PPC and Facebook Ads: How to Reduce Adspend to Increase the Quality of Leads

Frustrated with the amount of money you’re spending on digital advertising? Wondering how to reduce ad spend to increase the quality of leads?

You’re not alone.

Every year, millions of small business owners spend way more on marketing and advertising than they need to.

The result is a hodge-podge mixture of results that cost too much and yield too little business.

To be clear, digital marketing works but like anything worth knowing, it requires a clear understanding of the rules to get the result you want.

And it all starts with this.

The Truth About Generating Higher Quality Leads (Start Here First)

Don’t even think about taking any other steps until you nail this one first: Business owner, know thy customer!

You must get crystal clear about your customer’s pain points, aspirations, and their personal cost for not reaching those aspirations.

Without this essential information, your ad targeting will be off, jacking up the price of a lead—a lead that isn’t your ideal target and therefore not valuable to your business.

That’s why it’s essential to develop a buyer persona. Create a portrait of your ideal customers by asking these questions:

•     What are their biggest fears?

•     How about the challenges that keep them from getting what they want?

•     If they object to what you offer, what objections are most common?

•     What’s their ultimate end goal with their business?

You’ll also want to include background information and demographics. Once you have this information, you have a goldmine, one that will help you more accurately define your ad targeting.

Then start researching the keywords that your target audience might use to find a business like yours.

And think about the websites your audience may visit. What do they tell you about your audience?

For AdWords and Display campaigns, consider what publications, individuals, companies, and products might have a strong influence on your audience.

For Facebook campaigns, it’s good to know the kinds of companies your ideal customers work in. Do you know the average size of the company? Their job title? Their skills?

The more deeply you can dig into your buyer persona, the more you will connect with the audience that wants to do business with you.

But there’s one more crucial component…

Does Your Audience Understand Your Product or Service?

Nailing down your buyer persona is crucial to your ad spend success, but there is one more key component, making sure your audience understands what you offer.

Your marketing message must educate and offer the solution your prospect is seeking.

•     Does the picture relate to the marketing message?
•     Is it easy for the prospect to understand what you’re offering?

Once you’ve got these two biggies working together, you’re ready to enter the world of online marketing.

Whoop! Whoop!

How to Get Quality Leads from Facebook: Optimizing for Success

With marketing, it’s all about clarity. You have to have a clear picture of your target audience, and you need to have clear goals in mind when running a Facebook ad campaign.

Choose the campaign objective that is the best match for the action you want the prospect to take. Think ebook downloads, blog views, video views.

Then choose the appropriate conversion event you want for your campaign, e.g., purchase, lead, etc.

If you have run Facebook ads before, you’ve got great information that can help you to drastically cut down on your cost of a lead.

Even better, those demographics will tell you which ads performed better, allowing you to work with the audience that was most responsive.

It also allows you to eliminate underperforming audiences, sparing you an unnecessary expense. It also helps you to reduce fake leads from Facebook ads.

One of the most powerful aspects of Facebook marketing to reduce cost per lead is lookalike audiences.

This strategy taps into an audience that is based on existing customers who are most engaged with your brand.

A powerful proprietary technology, it can create an audience for you based on the characteristics of your most valuable customers.

That’s highly effective and cuts down on wasteful ad spending! And it all starts with an email list of your most valuable customers, a “seed” audience.

From this list, segment out the readers who are most engaged with you and create a custom audience. Then upload the segmented list to Facebook.

Follow the prompts for creating that new audience. Based on your information, Facebook’s algorithm will then work to find people it thinks share your seed list characteristics.

But there’s another aspect for reducing ad spend and generating higher quality leads. Without it, your ad will be a cost and not an investment.

The Key to Getting the Right Leads and Reducing Ad Spend

An equally important aspect to attracting higher-quality leads is the offer. If it doesn’t connect with your audience, the results will be mediocre.

Before you dive in and create the ad, ask yourself these questions:

•     Does the offer solve a specific problem?
•     How valuable will the offer be to the visitor?
•     Are you making the solution irresistible to the visitor?
•     Are you making the offer a no-brainer?

These questions will guide you in creating an offer that connects and sells.

But what about those leads that have engaged with you on your website but haven’t taken any action?

Re-targeting Ads: How to Reduce Cost Per Lead on Facebook

Another way to make your ad dollars work harder for you is through Facebook’s re-targeting campaign.

Done correctly and re-targeting can be a key to how to reduce ad spending to increase the quality of leads.

This is an excellent way to scoop up those warm leads that visited your site but weren’t sure of the value you bring, were just shopping around, wanted to check out some detail on your site, etc.

Sound impossible?

The process targets those who have visited your website, then uses their data to run ad campaigns to encourage them to re-visit your site.

Does it work? Heck Ya!

Of the website visitors who were retargeted with display ads, statistics show they are 70% more like to convert.

