If you’re struggling to get the digital advertising for your trade business to work, consider making this one change…
Start leveraging your owned brand or company creative assets in the campaigns.
What Creative Assets Should We Use?
Examples of these assets are genuine videos or photos of your:
Experienced team
Premises, factory, or warehouse
Products that you use
Company vehicles
Happy customers
Really anything that is a unique representation of your business.
Experience generating tens of thousands of homeowner leads across dozens of trade businesses has shown us that these creative assets are frequently our top performers.
And it makes sense as to why these work.
The Creative Assets Are Unique
Using your company’s images means you can stand out from the crowd by not using the same stock images that are available to your competitors.
These Assets Provide Credibility
Using images/videos based on your company, its team and its successful work will highlight that you are a reputable company that can be trusted.
People Buy From People
It’s important to remember the old adage that “people buy from people”. And they buy from people that they know, like, and trust.
These brand assets can humanise your organisation from a faceless company to someone that they can trust.
So…. Go Out And Test Them
If you’re not using these assets already then introduce them into your campaigns as a test to see how they perform, and I’d love for you to let me know how they go!
Here’s a situation many marketing teams can relate to…
You’ve launched a new lead generation campaign and you’re starting to see great results.
The sales team is happy with lead quality and your Cost Per Lead is looking good.
There’s only one thing left to do.
“Let’s increase the spend to increase our lead volume!”.
And of course, you know what happens next…
While you see an early increase in lead volume, your Cost Per Lead continues to rise as you increase the budget.
Pretty soon, you’re seeing no extra leads for the extra budget, and your Cost Per Lead is out of control.
So what’s going on?
In this blog, we look at why your Cost Per Lead increases when you try to scale. We also outline the 4 techniques we use to scale lead volume, not Cost Per Lead, for our clients.
So, What’s Happening When You Try To Scale?
Let’s take a deeper dive into what’s going on using this example.
Let’s say you’re a new home builder with a currently successful Facebook Ad Campaign.
You’ve got your offer, audience targeting and ad creative all dialled in.
You’re generating 10 leads per day with a Cost per Lead that’s in line with your targets.
Your sales team want 30 leads per day and you have the approval to increase your budget.
As you start to increase your spend, you see a corresponding increase in lead volume until you hit 20 leads per day.
Yet as you continue to increase your spend, you see no extra leads as a result.
No matter how much you increase the spend, you can’t seem to crack the 20 leads per day mark.
So what’s going on?
In short, you’ve hit the point of diminishing returns for your offer, targeting and ad creative.
It doesn’t matter how much extra spend you push to your campaign. You’ve hit a saturation point for those who are ready to take action.
This point will vary depending on your targeting, offer and ad creative.
If you’re running a sales lead campaign, it likely represents those 3% of prospects shown in the graph below.
These are the “ready to buy” prospects looking to pull the trigger in your category.
So now what?
Are your campaigns limited to only 20 leads per day forever?
Of course not.
However, your approach to scaling needs to be more sophisticated than increasing your budget.
Here are 4 techniques we use to help our clients scale their lead volume without scaling their Cost Per Lead.
1. Expand Your Audience Targeting
This first technique is the most straightforward to put in place.
If your targeting is topping out, expand the size of your audience to increase your pool of prospects.
If you have a presence in multiple markets, this could be as simple as expanding the location targeting of your campaign.
E.g if you’re targeting Sydney, add Brisbane and Melbourne to increase your audience size.
However, for most campaigns, your location targeting will need to remain consistent.
In these instances, test expanding your targeting by increasing the size of your lookalike audiences.
For example, if you’ve been using a 1% lookalike audience of converted customers, test a 2% or 3% lookalike using the same audience.
This will allow you to double or triple your audience size without a significant departure from the original source audience.
If you’ve been relying on interest audiences, test selecting “Interest Expansion”.
This will allow Facebook to move beyond your current interest parameters if they believe they can capture a conversion.
A word of warning – beware of the impact that expanding your audience may have on lead quality. Ensure that you’re evaluating your campaigns based on Cost Per Sale, not just Cost Per Lead.
