Want More Profit? How to do your own targeted lead generation

Want More Profit? How to do your own targeted lead generation

by Eli Gladden / Thursday, 07 January 2016 / Published in ePath to Leadership

Last time, I wrote about one big reason to start generating more leads yourself: driving “free” inbound calls. Now, in this article, we will look at another big one: targeting to your key demographic. This results in, yup, more profit. I have sold leads for 15 years, and there are definitely big advantages to buying leads from lead generation companies, such as cost and the ability to scale quickly. But here is one advantage that generating internally can give you.

Create more expensive leads and make more profit. One of the most successful campaigns I ever managed was priced at more than $450 CPM and required a contract north of $4,000,000. The lead cost on this was very high, but what it produced was a large volume of the right kind of lead for my client (in this case exclusive, excellent credit, mortgage refinance leads). Those types of leads were simply not available from lead aggregators, on an exclusive basis, with any volume at the time. So, despite the big price tag, the campaign was very successful. At times it was even too successful: the 200+ agents were not able to get to 100+ inbound calls an hour because of the lead and call volume the campaign generated.

Lead generators typically can create high quality leads at a lower cost and provide the ability to scale. But, one disadvantage in selling leads is that very high quality leads may be too expensive to generate at the price point dictated by the lead buyer market. Here are a few ideas that may create more expensive leads, and produce a big return on your investment:

• Build a splash page to educate the consumer. If you have a product or service that does not have a big existing market online, try dropping the consumer on a more informational splash page prior to asking them to submit a lead form. The splash page will filter people out, but the people who read through it and click off should become much more qualified leads.
• Build landing pages to go along with specific keywords. Cost per clicks on the most qualified keywords may be high, but traffic from them usually produces the most qualified prospects. Build pages to match those keywords specifically, and then see how that backs into a cost per new customer.
• Long form leads. Try adding additional qualifying questions to the back of your lead form after the initial submit. Some percentage of your prospects will complete this second set of questions, and those should be very low hanging fruit. This, actually, will not produce a more expensive lead. If it improves overall conversions, though, you then have the ability to raise your cost per lead target to drive more volume.

One note here is that these types of leads tend to be limited in scale, and eventually you will hit a celling with how much you can produce. Buying leads from qualified sources can allow you the ability to continue to scale. Adding the two channels together can effectively raise your profitability as a whole while continuing to grow. If you are not set up to generate leads internally because of technical and/or media buying resources, but still want to take advantage of benefits, maybe consult an online direct response agency (like us).

Stay tuned! In part 3 of this post we will discuss the “B word”.

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