For the last 25+ years, WSI has helped 100,000 businesses navigate the complexity of digital marketing. Attracting more qualified leads online is just one of the topics we have covered in webinars intended to educate and share best practices on aspects of digital marketing. Managing director at an Atlanta-based WSI Agency, Gerardo Kerik draws on his years of experience at Fortune 500 companies where he launched brands and products in the US, Europe, South East Asia, and Latin America. What is a Lead? “A lead is an individual or organization with an interest in what you are selling. The interest is expressed by sharing contact information, like an email ID, phone number, or social media handle.” Leads vary from cold to warm or hot leads, depending on how engaged they are with your products or services. Marketing Qualified Leads (MQL) are engaging with your marketing activities, e.g., a webinar. Sales Qualified Leads (SQL) are high-quality leads showing a clear intent and ability to buy. Ideally, you want to scale up the quantity of quality leads to achieve your goals. The 7-Step Framework 1. Goals Using a mathematical formula, you can enter the average sales price of your product and your average lead-close rate to calculate the number of leads you need to achieve your revenue objective. Including the average cost per lead will return your total budget. If you don’t have these figures for your business, use industry averages in the meantime. 2. Buyer Persona “A buyer persona is a semi-fictional representation of your ideal customer based on market research and real data about your existing customers.” To find out the interests, pains, and challenges of your ideal customers, consider interviewing customers, studying your contact database, leveraging website forms, and getting feedback from your salespeople. Then brainstorm with your team to create buyer personas from the info you have gathered. (Get our eBook, How to Create Buyer Personas, from your friendly WSI Consultant.) 3. Buyer Journey Map the process buyers go through to: Become aware of a need. Consider options to solve the need. Decide to purchase the solution. Be sure to match journey touch points to your type of business (B2B vs B2C). 4. Content Mapping and Offers An effective strategy to maintain engagement with your business delivers the right type of content to each buyer persona at the right time. Generate leads with an offer that will motivate your prospects to share their contact information in exchange for it, i.e. a lead magnet. Your local WSI Consultant can assist you with a content audit. 5. Conversion Path What digital path is followed to convert an anonymous Philippines Photo Editor website visitor to a lead to a buyer? Four basic elements include a download offer landing page, a conversion form, a thank you page, and in return you get an email address lead. 6. Channels This step can only be addressed as a consequence of the previous steps. Now you determine what marketing tactics will achieve your revenue goals. Each channel (paid or organic search, social, display, email) has its own benefits and is mapped to steps on the buyer’s journey. 7. Reporting Use data and insights to close the loop between marketing activities and sales results. Getting feedback lets you make campaign changes that increase the number of quality leads. For one-on-one help with your online lead generation strategy or any other aspect of digital marketing, contact WSI without delay! Or catch up with our full webinar recording below:

Are you a business owner challenged with finding enough qualified leads for your business? Don't worry, you are not alone! This is one of the top questions we get regularly. It's the classic catch-22; you have a million things to do to support your business, and it would be great to solve the ongoing issue of finding enough people who want to buy your product or service regularly. This blog article will explain the various paid search advertising tactics that a company can use to generate leads quicker for their business. 1. Good Paid Search Starts with Great Keyword Research While there are multiple ways a company can generate leads for their business online, pay per click remains one of the simplest and quickest ways to generate leads in almost any industry. A basic pay-per-click campaign (PPC) will usually roll out as a highly targeted campaign by targeting the demographics of the clients you would like to attract. You will start with excellent keyword research to see how people are actually searching for your product or service online - no guessing here. If you have been running ads for some time, then conducting a periodic audit of search terms is essential since how your potential clients are looking for your products and services can change over time. While some companies choose to run these campaigns on their own, a professional firm that has run thousands of campaigns and has specialized knowledge in your industry can help significantly in identifying opportunities you might not otherwise be aware of. This helps ensure your precious ad dollars are not wasted, and the ads are properly optimized over time, so you get the best results for your marketing spend. 