We often explain to clients that we aren’t just your digital marketing team. We see ourselves as digital advisors leading & scaling your business through the new age. At New Age Explorer, we pride ourselves on one thing - Integrity. While we provide new affordable leads, improve brand awareness, growing sales, and last but not least, increase return on investment; measurably. Our success as a business stems from being passionate about serving our clients & really understanding their business needs & life goals.
First off, if you're still not completely sold on the idea of Paid Online Advertising, read our blog Organic Social Media is Dead - What Now?! and perhaps you might just change your perspective and outlook.
With phones, internet, laptops & social media ever-so-more part of our daily lives. The need for an online presence and effective & seamless digital marketing efforts has become more apparent. While ‘old-school’ business owners see digital marketing as an operation within a business; serial entrepreneurs & digital-nomads with an eager eye for opportunity see it as a passive asset & income-producing investment.
Here are 5 ways lead generation digital marketing can help scale & grow your business to 10X return on investment in 2022 and beyond:
1. Generate More Leads
This is done by buying targeted traffic and driving them to your website contact form or sales funnels where they can either inquire or make a booking. The issue is that across the board the average conversion rate for a website around the world is 1.47%. So, you have to spend a lot to send a lot of traffic to your website for minimal conversions. Whereas with a sales funnel where the average conversion rate is 20%, every 5th person should convert. Read our blog, What is a Sales Funnel & Why your Business Needs One to Succeed for more information.
Another important factor in generating these leads is how they are targeted & driven to the website or sales funnel with online advertising. Facebook advertising allows you to find & acquire your perfect customer based on demographic, psychographic, interests & behaviors. There are some advanced tools that also allow you to advertise to your existing database, as well as to people who take or don’t take certain actions on your social media and/or website; allowing for more personalized ads & better results. Facebooks most powerful advertising tool by for is the formidable & extremely cheap lookalike-audiences.
The Facebook algorithm is able to essentially duplicate an audience with brand new potential customers who have similar behaviors, demographics and/or interests to that audience. So if you have an audience of paying past customers – you can find a whole new group of potential customers; doubling your market share just like that.
Google advertising works a bit differently & is usually a bit more expensive, but it does have some similar features to Facebooks advertising. Google advertising works based on a search term or buyer’s intent; allowing for your business to show up first on the search engine rankings and provide the right valuable information to solve a pain-point or problem. While keywords become the focus for advertising; there are also retargeting tools to send banner ads to people who have visited your website but have not taken action or converted, as well as similar ‘lookalike’ tools where you can place banner ads on websites your perfect customer visits often.
2. Increase Conversion Rates
While driving people to a conversion-optimised website or sales funnel is a great start to generate new leads & scale your business, increasing conversion rates means more qualified customers in each part of your funnel, which means more revenue & more capital to scale your business.
Making sure your initial offer fits the jaw-dropping no-brainer criteria is the first step in the funnel and the starting point to increase conversion rates. So, what makes a good offer? Firstly, it should focus on the outcome from the solution you offer that solves your customers fear/desire-based pain-point. The offer needs to be irresistible; a no-brainer jaw-dropping discount that they can’t refuse. Lastly, the offer needs to create urgency – the customer needs to feel like this is now or never. This can be done by making the offer time-bound, limiting the number of people who can take the offer and/or by adding in a bonus for the first few customers to inquire. Furthermore, once the client is in the door from your jaw-dropping offer, you want another upsell jaw-dropping offer to retain the customer and get them coming back for more, sooner rather than later.
Let’s face it though – the modern world is busy and technology has us consistently distracted. So even when we have the perfect offer, we can forget, get side-tracked from the other 50 tabs you have open, or have our attention taken away by the vibrations, beeps & pings of our phones. This is why Facebook retargeting advertisements & Google retargeting banner ads are so crucial, and on average 2x sales and increase conversion rates by +30% within the first 90 days.
If your jaw-dropping offer doesn’t hook them but retargeting does then the next focus is nurturing them via automated emails. Read our blog, the 5 Essential Automated Emails for Nurturing Campaigns. By setting up an automated email series to further nurture these leads & deal with objections; you can not only stay in touch with them, but you’ll also be able to get them to convert by educating them and further satisfying their emotional decision with rational & logical backing. Oh, and big emphasis on automated; so you don’t need to spend hundreds of hours emailing each lead, every day; Allowing you more time to generate inquiries while your automated email series closes existing leads, thus allowing you to increase revenue for your business.
