How to optimise the quality of your social media leads
While it’s certainly nice to see an influx of fresh leads, nobody wants to spend a significant chunk of their marketing budget on a LinkedIn or Facebook campaign, only to find that none of the leads generated turn into paying customers. In this blog, we share some tips on how to define, measure and improve the quality of your social media leads.
What is a high-quality lead?
To put it simply, a high-quality lead is a lead that is likely to turn into a paying customer. It can be tricky to determine who those leads are when you are running social media lead generation campaigns. With the correct definition, measurement and tracking, however, you should be able to gather the information you need to optimise your social media campaigns for lead quality.
Your definition of a high-quality lead will typically reflect your ideal customer profile. One approach to defining lead quality is using customer lifecycle marketing to map out the various stages a lead goes through to become a customer and identifying the leads most likely to become your customers. For example, at Driftrock we use a funnel report to track our social media leads throughout their customer lifecycle journey. Our definition of a high quality lead reflects the criteria we have set out for a MQL (marketing qualified lead). On top of this data we also look at the campaign performance for each one of our campaigns and how many of the MQLs generated actually turned into paying customers over time.
A good starting point when defining high quality leads is to look at your existing database and determine what the leads who convert to customers have in common. Do they share a specific industry or job title? Do they have a set budget to spend on your products? Drill into your data and compile a list of trends that will give you a good starting point in setting out a clear definition of who your most valuable leads are.
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Keep track of campaign performance across channels with Driftrock’s Multi-channel report. See how it works. [/caption]
Once you have this definition keep tracking and comparing the performance of your campaigns across different channels. As you gather more and more data you will gain a better understanding not only of who your high-quality leads are but also what channels, campaigns and products attract them to your business. The key here is ongoing measurement and optimisation. You can easily track your campaign performance across all of your lead generation channels with Driftrock’s Multi-channel reporting. Click here to see how it works.
How to measure lead quality
While sophisticated reporting and measurement tools such as Driftrock will definitely make your life much easier, you can use a spreadsheet to manually measure the quality of your social media leads. Here’s an example of what this might look like.
Step 1: Download your leads to a spreadsheet with marketing source from UTM or columns in native lead generation formats.
Step 2: Sort your spreadsheet to group leads by Campaign, Adset or Ad. Include two columns for each lead row: a) A ‘count’ column = 1 for each lead, b) a ‘quality count’ column = 1 for a high-quality, or 0 for a lead who doesn’t meet quality criteria.
Step 3: Use this data to create two Pivot tables to give you:
- The number of leads in each Campaign, Adset or Ad
- The number of quality lead in each Campaign, Adset or Ad
Step 4: Add ad spend and calculate cost per qualified lead (Spend/ Quality count)
Repeat this process for each new campaign and monitor weekly to educate decisions on how to optimise your campaigns. Drilling into which campaigns, adsets and ads generate the lowest cost high-quality leads will make it a lot easier for you to make decisions on which campaigns to resume, which ones to further optimise for quality and which ones to simply switch off.
How to improve lead quality
Now that you know how to define what a high quality lead means to you and have the tools you need to measure lead quality, it’s time learn some tricks on how to improve the quality of your social media leads. Here are some of the tried and tested ways of optimising your campaigns to generate higher quality leads:
- Optimise your targeting
Every successful social media advertising campaign begins with smart targeting. As you may already know social media networks such as Facebook and LinkedIn offer quite specific ad targeting and knowing how to make the most of those targeting options will help you get the best results from your advertising budget. Targeting goes back to your ideal customer profile and to your knowledge of your audience and their needs and habits. A great way to improve lead quality is using Facebook Lookalike Audiences or LinkedIn Matched Audience to target people similar to your existing customers or to your website visitors or LinkedIn.
2. Offer true value to leads
The more relevant the offer you advertise to your audience the more likely it is to attract the right type of leads. Don’t spare time or resources on identifying the exact need or problem your offer is trying to solve for your audience, hone your messaging to perfection to package it in an understandable and actionable language. Make sure that what you are offering to your leads in exchange of their personal information is something that ads real value to them or their business. Whether that is a free trial, a test drive, a free tool or a helpful webinar with industry specialists make sure it is designed to solve an existing problem and it is packaged in a way that conveys the benefits that your target audience will get from it.
3. Provide multiple options
It is good marketing practice to focus on one main desirable action you want your audience to take and provide a few additional options to capture leads who might be at different stages of their buying process. For example, adding a simple “I’d like a quote”, or “I’m just looking for more info”question to your lead generation forms will give you insight into the lifecycle stage of your leads and help them get the most out of the offer.
4. Validate and cleanse your lead database
We know that database hygiene is not the most exciting aspect of any marketer’s job but it is essential when it comes to social media lead generation. If you want to generate and convert relevant leads then you need to be quite stringent in removing any fake or invalid leads. According to research by Convertr 38% of the leads that enter your database are fake or invalid. This number can have a massive impact on your social media lead generation campaigns which is why regular lead database cleansing is essential. You can either manually go through leads and remove invalid leads or use a tool like Driftrock that will help you automatically validate and cleanse your leads.
Now that you have some tips on how to optimise the quality of your social media leads, it’s time to get to work. Whether you are just starting out with social media lead generation or you are looking for ways to improve your current performance, our guide will have some additional pro tips on how to make the most of your social media leads and drive more sales.
