Increasing quality lead volume at a lower cost is one of the most sought after goals for most businesses and marketers. How exactly can you lower your cost per lead?
Below are a few ways we've been able to lower our clients' cost per lead.
Track cost per lead
First, let's let Captain Obvious say his peace. In order to lower your cost per lead, you need to ensure you're accurately tracking it across all marketing channels. For example, using conversion tracking on paid search channels such as Google AdWords and Facebook Ads. Setting up conversion tracking for paid search is normally pretty simple. All that's typically needed is to add the conversion pixel to your thank you page.
It gets a little trickier to track other channels. For example, tracking your SEO, content marketing and email efforts. Tracking these channels will vary depending on how you're generating them - using an agency, paying a freelancer or employees doing the work.
Data based optimizations
For paid channels such as Google AdWords, letting data drive your optimizations is key to lowering your cost per lead. For example, when looking at your data, seek elements of the campaign that is not producing leads or at a a much higher cost than you would like. In a Google AdWords campaign, this could mean pausing keywords that spend budget, but do not convert. For keywords that are converting but at a higher cost, you could lower the bid.
Other paid channels such as Facebook Ads, look at your audience data. Often times, certain segments will out perform others. For example, is there a difference in conversion rate and cost per lead when looking at male vs female, age segments, creatives or interests?
As mentioned above, let the data drive your decisions, pause inefficiences and shift budget towards elements that are performing well. This is one of the best ways to lower your cost per lead for paid traffic.
Work on these marketing channels
Are you spending marketing budget on search engine optimization, content marketing, email lead nurturing, retargeting or social media? These channels often have a lower cost per lead.
SEO - It's important to properly optimize your website and content for search engines. SEO will help your website feed itself with traffic from search engines. SEO costs time and money, but the long term benefits will earn your website steady traffic without paying for each click it receives.
Content marketing - You can get a lot of mileage from your content marketing efforts. Content marketing lets you build assets that you can re purpose to earn traffic from multiple channels. For example, the content created for a webinar could be re purposed into a Slideshare, blog post, content for an email campaign and all of these can be promoted on social media. Content marketing is great for your SEO as well, helping you earn steady traffic over time.
Email lead nurturing - Forrester Research found companies that excel at lead nurturing generate 50% more sales ready leads at 33% lower cost. A well planned email campaign can nurture prospects into sales qualified leads. This keeps your sales team focused on working the right leads.
Retargeting - This is a paid channel, but retargeting gives you a second chance to convert visitors who didn't initially convert on the first visit. You only pay for clicks, and these clicks are often valuable as they've already been exposed to your brand.
Social media - This channel lets you promote your content, but most importantly, gives you a vehicle to personally connect with your audience.
Reduce budget on outbound marketing
All the above marketing channels are often part of a well planned inbound marketing strategy. Outbound marketing often has a much higher cost per lead and is less effective than inbound marketing.
HubSpot's State of Inbound Report found that:
- 2X as many marketers say inbound delivers below average cost per lead than outbound methods.
- $20K is the average companies save per year by investing more in inbound marketing vs. outbound.
If you made it to the bottom of this article, you have new tips you can put into action to lower your cost per lead! Let us know if you need help creating cost-effective marketing campaigns.
Learn how to lower your cost per lead by building and executing an effective content marketing strategy in our free eBook!
