Are you looking to achieve more inbound leads for your Clients’ service-led businesses? Want to maximise ROI of lead generation campaigns by driving leads towards high-converting channels? With so many marketers trying their best, competing even against each other, here’s what you can do to stand out.
According to a report from Hubspot, 61% of marketers said that generating traffic and leads was their biggest challenge, showing they’re not only under pressure to perform, but are responsible for delivering high volumes of quality leads.
This statistic comes as no surprise. We all know acquiring and converting leads can be tricky in this “always-on” digital world. And spending money on the wrong lead generation campaign is money wasted! Do not waste yours!
Contact form conversion rates average just 1% (mainly due to campaigns being too generic; bringing in volume, not quality; and often offering the wrong CTA for the target customer).
In stark contrast, average call conversion rates are at 25-40%. The most strategic approach you can take to lead generation campaigns is optimising for more of those high-converting phone calls and tracking conversions with call attribution software.
In this blog, we’re showing you how to do just that with our step-by-step guide to lead generation campaigns for service-led businesses.
The average conversion rate for every marketing channel
Below, we’ve compiled conversion rate averages with the best range from different studies to help you understand the effectiveness of each. As you can see, phone leads are the most effective, offering up to 40 times more conversions than landing pages or email marketing.
- Contact forms: 3-5% (WebFX)
- Landing Pages: 2.3% (Wordstream)
- Social Media: 2.4% (FirstPageSage)
- Google Search Ads: 2.7% (Wordstream)
- Email Marketing: 2.8% (FirstPageSage)
- Phone Calls: 25-40% (Marketing Dive)
Regardless of how each lead finds your business, you need to give them the appropriate conversion touchpoint for their place in the marketing funnel.
You can afford to show more forms to cold and warm leads, however, as you go deeper into the marketing funnel, giving leads a low-converting touchpoint would mean you would sell more.
For most businesses, it’s more effective to use phone numbers in campaigns (and capture demand with a higher probability to close/sell), and then tracking that phone call conversion, enabling you to target more of the same high-intent leads.
How to create a high-performing lead generation campaign
Now that you understand what channels work best for generating and converting leads let’s dive into our step-by-step guide to increasing the performance of lead generation campaigns.
1: Know your audience
Without thorough audience research, your lead generation campaigns will be too general and likely attract poor-fit leads. The more specific you can get about the below factors, the better targeted your lead generation campaigns will be:
- Who your target audience is
- How they behave online
- What their pain points are
- What their demographics are
- What they want/need
2: Make it human
Service-led businesses have a strong human aspect that many other industries do not. They’re customer-facing companies, so as a marketer working with a service-led business, you need lead generation campaigns that are people-friendly, welcoming, and approachable.
Here are our top tips for “human” lead generation campaigns:
- Don’t use “stuffy” or very formal language
- Don’t alienate customers with jargon
- Use visuals to show your team members
- Show customers you can solve their problems
- Let customers know what to expect from you
- Make it easy for customers to reach you directly, i.e. call you
3: Highlight phone numbers
According to Forrester Research, having a click-to-call functionality on your website increases ROI by an average of 143%!
So if you haven’t already, it’s time to make phone call CTAs the spotlight of your lead generation campaigns.
You can do this by adding a call now button/CTA to:
- Online ads
- Your website
- Social posts
- Emails
- SMS marketing
- Blogs/resources
Encouraging phone calls is a surefire way to get more leads talking to your sales teams, so they can better qualify them, making the chances of conversion much higher.
And using call conversion analytics or call attribution tracking software will help you take the insights of qualification and turn them to signals for your ad platforms. This way, you can understand what channels/campaigns are driving the most calls to your business, helping you pump more marketing budget into the ads and channels that work best.
4: Mix up your CTAs
Remember, only add a “call now” button or CTA when it’s appropriate for your target audience or particular audience segment. For those who aren’t ready to buy yet or aware of your business, you can go with a more appropriate CTA, like “Ask us a question”.
Be careful not to overwhelm all lead generation campaigns with a “call now” CTA. To target every lead type, it’s essential to have a mix of “softer” CTA’s that move them through your funnel, like:
- “Download now”
- “Read our FAQs”
- “See our reviews”
- “Watch video”
- “Subscribe to newsletter”
- “Sign up to webinar”
5: Exploit different channels
Since not every lead will be ready to call your business, you must include several marketing channels and alternative CTAs that help filter all lead types into your sales funnel (eventually leading to a call down the road).
- Generating quality organic traffic with SEO
- Nurturing leads with content marketing
- Staying top-of-mind with email marketing
- Increasing brand awareness with social media
- Gathering warm leads with enquiry/contact forms
- Creating lead magnets, like downloadable reports
- Promoting one phone number for general queries and another for sales enquiries (this one is a little more advanced but can really improve your lead generation strategy!)
6: Measure and improve
There’s almost no point in creating lead generation campaigns if you don’t measure the results. Do you know what campaigns/channels are pushing your leads towards making phone calls, booking appointments online, or filling in contact forms?
If you don’t, you’re missing out on the most effective way to increase ROI and stop wasting marketing budget on the wrong channels. Regularly assess the key metrics for every lead generation campaign using call tracking software and make improvements based on what you learn.
We’re measuring everything else, but not calls. How can we track call conversions?
Nimbata is your answer to deep marketing analytics – but for phone call conversions! Our leading-edge call conversion analytics software is super easy-to-use and gives you a real-time dashboard full of the essential insights you need to know about every call that comes in and every call conversion.
Nimbata is the perfect call analytics solution for marketing agencies and service-led businesses to collect, track, and leverage phone call data to optimise marketing performance, reduce customer acquisition costs, and grow revenue.
It takes just minutes to set up, doesn’t require any technical experience, and even comes with a 14-day trial so you can test out the software for free – no credit card needed. Just sign up, set up, and start call tracking! Get your free trial now.