Relying on a single creative angle is often one of the reasons why a campaign won’t scale.
The copy, images and videos you use to appeal to one audience segment may fail to register with another.
If your current creative angle appeals to price-focused buyers, you may be ignoring those prioritising service as their primary buying criteria.
To scale your campaigns, you need to be testing new ad creative angles that appeal to different audience segments.
Here are some points to get you started:
Use price offers or financial incentives to generate responses from those who are obtaining quotes within your category.
Leverage social proof and third party endorsements to appeal to those for whom trust in the service provider is more important than price. This is particularly important when targeting more affluent audiences.
Use scarcity for immediate, short term action but do so with caution. We all have those examples of brands that seem to always be on sale!
3. Expand Your Offer Selection
Like your ad creative approach, your campaign offer will appeal to some audience segments more than others.
As you scale your campaigns, introduce extra campaign offers to appeal to more audience segments.
If you’re currently focused on a price-based offer, try offers that include ongoing monitoring or maintenance services. For many buyers, they may be looking for ways to reduce the ongoing costs associated with a service rather than the upfront cost.
If you’re in a competitive market, test campaign offers that focus on guaranteed installation times or product performance. Many affluent homeowners are willing to pay more upfront for certainty around their use of a product or service.
If you’re currently focusing your campaigns on an entry-level package, test offers focused on more premium, higher-priced packages. While you may see fewer leads from this audience, a higher conversion rate is likely to lead to a lower Cost Per Sale or higher margin compared to your entry-level packages.
4. Move Further Up The Funnel
Finally, if you’ve exhausted your use of the 3 techniques above, it may be time to move further up the funnel.
This brings us back to the graph below showing that only 3% of the market are ready to buy at any given time.
To scale past this point, you’ll need to complement your Sales Qualified Lead campaigns with Marketing Qualified Lead campaigns.
Moving further up the funnel means that you can target those who are solution aware or problem aware, thus expanding your pool of prospective customers.
It is critical to remember that these “leads” are not sales leads. They will need nurturing and time before they are ready to buy.
However, by holding their hand as they progress through their buying journey, you can position yourself as their #1 choice in your category.
Ultimately, this will allow you to scale your campaigns beyond that 3% over time.
Wrapping It All Up.
The easiest, most obvious way to scale a campaign is by adding extra budget.
But, to continue to scale your campaigns without scaling your Cost Per Lead, you need to evolve your campaign approach.
These are the 4 techniques that we use to help our clients increase lead volume, not their Cost Per Leads.
For most companies, their thank you pages i.e. what someone sees after submitting an enquiry form are an afterthought. Much like this one:
And it’s easy to understand why given that the bandwidth of marketing teams is always limited.
As a result, it’s easy for them to tell themselves, “hey, by the time we’ve got the lead’s details, my job is over, and it’s up to the sales team now”.
Unfortunately, that mentality is leaving sales conversions on the table.
If you want to increase your company’s sales without spending an extra cent on advertising, I suggest you consider any (or all) of the following five thank you page optimisations.
01. Reassure Your Prospects With A Thank You Page Video
We’re funny creatures, us humans.
After making decisions, such as submitting an enquiry form, we experience a phenomenon called Post Decisional Dissonance.
Effectively, this is a form of regret or concern that perhaps we didn’t make the best available choice.
Our prospects are likely asking themselves questions like “did I enquire with the right company?”, “will they be able to provide what I want or need” “are they trustworthy and reliable” and many more.
A short, friendly, and professional video is a fantastic way to address these concerns and allay the prospect’s fears.
This simple video could cover:
Of course, a quick thank you
What to expect next
What your company does well
The type of customers you best serve
Anything else that will differentiate you from competitors
Whilst this may seem like a lot of work, you will find it delivers an incredible ROI by delivering prospects to your sales team have been reassured and warmed up by your thank you page.
02. Set Clear Expectations On What Will Happen Next
Another thing that humans dislike is uncertainty. In fact, we are hardwired to hate it.
Too common is the experience of completing a form online, only to be met with anxiety.
