As a marketer, you are constantly confronted with the task of minimizing and optimizing your company’s Cost Per Lead.
But here’s a vitally important question: are you calculating your Cost Per Lead (CPL) for outbound marketing but ignoring inbound digital marketing?
If so, that can be a big mistake. On average, inbound leads cost 61% less than outbound. To put that in more concrete terms, the average CPL for outbound-dominated businesses was $346, compared to $135 for companies that mostly use inbound marketing techniques.
That’s why an easy and highly effective way to reduce your CPL is to focus on your inbound marketing efforts. Here are three tips to help you cut your CPLs and get the most out of your marketing dollars.
3 Tactics to Lower Your Cost Per Lead
1. Develop a Laser-Focused Persona and Content Strategy
In order to reduce cost, you need to have a much greater focus on your ideal customer (also known as a persona).
Ask yourself: who is your average buyer? Your ideal buyer? If you know the answers to those questions, why would you make your marketing general? That is a waste of money, time and resources.
Only spend your marketing dollars where your ideal customer tends to be. Are they on social media? Are they more interested in informative white papers? Create the content they want to see in the places you know they’ll be.
Of course, a persona is only as good as the content strategy behind it. Simply put, a content strategy outlines all the media pieces you’ll be creating for your marketing plan (blogs, social posts, downloads, videos, etc.).
Think of a content strategy as a road map for your digital marketing. A good strategy should take into account things such as persona pain points, what formats are the best fit and what stage of the buyer’s journey the content will address.
That last point is important. It’s crucial to create content that meets potential customers where they are in their buyer’s journey. For example, provide educational, helpful content on general topics related to your business or industry for those at the top of the sales funnel. Develop content that shows how your product or service will solve potential customers’ problems when they’re in the middle of the funnel, and so on.
2. Optimize Your Landing Pages and Test Results
Landing pages can be a great resource for you to gather information on potential customers. However, if your landing pages have low conversion rates, it could greatly affect your overall CPL. If the conversion rate is unfavorable, your landing pages may need optimization.
Landing pages provide one way to generate leads. Here are some others.
Landing pages can be very tricky to optimize. So, it’s always important to try new things, review the results and continually make changes until your conversion rate is at an acceptable level. Here are a few things to keep in mind when creating a landing page:
- Make sure the submission forms stand out from the rest of the page. Use arrows, colors, different font styles and more to make sure the viewer can easily find it.
- Don’t ask too many questions. When someone submits an initial form, only ask for the bare minimum – name, email address and phone number. Once you have general contact information, you can dig deeper in the future with content directed at their interests.
- Keep the word count low, and focus on the benefits. Once a potential customer arrives at the landing page, they already know why they are there. It is pointless to have a long, drawn-out landing page discussing your company history when all the buyer wants is the advertised long form. Nothing scares someone away faster than a bloated, confusing landing page.
Here’s an example of one of Marketing Essentials’ landing pages:
3. Reevaluate Your Social Media Plan
Social media can be a very powerful (and mostly free) tool for companies. It is a great way to engage with customers and gauge what piques the interest of potential buyers. However, like anything else, using it incorrectly will yield unsatisfactory results.
Try these social strategies to drive prospects to your website!
Even though it can be a great tool for your business, one of the worst social media sins is to treat it like one.
What that means is, your company’s social media channels shouldn’t be robotic newsfeeds of press releases and product posts. Instead, they should be a meeting place for your customers and clients, a place where they can clearly see the human side of your business.
This is what’s known as being human-to-human. Human-to-human (or H2H) is an ultra-personalized approach to social media (and marketing as a whole). What it means is, speak to your base like a human, not a business. Post pictures that they’ll enjoy seeing, give them useful information or entertaining nuggets to brighten their day.
Another important thing to keep in mind with social media is to treat the channel almost as its own website. Rather than thinking of it solely as a way to drive traffic to your website, think of it as a new, separate platform to engage with your audience.
Do so on the platform’s terms — after all, there’s a reason those customers are on that social channel instead of your website. Give the people what they want.
Bottom line: social media is changing. People want human connections, not a robotic sales pitch. If your social channels aren’t following H2H principles, it’s time to fix that.
For more tips on being H2H, check out our infographic, Stop Being a Brand on Social Media.
Don’t Forget: Monitor Performance, Make Adjustments
The final (and arguably the most important) step is to monitor the results of your efforts. This means that before you even begin, you need to determine your current inbound digital marketing CPL.
If you’re unsure of how to calculate your current inbound digital marketing CPL, use this simple formula:
Cost Per Lead = Cost Per Click / Conversion Rate
Once you’ve found your current digital marketing Cost Per Lead, monitor it and use that number as a benchmark. From here, you’ll be able to view movement, good and bad, and make changes in your inbound sales tactics accordingly.
How to Succeed
Would you like additional tips to lower your Cost Per Lead? Worried that you don’t have the know-how to make needed changes? Reach out to Marketing Essentials today. We offer a free 30-minute consultation to review your current strategy and point you in the right direction.
