suck or you’re attracting too many tire kickers that won’t convert…
In this quick guide, article, I will go over all the ways you can increase lead quality, increase conversion, and ultimately improve your ROI from all the advertising dollars you’re already spending.
But first, you must understand that…
Improving lead quality is not one thing you implement, but rather a collection of things you implement.
The way we go about improving lead quality is we a look at a few ways we can improve the lead quality on the front end and a few ways to improve lead quality on the backend
Let me explain…
Frontend Lead Quality Improvements
Frontend tactics are things you do before they submit their name, email, and phone number. These are usually tactics such as selecting the right channel, creating the right ads, having the right message, etc…
Channel Selection Matters
Which channel you use to generate your leads matters because the intention of the people using these channels will be different. Typically it breaks down to high intent vs low intent channels.
People who click on your Google Search ads will generally have higher intent as they’re actively searching for your service or a solution (the keywords you bid on matter).
However, it’s usually a lot more expensive and does not guarantee any other lead quality that may have.
For example: In Mortgage, two of the key determining factor of lead quality apart from interest is the FICO score and their ability to make a down payment. Unfortunately just because you’re running a Google ad that doesn’t mean they will all have great FICO scores and the ability to put down 20%.
Social Ads Such as Instagram and Facebook will tend to have lower intended leads because no one is going on Facebook or Instagram to look for life insurance or mortgages solutions. They are there to engage with their friends and get entertained.
YouTube ads, on the other hand, are kind of in-between in my opinion. People do go on Youtube to search for solution videos or review videos which puts them slightly higher in intent compared to Facebook or Instagram ads.
Either way, understand that the only thing these channels will differ in terms of lead quality is only INTENT.
Quick Note: Before closing off this section, it may seem like that Google Search is the best channel for higher quality leads and in many cases, it is but that shouldn’t be the only factor you should consider. There are a lot of trade-offs for running ads on Google Search, more expensive, not as scalable, tons of competitions.
Targeting
There is this whole idea and myth out there that if you just get the targeting right you’ll have higher quality leads and that’s not true at all…
Does knowing your audience and targeting the right ones help? Yes, absolutely but is it going to solve all your lead quality issue… no absolutely not.
Especially, for businesses in the housing and credit industry where 80% of the target option isn’t available to you.
And with IOS14 and Google’s new cookies policy, more of these candies that made advertising easy for the past 10 years are going away.
Targeting Through Creatives and Copies
Most business understands targeting through selecting the right audiences and then rely on Facebook or Google’s AI to find your ideal customer. Very few businesses understand to target the right people through the ad’s creativity and copy.
Everyone uses the same ads, creatives, copies, and funnels and wonders why they get the same low-quality leads.
A good example of this is in the mortgage business everything has the same long-form pre-approval ads and landing page that companies like Bankrate and Lending Tree use and then they wonder why it works for Bankrate and not them.
Well, Bankrate sells their leads to multiple mortgage brokers, their strategy is different than yours and their model is different than yours. This is why you cannot copy them and expect them to work for you.
Filtering The Leads
One of the easiest ways to filter your lead is through barriers and filters. Yes, it’s simple. The more hoops you get someone to go through the higher quality of leads you’ll end up with.
Doing this will increase your lead cost but, you’re saving time and reducing your overhead of talking to lead quality leads that are tire kickers and won’t convert. This is a great way to segment your lead and the ones that don’t qualify right now can be put into a different nurturing sequence for later.
Using Content & Advertorials
Another great way to improve lead quality on the front end is to use content, advertorials, and webinar. This helps to build trust and the people who consume your content will usually be of higher quality as they just took the effort to read your article, watch your video or webinar.
Quick Note: This does not mean you can put up any content and it will work, you’ll need to think about and test to see what type of content will resonate with your audiences the best.
Branding
Very few people talk about this but having a solid online brand presence in the market matters.
