How to increase your leads to hit your targets

You've put together a well-thought-out marketing strategy, and you're executing it perfectly, but you're still nowhere near hitting your lead target.

Does this sound familiar?

When the economy is uncertain, your usually reliable channels might not generate the enquiries you expect. Seasoned marketers turn to brand awareness for the long-term and ensure there's a pipeline for when things improve.

But there's still pressure to bring in leads in the short-term.

What you need is a 360-degree view of your marketing performance. This complete picture helps you understand what your most effective marketing activities are. You can then use this to adjust your lead generation approach, meaning you can spend your tightened budget with confidence.

To get that full view you need to look beyond just digital analytics. You need to encompass phone call analytics, as there's such a rich amount of data behind every call.

In this article, you'll learn four ways that analysing both your online and phone enquiries can help you make quick - but assured – decisions to generate those elusive leads while keeping a close eye on your budget:

1. Understand which channels are bringing in qualified leads
2. Get smarter with your PPC budget
3. Optimise your user journey and landing pages for conversions
4. Remarketing to prospects using phone call data

1. Understand which channels are bringing in qualified leads

When you're under pressure to reduce your budget, it's not uncommon to take your GA4 reports at face value and cut the activities that aren't delivering conversions.

You need to look at all your online and offline conversions to understand which channels are delivering qualified leads. With this information, you can confidently identify which activities to stop - and which you need to optimise - to increase your leads.

"Your activity might not be bringing in online enquiries, but is it bringing in phone calls?" asks Colin Hudson, Head of Client Services at Mediahawk, a call tracking solution provider. "When we talk to new clients to understand their objectives, their pay-per-click (PPC) performance is often high on the priority list. They're worried that they're spending a large proportion of their budget on PPC, but their online conversions are too low to justify continued investment. They're on the verge of reducing, or even cutting off the channel completely."

"With Mediahawk call tracking they can see that PPC actually delivers a considerable number of phone call enquiries. If they had stopped their PPC activity, their leads would have dried up even more."

2. Get smarter with your PPC budget

Another problem we often come across is when your existing customers or prospective suppliers click on your PPC ads to search for your contact information.

This is one of the quickest ways of draining your PPC budget. Luckily, using call tracking and the advanced features within tools like Mediahawk, there are ways you can stop this happening:

• Categorising and scoring inbound phone calls based on criteria that you define (such as 'customer service', 'sales', 'recruitment', 'wrong number').
• Putting an IVR (interactive voice response) in place to route callers seamlessly to the right department.

These measures enable you to see at a glance if your budget is being spent on customer service, business service, or other irrelevant calls. They help you quickly identify the types of calls coming through, and the channels they're coming from.

In the case of PPC, you can even drill down to the keywords that the're using to reach you.

Armed with this information, you can fine-tune your PPC activity to make sure that your ads aren't appearing for these users – either by using careful keyword selection, negative keywords, or scheduling. This inevitably frees up more of your PPC budget to go directly towards targeting prospective customers.

3. Optimise your user journey and landing pages for conversions

The last few years has seen a huge shift in how we discover, research, and buy as consumers. Do you know how the journey has changed for your customers?

• Is the research phase longer?
• Is there are shift in the marketing channels your prospects are using?
• What touchpoints contribute to each stage of the journey, and has this changed?
• Are your prospects picking up the phone more, compared to filling in online forms?

Map out the user journey

Your first step is to map out what the user journey looks like for your prospects. For example, what touchpoints influence certain stages of the customer journey, what interactions lead your prospects further down the sales funnel, and how do your prospects prefer to convert – on the phone or online?

Mediahawk's call tracking software shows you each individual visitor journey, including the source and medium that brought them to you, details of every page on your site they visit, any interactions they have (including making a phone call, using live chat, or filling in a form), if they've made repeat visits to your site, and what other marketing touchpoints they've engaged with. (including making a phone call, using live chat, or filling in a form), if they've made repeat visits to your site, and what other marketing touchpoints they've engaged with.

With this information, you can improve the user experience, reduce friction in the journey, and increase your leads:

• Understand what content prospects need at the start of their journey, and what questions they’re asking along the way.
• Determine how often in their journey they interact with your team, and where human connections, such as the phone and live chat, are important.
• Identify which web pages people call from compared to filling out an online form in Mediahawk, and optimise your key converting pages for your target customers.
• Provide the reassurance that will help your prospects convert.

4. Remarketing to prospects using phone call data

Remarketing is a powerful feature to persuade previous visitors to your website to return and convert. You can also do something similar with phone calls using speech analytics technology.

You can create custom audiences in GA4 based on what's being said in phone conversations – such as 'pricing', 'features', or 'offers', for example - or by how the call is categorised. These custom audiences then allow you to remarket highly relevant content directly to prospects that called you.

You can also use your call data to create existing customer exclusion lists. That way you know that your remarketing budget will be used expressly to reach prospects.

Faye Thomassen, Head of Marketing at Mediahawk explains, "You can remarket to those that have called you but not yet converted to a lead. For example, someone who's got a query about your product but isn't ready to provide their details. From the conversation you can see what they're interested in and automatically add them into a custom list of others with similar queries for a highly targeted ad campaign."

Summary

If you feel like certain channels aren't performing as well as you'd expect, look at your online and offline conversion data for a much more rounded picture so you can:

1. Focus your marketing budget on the channels that are delivering leads.
2. Make sure that your PPC budget is being spent on prospects – not existing clients.
3. Improve your customer journey and landing pages to increase conversions.
4. Create highly targeted remarketing campaigns based on the conversations your prospects have when they call you.

You can then be confident that your remaining marketing budget is being used much more effectively to ensure you hit your lead targets.

Copyright 2023. Sponsored post made possible by Mediahawk.