Last but not least we have the telephone follow up. This is one of the most important aspects when wanting to increase conversion rates and its where South African businesses fail the most. You have gone through all the stops to get the customer to convert, but they just aren’t taking action. Firstly, this is where you need a couple of automated SMS’s to supplement your email marketing campaign – we usually set this up through Twilio. But lastly and most importantly, you need your sales team to call the customer; and not a couple days later, but within the first hour they opt-in, again before the end of the day if they didn’t pick up, again the following day if they still haven’t picked up and lastly – a couple of days later if they still haven’t picked up or converted yet. More than just the crucial timing aspect, it’s important that your salesman understands who is on the other side of the phone, what is their main pain-point & why they think your business will solve their problem. Your salesman should also try to evoke an urgency but mentioning how many limited spaces are left for the offer, how much time there is left for the offer to be taken and even mentioning a couple of bonuses if they convert right now. We use an app called LeadOwl, (which also has SMS capabilities) which sends the lead's information straight to your sales team’s phones so that they can call, SMS & email the client almost right after they opt-in; no need for a messy CRM. It also rates leads & reminds your sales team when to get in contact with the lead if they have not yet picked up or converted.
3. Increase Frequency of RePurchase
You have spent time & money getting the customer in the door and they have purchased your product and/or service. But, in order to increase revenue - you need to upsell the customer to entice them back for repurchases - and the sooner the better, and the more frequent the better. This can be done in various ways.
The first way has nothing to do with your ideal customer, and everything to do with your business model & industry. Do you have a well thought out value-ladder so that either each purchase is more valuable than the last but more expensive; or that your businesses product and/or service is based around a regular subscription known as passive income or annuity purchase.
Secondly, in order to increase the frequency of repurchase – we can look at the type of customer we are targeting. As we have mentioned before – don’t waste time & money trying to market to everyone. Market with the Pareto Principle in mind; that 20% of your customers will bring in 80% of the profits. So, tweak your ideal customer, so that you are targeting higher lifetime value customers who are more likely to come back more often and for a longer period of time.
Your next best bet is to send regular email newsletters out – not just to retain clients & keep your past customers informed with industry & businesses related trends & news, but to send them specials that will get them coming back to buy sooner rather than later. Our favorite CRM of choice for this is MailChimp.
Last but not least, you should always continue to send retargeting advertisements to past customers. The more they see you and the more you are in their mind – the more they will consider repurchasing your product and/or service when their pain-point is heightened. You can also retarget them with specials and discounts that have been mentioned in your email newsletter for past paying clients. Skeptical about Facebook advertising? Then you must read our blog on the 5 Reasons to Embrace the Power of Facebook Advertising.
4. Increase Average Sale Value
When you have more leads coming through your sales funnel, you have more customers converting – and more regularly; the next aim is to increase how much the average lifetime customer spends. Of course, increasing prices is the obvious no-brainer, although it can push away some customers if they can’t correlate the price increase to the value they are receiving.
So, your next best bet is to sell bundles. Instead of selling just the one-time purchase of your product and/or service & trying to upsell – sell in bulk and provide a jaw-dropping discount that justifies the upfront purchase.
Your next option is to tweak how you sell your business. Firstly, working on your follow-up & sales processes mentioned above – like automated SMS’s, automated emails & getting your sales teams skills up to call & close clients on the phone. Secondly, instead of selling products and/or services – sell outcomes. I.E. don’t sell a R1,000.00 monthly gym membership – sell a 3-month R5,000.00 summer body transformation package. Don’t sell the features of your product and/or service – sell the benefits and the outcomes of solving the customer's pain points & desires.
5. Increase Profit Margins
If you have done the following 4 suggestions mentioned above then you’re in good stand to scale & grow your business. When you have hit this point - it becomes a logistical game of numbers. It’s all about improving & optimising your already world-class digital marketing foundation & sales funnel for more, better & cheaper results.
By increasing your prices, average sale value and/or the frequency of repurchase - you are increasing your profit margin as well as revenue. With conversion optimised-landing pages & an optimised-Facebook pixel; you should be able to decrease the cost per lead and thus receive more leads with the same budget and thus increase your profit margins.
By having conversion-optimised automated nurturing emails, automated SMS & a skilled sales team who calls & closes more leads – you will have more sales, more revenue, and thus increase your profit margin.
As an entrepreneur or business owner – your main goal is to have a successful growing business that runs on its own & provides you with passive annuity income; then allowing you to reap the privileges of the entrepreneurial lifestyle, like time-flexibility, location flexibility & financial freedom. By implementing these 5 things into your business plan & marketing efforts – you should be able to increase your bottom line and scale your businesses revenue; maybe even allow your business to expand into new markets or area’s for bigger market share. Let us know in the comments down below – what has your business done to scale, improve profit margins & increase revenue?