Today, we’re going to look at a range of different ideas that will help your business create more leads. While there are plenty of strategies, we’ve split them into two main categories; Paid vs Organic. In this post, we will start with paid lead generation strategies.
Paid strategies are ones where you actually pay to directly influence lead generation. Organic ones are ones that occur naturally through different tactics that you employ. Don’t worry, all will be made clear as we progress through this guide!
Paid Lead Generation Strategies
The most obvious type of paid lead generation strategy is advertising. You pay for ads, and they help bring new leads to your business. In the digital world, there are plenty of ways you can use advertising to get ahead of the game. The two most popular are:
- PPC/SEM
- Display Ads
PPC/SEM
PPC stands for pay per click, and it’s a type of digital advertising on search engines. This brings us onto SEM, which basically means search engine marketing.
The idea with PPC is that you pay to get adverts displayed on Google SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages). You bid on different keyword searches that you want your ads to be present on – these will be some of your target keywords that you’re focusing on for search engine optimization anyway. The highest bidders get their ads placed in the sponsored listings, which tend to appear at the top of the SERPs, which means they’re seen before the rest of the organic listings. The amount you bid is what you’ll pay Google when people click on your ads.
You can use PPC/SEM to direct people to specific pages on your site and then use landing pages to generate leads. It’s effective, but it can be costly as there are lots of companies competing for the top keywords.
Display ads
Display ads are adverts that are shown on websites around the web. No doubt you’ve encountered them yourself, and you’re usually shocked at how specific and targeted they are. You pay for these ads in a similar way to SEM. You still have to bid on them, and the cost varies depending on the keywords, where you want the adverts placed, and so on. The difference is that you’re charged per conversion instead of per click. So, if someone clicks on your ad and you get them to convert, then you’re charged.
Both Display Ads and PPC/SEM use Google AdWords, but they operate on two separate networks; display network and search network.
What’s the difference between display network and search network?
The search network simply refers to search engines. The adverts on this network are all text-based – they look just like regular Google search results. When bidding on these ads, the only thing to worry about are the keywords you’re targeting.
The display network is slightly more complicated. It’s basically the entire network of websites that have Google AdSense enabled. This means they allow Google to find and place ads on their site. They can be banner ads, images, moving ads, and so on. Bidding is more to do with lots of other factors like the relevancy of the pages you want the ads on, the topics, the audiences and so on.
One key difference is that display network advertising is cheaper. This is just because there’s only really one search engine people care about, but there are millions of websites to post your ads on.
It’s a good idea to use a combination of display ads and PPC to get the best results for lead generation. The search network is excellent for generating traffic to your site where you can use landing pages. The display network is great for targeting specific products or generating leads for certain services.
Paid Social for Generating Leads
Along with the two ideas above, there’s another lead generation idea called paid social. Here, we refer to paying for things on social media sites like Facebook, Instagram and Twitter. There are two different approaches; paying for ads on the specific social media advertising platforms, or paying to promote your posts.
Social media advertising taps into the large user base of these platforms and can help you generate a lot of targeted leads. If you use Twitter or Instagram, then paying to promote your posts is also a great idea. You can get them on other people’s timelines and ensure your posts are seen by more of your target market. Combine with links to your website and great landing pages, then you’ll generate lots of leads.
In the next part of this blog series, we will explain the difference between paid and organic lead gen strategies and how both can benefit growing your business.