We ran a similar ad campaign for two very different business to a similar funnel and one company were able to convert 1 out of 10 leads and had little to no complaint about lead quality while the other couldn’t even close 1 out of 20 leads and complained about lead quality every day.
The only difference between the two companies is one had a massive brand online presence that took 7 years to build while the other rely heavily on referral, just did a rebrand, and have little to no online presence.
Both are great companies that care deeply about their customers.
Backend Lead Quality Improvements
Backend lead quality improvement tactics are stuff you do once you’ve captured the lead. This is usually going to be your sales, your follow-up, and your nurturing automation.
Sales Matters
Shelley(Jack Lemmon): “The leads are weak”
Blake(Alec Baldwin): “You’re weak”
That was a quote from the movie Glengarry Glen Ross, where Alec Baldin was brought in to straighten up the sales team that wasn’t producing.
Great movie by the way, if you haven’t watched it.
20 years later, with Facebook, Google, YouTube, Bind, Instagram, yet we’re here to debate the same question.
Do you have a low lead quality problem or do you have a sales problem?
Look, I’m not an advocate of a boiler room type of sales environment or approach but the truth of the matter is SALES MATTER.
You don’t need to be aggressive but you do need to know how to deal with cold leads, especially cold leads from online, they will be harder to close and harder to reach.
If that’s not your cup of tea then, you’ll have to play the long game and build out brand equity/presence online.
Getting On a Call ASAP
You’ve probably heard of this one, which is the five-minute rule. The idea is that the faster you can get on a call with the lead, the more likely you can convert that lead into a closed deal.
Is this true?
Yes! It is true because we’ve tested it with our leads.
Believe it or not, we generate leads for our self too using Facebook, Google, etc…
We had people schedule a call with us but, nearly 50% would ghost and never show up to the scheduled call.
We made a change and had an inside sales rep call the lead right as the book the lead to build rapport and that increased our response rate to nearly 73%.
Which if you’ve run any kind of online ads before, that’s really good.
Nurturing and Drip Sequences
Setting up nurture sequences and drip sequences to follow up and nurture the leads that come in from your online advertisement will also help to improve your overall lead conversion. It won’t necessarily improve lead quality but it will help you to convert additional leads that didn’t say yes right away.
Remember only 3% of your marketing is ready to buy today, and 7% in the next 30 days. That means that there are 90% who may convert 3 months, 6 months, or maybe even a year down the road.
This is especially true for leads coming in from lower intended media such as Facebook, Instagram, Tiktok, YouTube, etc…
This is also the reason why a lot of businesses complain about lead quality coming from these sources.
Most people using platforms like Facebook or YouTube are not there looking for your service or product but rather for entertainment or education and are usually much higher up on the customer’s journey.
ISA or Call Center
Of course, most of the backend tactics for improving lead quality are often very time-consuming but the good news is there is a way around it.
You can hire an inside sales agent or if you really have lead volume maybe even a call center to handle all the initial inbound inquires.
Remember the key isn’t to have your ISA (inside sales rep) close the deal but rather to just build a real human connection plus pre-qualified the potential prospect a little bit so they are less likely to ghost on the call with you.
That’s it for us, this is all the way we use to increase lead qualities for all of our campaigns, there may be more…
There is one that I’ve left out and in fact, it is probably the most important one and that is Strategy > tactics.
You see, from all our experience of working with businesses large and small. The best ones are the ones that have a clear long-term strategy and then surround their ad strategy around that and not the other way around.
This allows them not to worry if, they are paying a slightly higher acquisition cost while their competitors will be too be priced out of that channel.
This allows them to craft strategic messages for all the ads and copies rather than relying on clever hooks and gimmicks.
But the strategy is not something I can explain here in this short article.
Either way, all the frontend and backend tactics I’ve mentioned above will definitely help you improve your lead quality from your online marketing.
If you’re not sure where you can improve your online ads strategy and whether there is room for additional revenue, book a free lost profit revenue analysis with us, and we will help you find additional revenue from your current advertisement budget.