“So what happens now?… will I get a call, an email, anything?”
Effectively constructed thank you pages, like this example from Refy below, can put your prospects at ease by clearly setting expectations on what will happen next.
Not only does this visibility increase the probability that the lead will move through outlined steps, but it also positions your company as a professional organisation that follows a consistent, documented process.
03. Improve The Initial Call By Answering FAQs
First impressions last.
Time is money.
The intersection of these two adages means that your sales team must have an effective and efficient initial call with a prospect.
You can make sure these calls are ‘all killer, no filler’ by answering some of the most commonly asked questions ahead of the call.
You can see an example of this below one of our Axis Social thank you pages:
Having these questions answered ahead of the call gives your sales team more time to qualify the lead, understand their unique needs, develop an expert position and deliver value.
04. Increase Buyer Sophistication With Education
I frequently hear salespeople lament that prospects lack the knowledge required to make intelligent buying decisions.
“They don’t get the importance of X…” or “they’ll get stung because they don’t realise Y”.
If that’s a consistent reason your team is losing deals, it’s vitally important to fix it.
As an actionable example, your company could develop a ‘Buyers Guide’ (like the one that we have here) which educates prospects on everything they need to know about purchasing from you (or your competitors).
This guide would be made available as a download from the thank you page.
This education strategy has the dual benefit of positioning your organisation as experts whilst delivering an informed, sophisticated prospect to your sales team.
05. Capture The Next Sales Step Or Additional Qualification Criteria
Immediately after a lead has completed a conversion action is an excellent time to ask them for more.
This honeymoon period is due to a principle known as the ‘Yes Ladder’.
The ‘Yes Ladder’ principle suggests that someone is more likely to say yes to a request if they have just said yes to something else. Science here.
You can take advantage of this by adding an additional conversion action on your thank you page. This could include:
Ascending users from a marketing qualified lead to a sales qualified lead (by asking for a phone number and more)
Asking for additional information that allows for lead scoring or qualification
Locking in time for an initial call on a calendar (through a system like Calendly)
What I love about this approach is that you’re effectively playing with house money. Any ascensions or secondary conversions you get from this page are simply a bonus to the existing lead volume.
In Summary
In summary, the five thank you page optimisations you can make today to increase sales are:
Reassure your prospects with a simple, friendly and professional thank you page video.
Reduce your prospect’s uncertainty or anxiety by setting clear expectations on what will happen next.
Improve the quality of the initial call by answer frequently asked questions ahead of time.
Increase the sophistication of your buyers through education, for example, a Buyer’s Guide.
Leverage the ‘yes ladder’ and capture buyers intent or qualification criteria by adding a conversion action to the thank you page.
What Did We Forget?
If you have come across any excellent thank you page optimisations; I’d love to know about them!
Welcome to the Gold Coast Edition, that’s why I’m in shorts, of the Science of Advertising show. I’m here with one of the three gurus that I go to for expert counsel, specifically for social media. Dan, welcome to the show for our special edition.
Rarely do we come across targeting which is routinely updated with sales data.
Think about your campaigns for a minute…
When was the last time you created a lookalike audience of quoted or converted customers?
If the answer is “more than 3 months ago”, your campaigns aren’t primed for sales.
To feed your campaign sales data, make sure that you’re regularly updating your audience targeting with customer or quote lists. We’d recommend that this occurs between monthly or quarterly depending on sales volume and sales cycle.
Test the impact of excluding non-contact or quote-lost lookalikes from your targeting. This can help remove the lower quality, “tyre kicker” leads from your team’s pipeline.
2. Match Your Offer To Your Desired Lead Temperature
Does your campaign currently using a “Get A Quote” offer?
If so, I’d bet your sales team complain of a pretty mixed bag of leads when it comes to readiness to buy.
And it makes sense. Requesting a quote makes it difficult to determine if a prospect is ready to buy, or is doing initial research.
This approach is fine if your sales team is happy to continue to deal with a mixed bag of leads.
However, if you’re looking for a higher level of intent from your leads, your offer needs to appeal to those ready to buy.
