How to Get Your Cross Channel Lead Generation Started
Having cross channel marketing is a cornerstone when it comes to your lead generation. This process can be a little tricky, figuring out the relationship of each channel can be confusing, there are a few questions you need to ask yourself.
- How do I integrate Google Ads to coordinate with Facebook ads
- How do I maximize my channels
-How do I know how to budget each channel
As you start your multi platform marketing you will notice that one channel will work better than others as well as some channels work well for multiple sections of lead gen. We will go over a few things to help you set up a cross channel strategy to you the advantage.
Figure Out Your Baseline For Cross Channel Lead Generation
You will notice the more you work in Google, Facebook and Bing that you will have good ideas for each platform to advertise. Baseline results are something that you can expect from every platform. This can get confusing with an assortment of promotions and different stages of the marketing funnel. One thing to do is map out what the cost per conversion is for each channel by using your account analytics averaging results may need to be used (and is okay).
After getting your baseline you will know what the standard cost will be throughout your funnel. This is important to help you figure out what types of promos to use in each channel. An example you might come across is that that the cost for a conversion in Bing might be lower than a conversion in Facebook. You will have two different types of funnels to work with a high-funnel promotion and a low-funnel promotion.
High-funnel is advertising that drives traffic to your website, like a blog post, newsletter, or ads that directly relate to your brand. This funnel is used to get people into the marketing funnel a good analogy is like getting a person into shallow end of the swimming pool. In theory after getting people into the higher funnel it should be easier to cultivate them into a customer, by converting in a lower funnel. This type of strategy is a marathon not a sprint, you will have high volumes of people flow through this funnel and slowly make their way to the finish line, do not expect a conversion right away. But as you do this overtime you can manipulate it where the cost will be less than the lower funnel, and can even yield a better ROI over time.
Low-funnel is a more direct form of marketing. This will drive traffic to free trials, sales call, consultations or demos. This will be promotions that are intended to attract closing a customer than the high-funnel. You should keep in mind that the CPC of these will more likely be higher than your high-funnel promotions.
In the end you will need to determine what kind of promotions go into which funnels. It will be important to identify the level intent of each promo when placing a marketing budget. These budgets will influence your ROAS in the long run.
Tracking & Results Cross Channel Lead Results
One of the biggest things everyone needs to do is tracking results. Being able to track all marketing channels will make your life a lot easier for decision making regarding budgets. We highly recommend installing Google analytics, but isn’t always necessary depending on your situation. Paid ad landing pages are your primary pages to track because this is where you will be getting your leads. If you can measure the performance of the landing page and be able to track it back to the channel it came from you will be in a prime spot.
Google Analytics makes viewing by channel easy with the UTM tracking that is provided. All you need to do is make sure on each landing page you use for a promotion has a UTM to attach to the URL.
Channel level conversion rates - Learn how ads convert for audiences or ad groups. By having your baseline you will be able to figure out if low conversion rates are an issue for the specific ad group or audience.
Conversion rates for landing pages- Similar to channel level conversion rates, you can determine with your recorded baseline if landing page conversion rate is an issue across all the channels.
CPC (cost per conversion) - Keeping track of this will let you calculate new customer acquisition costs from lead effort generation.
Lead Quality - Knowing how well each channel is doing, how many leads you are getting and how many leads are converting. You can figure out the lead quality for each channel. For example if a Facebook audience is generating 30 leads a month but only 10 get converted. Where as Google Ads is getting 30 leads a month and is converting 20 of those leads. You can figure out Facebook audience is under performing compared to Google Ads, this is where you can make some judgement calls, either spend less budget in that audience because you know the lead quality isn’t as high or modify your audience, ad copy, or landing page to see if you can get better results.
Budget Allocation Based on Intent
We all know that there is a limited budget in our marketing, especially when you are starting out. The more you test you will gain insights that will affect your business, where you can prioritize your budgets and channels.
Push vs. Pull for Cross Channel Lead Generation
Paid search and paid social media are both different monsters and you need to understand that the nature of each channel will be different including the dollar amount to maximize your efficiency. Testing a variety of promotions at once will gain insights as to how effective each is on your business.
Paid Social- All social media marketing platforms are considered “push” marketing. Most targeting will be towards an audience that either have or haven’t heard of your company before. Reason why it is called push marketing is because you are “pushing” your advertisements onto them.
With a limited budget your first point should be to focus on remarketing. Targeting users that have already have visited your website. This will help with your pushing strategy, because they will likely already be somewhere in your funnel or as some would say “lower hanging fruit”.
Paid Search- Paid search is Google and Bing, which are considered “pull”marketing. They are called pulling because there is already a form of intent when someone is looking searching on these platforms, so you are pulling them into your ad. This is a more competitive platform especially on the higher search query keywords. Starting with a limited budget, you should be focusing on keywords that are the most relevant and important to do with your business. The other given is to focus on is your brand campaigns.
Google Display Network- This is actually more of a push than a pull market. It isn’t a direct ad that you see when searching in google. It is usually on the side of the screen as a pop up, when starting out I would put this low on the totem pole.