Number 1 channel(s) for lead generation
your answers revealed
Over the duration of this season of Mehdeeka, I wanted to try out a “one question interview” style which compiled and compared many different marketers’ answers to the same one question. I didn’t get as many submissions as I had hoped for, but I think there’s enough here to hopefully make you consider a channel you previously hadn’t, or help you decide on your next experiment. Let’s get into it.
Facebook ads
With a target market of businesses with between 250 and 2,500 employees, Facebook worked amazingly for Perkbox Australia. Every time I spoke to another marketer about large B2B leads coming from Facebook they’d give me a “wait, what?”.
Not a channel to discount for B2B, I found bottom of the funnel (AKA straight to ‘book a demo’ messaging without any top of funnel marketing) actually worked really well on Facebook.
Conferences and events
Pandemic-permitting, running your own conference and events (a la Salesforce Dreamforce where you’re the owner of the event) works well for a SaaS businesses targeting businesses with 5k+ employees.
Of course to run an event the size of a conference, you need quite a lot of resources and cash, but you can start on a smaller scale with webinars, roundtables, lunches, or even community meetups. Just make sure you have a good nurture plan for these leads.
Check out previous Mehdeekas on lead recycling and email nurtures
Events was also a popular lead gen channel for academics looking to turn their research into businesses.
Google search ads
Perkbox Aus might have loved Facebook, but Perkbox UK loved Google. A solid 90% of UK leads came from Google - a majority of those were brand searches.
Google is a great channel if you have strong brand awareness (which requires effort and investment over a long time - it took Perkbox 4-5 years!) or you have such a generically named product that people are search that term often.
Don’t forget display network too!
A lot of startups/tech companies are well into search ads, but display ads work too! Great for re-targeting and top of funnel or seasonal campaigns. I know a lot of old school (AKA big and clunky legacy companies) use banner ads as their BAU lead gen channel.
Newsletters
Another popular channel amongst the academics running events.
Newsletters is something I’ve experimented in and really believe in as a good channel. If you can find industry-focused newsletters that are region based, you have an incredibly targeted and usually highly engaged audience.
My recommendation here is to go with extremely good quality gated content. Think guides, action points, time saving tips etc that you can give away for free that tie back to your product even in a very abstract way (more about this in the email nurture issue). If you have a high contract value, this is a really high ROI channel as a campaign can cost as little as $5k and as long as you convert one lead to a customer your ROI is through the roof. You’ll need to settle for what may be a longer cycle than you’re used to though, so stay committed to nurturing these leads and have a good follow up process for the sales team.
Sales team’s personal networks
There’s something to be said for poaching industry veterans (or investors) and using their personal networks as a target list. In this instance, marketing should focus on a solid nurture running in the background while the sales team do their thing, and supporting with high quality sales assets.
Hard truths: LinkedIn sucks
I’m yet to find anyone who likes LinkedIn ads. Plain and simple, LinkedIn is not quite there yet with their ads, and while yeah using the in-platform forms has a higher conversion rate than using a landing page, the lead > closed won conversion rate is… less than stellar.
If LinkedIn works for you, amazing. If it works for you and it’s the only channel you’re using, start testing out the channels above and you’ll quickly find better results, I’m sure of it.
If you’ve been trying to make LinkedIn work to no avail, just cut your losses and spend your time, energy, money, and resources elsewhere.
If you’re committed to making it work, my advice is to build out a very thorough organic strategy first (both company page and employee advocacy from their personal profiles and this will inevitably mean investing in a content strategy), including training employees on how to use LinkedIn effectively. You may need to provide some sort of competition or incentive for them to get on board with this. Remember they’re not obliged to shill your brand on their personal profiles and yes LinkedIn is a personal profile.
Then once your page has high engagement, you can start retargeting ads aimed at your website visitors and Facebook audience if you’ve been building one up.
But I honestly don’t recommend it. If any channel just isn’t working for you no matter what you do, don’t double down on it! Let it go!
A mixed bag of links
I recently was shown the masterpiece that is the Microsoft PR standards and their resources page that helps companies mentioning Microsoft in press to prepare those releases and streamline them through approval. Just a *chef’s kiss* example of quality brand standards and documentation.
An excerpt; If you control F on the homepage of the two companies you’ll find “Survey” mentioned 47 times on SurveyMonkey’s site. It is in the subheading, in comments, and in the copy. Shoot, it is even in the company’s name! They position themselves as a survey company. If you perform a similar search on Qualtrics’ site, you’ll only find surveys mentioned 4 times and those mentions are buried at the very bottom of the page under popular use cases. Instead, Qualtrics invented something entirely their own, “Experience Management.” What is this? Who cares! Sounds a hell of a lot more valuable than “survey software.”
A really thorough walkthrough of the process the Clubhouse team went through to diagnose what was wrong with their old onboarding process, what customers needed, and how they made that a reality.
I really enjoy Mason Currey’s Subtle Maneuvers newsletter. In it he dissects the routines of various creative people. In this week’s issue he went into Janet Malcolm’s New Yorker profile on artist Adam Gopnik.