In our experience, these offers usually contain a financial incentive for immediate action.
Some examples include:
Get $1,000 Off A Premium System When You Buy This Month.
Get 72 Months Interest Free & No Deposit Across Our Range.
Get A Free Upgrade When You Book An Install Before June 30.
These type of offers will appeal to those prospects who have made the shift from consideration to actively shopping. They are already convinced they want to make a purchase within the category. Now they are looking for a great deal and a supplier they can trust.
These are the “ready to buy” leads you want more of if you want a campaign designed for sales.
3. Use Your Form To Position Your Sales Team For Success.
For most homeowner lead generation campaigns, the questions asked on an enquiry form are an afterthought.
Little attention is paid to how the questions you ask will influence the sales follow up and the prospect’s perception of the organisation.
For example – let’s say you were interested in getting solar installed at your home. You’ve shortlisted 2 different installation companies that you think would do a great job.
For Installer A, you were asked to provide your name, email and phone number.
For Installer B, you were asked to provide your name, email, phone number, street address along with an estimate of your quarterly energy bill.
Which sales team do you think will be in the best position to provide you with a customised quote and pitch?
Which sales team do you think would record a higher percentage of qualified leads?
Which sales team do you think would be able to score your enquiry and prioritise it against other leads they received that day?
Now there is undoubtedly a need to balance the number and types of questions you’re asking with the impact on your landing page conversion rate.
For some campaigns, adding extra questions will only lead to an increase in the Cost Per Lead.
But the key takeaway here is that deciding what to ask on your form is a key component of designing a campaign for sales.
Don’t treat it as an afterthought.
4. Design Your User Journey To Nurture & Close Leads.
So far, everything that we’ve covered has been focused on getting the initial enquiry.
But a campaign designed for sales, not just leads, continues to work even after the prospect has enquired.
This is because once a prospect submits an enquiry, they will instantly shift into evaluation mode.
They will be analysing every touchpoint with your business to determine if you’re the right solution for their needs.
And while the heavy lifting now will be done by your sales team, there’s still plenty your campaigns can do to help nurture and close leads.
You can do this by ensuring that your retargeting includes those who have recently entered your sales pipeline.
Depending on volume, you may be able to segment based on recency of enquiry and deal stage.
For a campaign designed for sales, you want to ensure that you’re retargeting prospects with the following ads:
Customer Testimonials: Break down any lack of trust by showing consistent success for other customers.
Why Choose Us?: Prospects active in the category will likely be evaluating you against your competitors. Clearly spell out the specific reasons why you are the best choice.
What Happens Next?: Some prospects may feel daunted by what happens post-enquiry. Break down this barrier by clearly outlining what happens after their enquiry.
FAQs: It’s likely that prospects share the same questions or concerns about buying in your category. Answer these within the ad to provide confidence that your team is THE expert in the category.
5. Measure Cost Per Sale, Not Cost Per Lead.
The final component of a campaign designed for sales is the most important.
Make sure that you’re evaluating your campaigns based on Cost Per Sale, not Cost Per Lead.
This is simple to understand, but harder to implement.
It is vital however to ensure that you’re focused on the most important measure when it comes to optimising and evaluating your campaigns.
Some tactics that will improve lead quality may lead to an increase in Cost Per Lead but a decrease in Cost Per Sale. These could include qualifying ad creative or adding questions to your forms.
If you’re not evaluating your campaigns based on Cost Per Sale, you’ll likely throw these tactics away.
This process of Sales Focused Optimisation is so important that we’ve dedicated an entire post to it. You can find it here.
In summary, if you want a campaign designed for sales, you need to be measuring what truly matters.
Wrapping It Up
It’s easy to fall into the trap of evaluating your campaigns based on lead volume and Cost Per Lead.
But when it comes to maximising the ROI of your media spend and sales team, the best campaign approach is one build for Sales, not just Leads.
These are the 5 things that you need to do if you want your campaign to deliver sales, not just leads.