What’s more, the click-through rate of a re-targeted ad is 10 times higher than that of a typical display ad.

Re-targeting is an essential strategy that helps to lower your cost per lead by sending leads to you that otherwise would have disappeared.

 

Landing Page 101: Why Simple is Most Effective

There are two kinds of ads on Facebook, Conversion Ads, and Leads. With Conversion Ads, the visitor is taken to your website to complete the transaction.

Lead Ads keep the transaction on the Facebook platform.

If you choose a conversion ad, make sure your landing page follows a few simple rules:

•     It has only ONE goal—to generate leads

•     Ask only the minimum amount of information necessary

•     Have one call-to-action

•     Copy should be simple—Use headers, bullet points and LOTS of white space

•     All important information should stay above the fold.

A tightly focused landing page attracts your target audience and reduces wasteful ad spending.

Facebook Link Clicks vs Landing Page Views

When optimizing your Facebook ad to drive traffic to your website, it’s important to understand the difference between Facebook link clicks and landing page views.

Get this wrong and it will greatly affect the cost of a lead.

A link click means someone clicked a link in your ad.

A landing page view means a person visits the ad’s landing page after clicking the link in your ad.

Why is this so important?

Optimizing for landing page views–instead of link clicks–tells you how many times a person went to your website after clicking on the Facebook ad.

Comparing landing page views to link clicks tells you how many people clicked on your ad but didn’t complete the transaction on your site.

In short, if your goal is to drive more traffic to your website, optimizing for landing page views is your best choice. Quickly following up reduces loss and increases conversion opportunities.

With quality strategies like these, Facebook offers an excellent opportunity to get more bang for your buck, and so does Google.

Paid Search: Spend Less Without Compromising Performance

To generate leads with your Adwords, there are several ways to reduce ad spend to increase the quality of leads

1. Set Up Proper URL Tracking

This measures the effectiveness of your campaigns by tracking conversions, where a lead came from, the keywords used in their search, the device they used, and so on.

2. Target Relevant Keywords

Identify your top-performing keywords and eliminate the keywords that convert poorly.

Once you have your tracking parameters in place, you’ll want to capture them on your landing page. Sync your lead data with your CRM so that you can view all the data.

Some of the most important data you want to extract include:

•     The number of opportunities
•     Customer source, keywords used, campaign, and device used
•     Name, email, company
•     The lead/status stage, lead score, source, campaign, keyword and device used for each lead

Combining this information with your spend data, you’ll get a good picture of your ROI.

3. Segment Campaigns into Groups

Segment your campaigns by main feature, sub-category, benefit, target industry, and geographic location. This allows you to laser focus your efforts which will result in higher quality leads and conversions.

4. Use Your Ad Copy to Pre-Qualify Leads

Yes, you want a strong click-through rate. But just as important you want targeted traffic. That’s why writing ad copy for the sole purpose of increasing click through rates is a mistake.

Instead, write ads to pre-qualify your prospects and appeal to your target persona. Make the traffic you get more relevant to your business. Here’s how.

If you’re targeting businesses of a certain size, reflect that in your text. If you’re working with a specific industry, specify that in the ad.

Include pricing in your copy to weed out the less serious.

5. Tailor Your Landing Page to Your Ideal Customer

Just like with Facebook, you want to set up a landing page that has one goal. And you want to keep it simple.

Tailor your landing page to address the wants, needs, and challenges of your ideal customer. Keep headlines and subheads engaging.

Offer some exchange of information for an email address.

Add visuals that work with the copy to drive home the message.

6. Test, Test, and Test Again

If you have more than one landing page, A/B testing is a must. This will determine which one is driving more opportunities, conversions, customers, and ultimately, good ROI.

Keep the most important information above the fold which includes:

•     Headline—test different versions
•     Call-to-action—Again, try out different versions including different copy, colors, sizes, placement
•     Images—Test different hero shots or background images to find which one pulls the best
•     Form—Test your form length and placement. Does it work better at the bottom of the page or as a pop up?

7. Get Your Competitors to Help You ;o)

Use similar keywords and calls-to-action as your competitor especially if they are ranking higher than you. Avoid blatantly copying them and reduce broad search queries.

Then make ad adjustments based on mobile performance. The important thing is to follow what the data tells you and making adjustments accordingly.

Re-marketing your ad can also stretch your dollars and make them work harder. As always, follow up quickly with captured leads.

Ready, Aim, Fire (Your Next Steps)

Figuring out how to reduce adspend to increase the quality of leads takes a lot of thought and planning.

And to be honest, there’s a few things to consider when making the decision.

This isn’t a point and click approach to marketing. But if done correctly using the points laid out above, your ads can have a powerful impact on the number and quality of leads you attract to your business.

Make a plan and use these steps as your guide.

The payoff will be the reward of a paid campaign that delivers stellar results!

 

 

© Shawn Casemore 2020. All Rights Reserved.