5 Ways to Increase the Number of Low-Funnel Leads You’re Generating Monthly

When you know how many low-funnel leads you’re getting per month and the answer is ‘not enough,’ there are a few steps you can take to increase the number of quality leads you’re driving from digital marketing. 

1. Start With a Strong Foundation

I can’t emphasize the importance of well-developed, highly optimized ads, landing pages, and targeting strategies enough. It’s critical that you provide a consistent, personalized experience for each customer through:

• Relevant keywords & geotargeting
• Relevant ad copy & information
• Relevant landing pages

When a customer searches online, they expect the results to be personalized and the process seamless. To both provide that experience and get better results for your business, align your digital advertising and website strategies so you’re bidding on relevant keywords with highly targeted ads that drive traffic to relevant, easy to navigate landing pages.

2. Prioritize Ready-to-Buy Moments

Next, focus your budget where you’ll see the best return. Most businesses have aligned their digital marketing with Google’s micro-moment strategy and bid on all five micro-moments. Allocating spend across the micro-moments is recommended, but if you have a limited budget and are not able to cover all relevant searches within your market, prioritize the three ready-to-buy micro-moments where you’ll capture the most low-funnel leads. 

Prioritize your spend here and only move further up the funnel once you’re sure you’re converting the maximum amount of leads from these ready-to-buy micro-moments.

3. Meet Customers Where They Are

Map historical sales-by-zip data and use that to inform your targeting strategy. Not only will using your own sales data show you where to target, it will also show you where not to target. Don’t waste your dollars where you haven’t seen results, and don’t expand your geotargeting unnecessarily. When we get new accounts, we often see that businesses have been using a 50-75 mile radius. Don’t. In our experience, the farther you move away from your physical location, the less inventory you sell at a higher cost per conversion.

Instead, prioritize the areas where you see the lowest cost per conversion and highest sales. Max out your search impression share here to ensure you’re dominating the market closest to your business before starting to bump out. From there, expand targeting until you reach your maximum budget or desired reach.

4. Don’t Set It and Forget It

Don’t stop here—continue to repeat steps 1-3 to refine your campaigns and improve your results. Seasonality, increased competition, changes in search behavior, and countless other factors can affect your results each month. Make sure you have the reporting and KPIs in place to monitor lead performance and the ratio of web traffic from paid search compared to leads from paid search. Having these metrics on hand in a real-time dashboard can help you quickly adjust strategy and targeting to maximize your return on investment each month.

5. Track Sales, Not Just Leads

To take it a step further, instead of just tracking leads and quality sales prospects, connect your pipeline and track leads all the way to actual sales. User-level tracking can help you do this by recording lead activity all the way from a customer’s first click to the final sale. 

Using these insights, create a new funnel of paid prospects, qualified sales prospects, and sales. Then, calculate your digital advertising ROI based on actual sales like this example from automotive:

Attribution data that connects leads to sales is not hard to come by, but it’s something we know businesses struggle with. With the right tools in place, it should be simple. And it’s my bet that two years from now, this type of reporting and way of measuring success will be the norm and metrics like cost-per-click and cost-per-conversion won’t matter as much. 

But there’s no need to wait five years to leverage these insights for your business. If you’re interested in learning more about connecting lead generation efforts to sales, or want to talk about more ways to capture low-funnel leads and increase sales at your business, reach out for a free digital analysis.