1. Feed Your Targeting Sales Data, Not Just “Leads”
2. Match Your Offer To Your Desired Lead Temperature
3. Use Your Form To Position Your Sales Team For Success.
4. Design Your User Journey To Nurture & Close Leads.
“We just need more leads”… “Where are the cheaper leads?”… “How can we drive volume?”
These are statements that we regularly hear inside the agency.
And it makes sense; our clients are keen to generate predictable growth for their organisations.
However, it highlights a weakness in how many marketing teams and their agencies think about what’s required to generate tangible business results.
How Most Agencies Optimise Campaigns
In our experience, the majority of direct response agencies with a performance focus optimise their campaigns for lowest cost leads.
This approach means the distribution of advertising budget towards campaigns, offers, audiences and creative elements that generate the cheapest leads.
As shown in the graphic above, under a traditional performance-focused optimisation approach, Audience 1 would receive more budget due to the lower CPL ($20 versus $35).
Remember this scenario, as we will come back to it!
Whilst this campaign approach is undoubtedly superior to ‘branding’ or ‘traffic’ campaigns, it ignores a pivotal piece of the ROI puzzle… sales!
Why ‘More Leads’ Is Not Always Better
Over the last few years, we have become more deeply ingrained in the sales performance of our leads.
Through a better understanding of lead performance, we have confirmed our suspicion that more, lower-cost leads are not always better.
The reasons for this, which became apparent, are discussed below.
Lower Cost Tends To Correlate With Lower Quality
Campaign approaches and offers that remove ‘friction’ from the conversion process also remove an element of commitment or ‘qualification’.
An excellent example of this is the use of Facebook Lead Forms versus a landing page to capture leads.
Facebook Lead Forms remove the friction, allowing somebody to enquire in as little as two taps with pre-populated data.
Whereas, landing pages require a user to leave the Facebook environment, load a new page, and enter their details into a form.
Our testing has shown that landing page leads convert at a significantly higher rate than leads captured via Facebook Lead Forms.
Campaign success requires a balancing act that accounts for both lead quality and cost.
High Lead Volumes Require Significant Time Investment By Sales Teams
Unfortunately, valuable sales team member time spent following up high volumes of low-quality leads can represent a high cost to many companies.
It also reduces the time available to sales team members for high-value activities directed at qualified prospects deeper in the conversion process.
Both will be detrimental to performance and represent a hit to any campaign’s return on investment.
Low Conversion Rates Can Crush Your Sales Team’s Morale
Success in sales requires confidence.
It’s a tough gig, sales. You hear more no’s than yes’s but you have to keep going, keep dialling, keep closing!
However, despite what you might think, salespeople are human too.
The generation of high volumes of low-quality, low-cost leads will reduce the success of your sales team. They will have higher rates of non-contact and disqualification of leads.
These repeated failures can become quite demoralising and demotivating.
Unfortunately, in a vicious cycle, this can result in further reductions in sales performance and productivity.
Increased Opportunities For Negative Experiences
A strategy that results in the generation of high volumes of low-quality low-cost lead means that your company will come into contact with more people every day.
Further, as discussed above, your team will be disqualifying more leads based on their lack of fit for what you do.
This strategy increases the opportunities for somebody to have a negative experience with your company. We’ve seen this vary from the benign (think: “Too big/small/expensive”) to the potentially damaging (think: “Stay away from this company at all cost! “).
What’s The Solution? Introducing Sales Focused Optimisation
Sales Focused Optimisation (SFO) is an approach we use at Axis Social.
SFO is a scalable and repeatable campaign framework that uses the movement of leads through critical phases of a sales process as inputs for campaign optimisation decisions.
We use cloud-based tracking, usually a database or CRM, that allows us to identify which campaigns, offers, target audiences, and creative elements are generating leads that qualify and convert at the highest rate.
This data allows the Axis Social team to calculate success metrics that more closely align with those of your organisation. These metrics might include cost per appointment, cost per quote, and (of course) cost per sale.
Such metrics allow our Campaign Managers to optimise the campaign for actual conversions in the form of sales (rather than the lowest cost lead).
The net result of this ‘Sales Focused Optimisation’ approach is a higher lead to client conversion rate and lower cost to acquire a sale.
