---

What can our team at adwhip do for your business?

We set up and quarterback your online lead funnel. This includes digital ads working in-sync with your social profiles and utilizing the highest ROI yielding strategies that put you ahead of your competitor(s).

---

Our hitchhiker’s guide to sourcing new client leads for your business.

New clients are essential for your business. But what’s the best strategy for getting new clients leads to turn into valuable clients? Advertising and word-of-mouth.

Let’s start with advertising. Advertising for clients is no longer as easy as putting an ad in the local paper. With so many companies/competitors utilizing advertising (both physical and digital), your ad strategy has to be laser-targeted and data-focused.

Word-of-Mouth

Word-of-mouth (aka referral) marketing, as you know, is powerful and every type of business uses it to grow their clientele. Some of your best clients are most likely word-of-mouth based. However, in order to build this referral momentum and keep your business fresh in the minds of your past and current clients, will require continuous advertising efforts. You have to think about all of the things we get bombarded with on a daily basis, from work to hobbies, to parent duties, without advertising effort to stay relevant, the word-of-mouth machine may run out of fuel.

Digital Funnel

A digital funnel is a step by step process that sources valuable leads for your business, for you to turn them into paying customers. To summarize the digital funnel, it begins at the point of an unaware viewer seeing your ad for the first time. From this point, multiple things can occur. This viewer may be instantly interested in the offer and become a hot lead, they may be mildly interested but not convert just yet, or they may not be interested at all.

A. Facebook Funnel

Facebook is a great way to build a lead generation funnel. This can work for any lead-focused business. Ads can take a visitor directly to your landing page, where you can collect their information for follow-up. However, my favorite way of building leads through Facebook is the Lead Ads, which prompt a lead form directly on Facebook after the viewer pressing on an ad image or call-to-action. The added benefit of these is how quick and intuitive they are for the viewer, activating instantly without having the need to load any additional web pages. Which is a big plus in a competitive environment where you may have seconds to entice a viewer into becoming a valuable lead.

B. Google Funnel

Google is also great for building leads. On Google, I prefer creating search-based ads targeting specific, and continuously benchmarked keywords, that take the visitor to a landing page that contains more information on your product or service, where you can then quickly convert the visitor into a valuable lead.

Retargeting

The above two methods can also work in-sync. One way to do this is to utilize retargeting efforts on Facebook. This is done by building a “custom audience” around you landing page visitors, acquired through Google, that you can then retarget via Facebook and the custom audience. The fact that the prospect has seen your service before, makes them significantly more likely to fill out a Facebook lead ad, as they aren’t required to go back to your website and wait for any additional loading time.

A. General Broadcasts

Social media is also a form of retargeting, as you are engaging with past customers and clients that actively chose to follow you. Social media retargeting for lead-based businesses can be a hit, but most likely a miss and time waste (honest opinion). Most lead-based businesses require a voice to voice interaction and once a customer has committed to a service, they will stick with you and refer others. Retargeting these clients on social media is cute for things like “Happy Holiday” messages but won’t generate you a  worthwhile ROI.

B. Mailing List

Mailing lists are far less effective than they used to be. However, nurturing a mailing list can still be effective as long as it isn’t your primary point of focus or investment. One great solution we implement is building an email list around “Lead Campaigns” on Facebook, which yields emails. We then segment these emails into our email campaigns as a form of continuous retargeting.

C. Retargeting Ads

Retargeting ads are the best when it comes to effectively reach past visitors. After “pixeling” your website, you can directly target people that visited the site and promote your service and have them finally convert into a lead. Retargeting ads have the highest ROI, as they target “warm traffic” or people that are already somewhat familiar with your brand or offer, so the chance of conversion is increased exponentially.

Influencers

Influencers are a hot topic right now for almost every business. We live in an era of Youtube video reviews and Instagram product posts by Kylie Jenner (youngest female billionaire). After testing influencer marketing for many companies and niches, it can be a hit or a miss. Some companies have invested a lot of money, and have gotten very minimal results. While others do great.

If you can get people to share your services to their friends, or even have relevant “influencers” in the community that can advocate your business for you, then leads can surely be generated. However, combining these efforts with digital advertising is the best route to go.

Advanced

Beyond the normal lead-based ads and sending traffic to a landing page that collects leads, there are more advanced metrics you have to consider when running lead-generating funnels.

A. Frequency

One of these is the impression frequency, or how many times a person has seen your ad over a period of time. For certain businesses that focus on a local market, such as real estate or insurance agents, your market is finite. If you begin an ad campaign around a finite market and let it run without proper timing, you run the risk of showing your ad too many times to your audience. So the frequency is an important metric to analyze. We recommend that a person does not view your ad more than three times in a single month (not including retargeting).

This can be controlled by Facebook “reach campaign” types, which allows you to control this variable quite easily. The Facebook reach campaign also has some great lead conversion capabilities, allowing you to attach a lead form to the ad and have the user fill out the form directly on Facebook without having to load any additional pages, or take the more traditional route of sending them to an optimized landing page, where you can then convert the visitor into a lead.

B. Segmentation

You can also further segment out those that already showed interest and filled out a lead form or visited your landing page by creating a custom audience, which can make your ads more optimized by not showing it over and over again to people that filled out a lead form, either on Facebook directly or your landing page.

C. Lead Type

There are several lead type captures that you can focus on when building your lead pipeline. Traditionally, email leads have been the predominant lead type that people seek. However, in my humble opinion, call-captures are far more important than email leads.

D. Lexical Sentiment Analysis

Lexical sentiment analysis refers to ad platform algorithmic sentiment. Meaning the algorithm that drives Facebook ads and Google ads like certain things that you should be aware of. These things include variables that make viewers happy, as ad networks want their ad viewers to remain happy after seeing an ad. These variables include smiling people, proper colors, friendly text, and good comment conversation. These are all variables that we closely monitor when running ad campaigns for our clients to ensure optimal return on investment.

E. Effective Chat Bots

Chatbots can be awesome if done right. If you have a growing Facebook page (which is important if you read section “D” above, then having a well-set chatbot will save you a significant amount of time. Chatbots can do complex tasks like list out your top services, connect you with a potential customer that is looking to contact you, or just give the hours of operation. Your friendly bot can do all sorts of great things. Chatbots have been a big focus for us here at adwhip, as many clients are looking to spice up their vast and growing Facebook pages with a helper chatbot that does all the heavy lifting. We can set one up for you too.

Let’s Wrap Up

Building a strong lead funnel online can be done by the strategies outlined above. Once your ads are operational, it is important to benchmark continuously to ensure that things are operating smoothly. When we create lead funnels, we create multiple ad sets and test multiple variables, such as keywords, images, headlines, and creative type, to get the highest possible ROI from our ad spend.

---