2. Serve Up Relevant Offers at the Right Time with PPC Usually, your initial PPC ads are in the form of a text ad since they are the most straightforward ads to generate (especially if you are doing it on your own). From here, multiple ads can be created to compare which ads are providing you with the best results. PPC ads are most effective when the ad served up is most relevant to what the buyer is searching for in a search engine. Because PPC allows you to reach the buyer right at the moment they are searching for their item, you have a golden opportunity to provide the buyer exactly what they need when they need it (i.e. it is 6 PM, and I am hungry and want to order a pizza, what deals are out there?) In this example, a pizza parlor looking to bring in more foot traffic or increase their online orders would use the hook of a coupon or promotional code in their PPC ad that is not only relevant and served up in their local area but is also timed to show up at the dinner hour. Implementing an ad campaign that is set up to reach a buyer, where they are in their 'buying cycle' increases the likelihood of you selling something to that individual. When there is high search volume around a product or service, PPC is ideal for starting with lead generation. Not only do you want to ensure your business gets a piece of that high traffic volume, PPC has the targeting capabilities to manage your budget accordingly so you can manage your spending but still use it as a more immediate form of lead generation. This is especially important if your digital marketing strategy includes longer-term tactics such as search engine optimization, which can take months to start producing results. 3. Expand Your Brand Reach with Display Advertising Display ads are online advertisements placed on websites that are highly relevant to what you are selling. They may be text, interactive, video or image ads shown to people who are most likely to be interested in your product or service. The type of ad format you leverage will depend on the objectives of your ad campaign. An image-based ad is excellent for expanding your brand awareness and may include your company's logo or a picture of the specific product you provide. In contrast, a video ad is highly effective when you need help explaining a more complex product or service. These types of ads are effective when search volume for a specific keyword may not be so high, but you have an idea of what kinds of websites or places your target audience hangs out online. Display ads are essential for established brands that need to keep the brand at the forefront. You can get millions of impressions over a short period of time and funnel traffic to your website or landing pages where customers can find out more detailed information about your services or immediately get in contact with you. 4. Bring Potential Customers Back to Your Site with Remarketing Going hand in hand with display ads is a tactic known as remarketing or retargeting. We've all visited websites that we've browsed but didn't necessarily buy something on. But have you ever been on a website that you have visited that you then started to see ads for as you browsed other sites online? This is what we call remarketing. Using cookies, this highly effective method of exposure gets your ad out in front of your prospective customers time and time again, increasing the likelihood that they will remember they were on your website and prompt them to revisit and purchase from you. Even if they don't purchase immediately when they first visit your website, the psychology behind this persistent advertising is proven to have more than a 50% success rate of getting customers to purchase from you on a subsequent visit. Remarketing is a great way to grab the low-hanging digital fruit in your marketplace and is something every company online should have set up. 5. Use Social to Connect with Your Target Audience More Effectively Social ads are becoming more and more common as people and companies flock to social media platforms at record speed. Entire communities for special interests groups have sprung up, making it ideal to find like-minded people like never before. For businesses, this represents an ideal opportunity to use the power of consumers for recommendations. Many consumers Photo Editing Services want a friend or family member to recommend a product or service before buying for themselves, and social networks have become the logical place for these discussions. Likewise, being 'social' is all about getting unique insights into your target audience. For example, the Facebook platform has done an incredible job of defining who audiences are by having individuals share their demographic information online, making it the perfect place to advertise if you are a business-to-consumer brand. Through Facebook, you can even input your existing client emails and produce a 'look alike' audience - in other words, you can find more prospective clients that look similar to the clients you already have in your database. Because of the personal nature of these social sites, as a brand, you have an excellent opportunity to form relationships with your audience, brand yourself quickly and develop exceptional customer loyalty, who, in return, create enthusiastic referrals. Unlike traditional advertising, the best thing about paid search advertising, regardless of the tactic, is that you can easily measure your return on your marketing dollars! Lead generation has never had so many varied options, with such an ability to hyper-target your desired customers. With great research and knowledge of the type of client you would like to have, it is possible to get an online lead generation campaign up and running within a few days. For businesses who require an immediate source of leads, pay-per-click, display ads, and social ads are some of the quickest lead generation tactics for you to leverage online.