Sales Focused Optimisation In Action
Above we demonstrated how many direct response agencies would optimise a hypothetical campaign. It resulted in scaling the budgets of the audience that delivered the lowest cost per lead.
However, below you will see the vital, yet missing, piece of the puzzle.
Through the addition of the sales performance of leads, it is evident that despite having a lower CPL, Audience 2 has a lower cost per sale for the client.
Accordingly, SFO has flipped the correct optimisation decision on its head. In this instance, we scale the budget for Audience 2 due to the lower cost per sale.
Want To Learn More?
Want to discuss how the Axis Social team might apply Sales Focused Optimisation to your campaigns?
How an agency structures its pricing and billing will impact how it operates and its incentives.
For clients, it will directly impact the way your campaigns are run and consequently, your success.
This article discusses common approaches to agency billing structures, including the advantages and disadvantage of each.
01. Billable Hours
Billable hours are the old school method of agency billing, i.e. track the internal head hours that are attributable to your campaign and then charge you accordingly.
This billing approach can ensure an agency’s profitability by ensuring that the agency is paid according to how their team are spending their time.
However, it can certainly have negative consequences for clients. Whilst you technically only pay for the time allocated to your account, this billing structure rewards an agency’s inefficiencies.
Effectively, the longer something takes to do, the more a client pays.
02. Percentage Of Media Spend
Percentage of media pricing means the more money that a client pays to the advertising platform (media spend), the more they pay an agency.
Whilst the percentage will vary widely across agencies and disciplines; generally, the agency fee is 10 – 15%
This model can be fair for both agency and client. Larger accounts require more work, which means the client will pay the agency accordingly.
However, as shown in the graphic below, there exists an inflection point where a client may pay an agency more every month, without the necessity of additional work.
Further, this can often incentivise an agency to make spend increase recommendations with the view to increase their fees.
However, it’s possible this approach may not be what is best for the company or campaign in terms of results or campaign efficiency.
03. Pay On Performance
‘Pay On Performance’ is an increasingly popular approach to agency billing, in which the agency is paid purely on the results they generate for a client.
These results might include a fixed fee per lead generated, ecommerce sale, or a revenue share approach. This model will vary across agencies; however, it certainly has the potential to reduce the risk of hiring an agency.
Sound too good to be true? It probably is.
There are several disadvantages to this approach.
Firstly, this approach can be more significantly more expensive for a business when compared to other pricing structures as agencies will often charge a premium for the risk they take on.
Secondly, this approach can often negatively impact an agency’s incentives. For example, in a pay per lead approach, the agency will strive to generate a high volume of cheaper leads, regardless of the lead quality that they generate.
04. Fixed Monthly Fees
Fixed monthly fee pricing is one of the most straightforward approaches to an agency fee structure, i.e. an agency provides a fixed monthly fee associated with a scope of work and the value it creates for the company.
Fixed monthly fees are often, but not always, provided exclusive of the variable cost of media spend (what you pay to an advertising platform such as Facebook).
Why Do Axis Social Use Fixed Monthly Fees?
Axis Social have adopted this pricing approach because it provides our clients with clarity around their monthly billing, i.e. they know what we will deliver every month and exactly how much they have to pay for it.
Further, it ensures that our incentives align with what’s best for our clients and their company. This agency fee structure does not financially incentivise the team in any of the following ways:
To be inefficient with our time (unlike the billable hours model)
To needlessly scale a client’s media spend (unlike the percentage of media model)
To generate high volumes of lower quality leads (unlike the Pay On Performance model)
So what are our incentives?
A fixed agency fee structure incentivises us to generate tangible business results for our clients, in whatever form that may take.
In agency life, this could mean:
Delivering assets or campaigns quickly and efficiently
Scaling media spend up, down, left or right
Generating a lower volume of higher quality leads
Above all else, great results for a happy client
What Next?
Are you currently searching for an agency?
If so, I would strongly recommend you download our Free Buyer’s Guide, which covers the steps you need to follow to ensure you hire the right Facebook ads agency for your company.
