What is Digital Lead Investing?

What Is Digital Lead Investing?

Digital lead investing is the process of investing in different online channels or platforms that can bring new customers to your business. This includes SEO, content marketing, social media campaigns, and PPC.

Digital lead investing is not just about finding new customers, but rather creating a system that will generate leads on an ongoing basis for you and your sales team to convert to paying customers. This way, instead of worry about where your next contract will come from, they’re served to you on a silver platter. 

Why Digital Lead Investing Is Important

Leveraging the mentioned channels can be a great way to acquire new customers and build brand loyalty. Digital lead investing allows you to establish yourself as a leader in your industry, build relationships with potential customers, and create an effective sales funnel.

It is a straightforward and cost-effective way to generate leads and provide you with the best return on investment.

This process will also be responsible for helping your business scale. With more clients to choose from, the picker you can be about who you work with. Additionally, the quality of the lead will be much higher than you would be able to find through traditional outreach.

In this case the lead would be known as “Pre Qualified”, meaning that they have gone through the relevant sales funnels, know what product/service they want, and are ready to buy. 

The Benefits of Digital Lead Investing

Wider visibility:

Compared to traditional lead generation methods, digital lead investing gives your business a wider visibility and greater reach. Just in the US, Google has over 240 million active users. This means that 75% of the country is using Google to learn, research, and find businesses. Additionally, Facebook has 260 million active users in North America.

By using these platforms to promote your business, you are putting yourself in front of millions of eyeballs. The opportunity to be found online has never been greater. 

Less time spent on sales:

Save money:

Digital platforms are cheaper compared to billboards and print ads which are commonly used in traditional lead generation. In the case of PPC, you only pay when your advertisement is interacted with, hence the name Pay Per Click. This means that instead of paying a set rent on a billboard or print ad, your spend is directly related to the interaction you receive.

Additionally, online advertisement provides you with the ability to select who sees your ads. Known as targeting, this practice allows you to massively increase the ROI (Return On Investment) of your ads as those who click are “Pre Qualified”.

Furthermore, SEO is what is known as “evergreen”, meaning that once the content is produced and ranking, it should deliver traffic for the foreseeable future. Instead of having to pay for traffic, you receive it directly on merit of authority in the space. All in all, digital lead investing is easier to implement, cheaper, and delivers a higher ROI than traditional forms of advertising. 

Scalable:

Digital lead investing is a scalable solution which means you can start small and grow the system as your business grows. Platforms like Google Ads and Facebook Ads make it easy to increase efforts, adding new ad sets, increasing ad spend and optimizing targeting mean that as income increases, it can be reinvested for future growth.

Although it’s true that the same could be done for traditional forms of lead generation, as PPC and SEO are hands off, it’s much easier done digitally.

Better audience targeting:

Insights and analytics can help you to target specific audiences based on their interest and geographical location, which makes it easier to convert leads into customers. This also allows you to control your budget more effectively and target only customers who are likely to convert.

However, due to the iOS 15 update, targeting on Facebook has become much more difficult. Users are choosing to keep their data private, meaning less insights for Facebook. As a result, ROI for facebook ads has taken a nosedive for some users, forcing them to focus on other platforms and methods of lead generation. 

Remarketing:

Oftentimes users will not convert on the first touch. In fact, case studies show that it takes on average 8 touches in order to close a sale. This is where remarketing comes in handy, platforms like Google Ads and Facebook Ads track who sees and interacts with your ads.

They can then be served your ads again across Google Ads network and Facebook platforms. Remarketing is a fantastic tool in the advertisers tool box and allows marketers to achieve a higher ROI than they normally would. 

Which Channels are Available for Digital Lead Investing?

Unlike traditional lead generation, digital lead investing provides a vast range of options and channels to generate leads. These include:

Social media platforms (Facebook, Linkedin, Instagram, etc.)

There are millions of users who are present on these platforms, making them great for lead generation. You can create your own page, run campaigns, and target specific audiences. Each one has different aspects that make them more or less impactful for running certain types of campaigns.

For example, if I ran a B2B Saas company, I may find that Linkedin is a better option than Instagram as my target audience is more likely to be on Linkedin. In vice versa, if I ran a company selling beauty products, Instagram would be far more effective at generating leads.

Think about the aspects of your business and the niche around it, find out what platform your buyers frequent. It’s much easier to go to the buyers than to try and get them to come to you. 

Paid advertising campaigns (Google Ads, Bing Ads etc.)

Paid ads or Pay Per Click campaigns are the bread and butter of the online marketer. They provide an extremely easy and convenient way to instantly be placed in front of prospective customers. According to Webfx, 97% of search users look for businesses online. This means that if you want to get in front of your audience, Google ads is a great way to do so.

Additionally, with the two for one combo of conversion optimization and remarketing the average return on ad spend for google is 2:1. This means that for every dollar you spend on advertising, you get two back. And trust me, it can be much, much, higher.

I have personally seen businesses do 12-20x ROAS on a basic campaign. If you’re a new business and you’re looking to expand your presence online, Google Ads is a great option to invest your money. All you need is a Google account and a landing page and you’re ready to go! 

Content marketing (Blogs, videos, podcasts)

This is a more consistent approach to lead generation as it helps you to establish yourself as a leader in your industry. And one of the key components to SEO. Content marketing is about developing top of the funnel interest in your business.

This is done by providing valuable information to readers for free! This strategy has a two pronged pay off. Firstly it helps customers understand that you know what youre talking about, and that you’re here to help them.

Secondly, it creates good will or reciprocity with the reader. Because you have given them something of value, they will feel obliged to return to you something of value. This could be an email, a consultation call, or sometimes their business.

Your main goal in content marketing should be to help and inform the customer, not to sell them.  Content marketing is great for improving brand visibility and loyalty, which will  eventually help you generate more leads.

Search engine optimization (SEO)

Often referred to as a long term proposition, SEO is about two main things. One, providing value to searchers, and two, structuring content in a way that search engines can understand. In combination with a strong content marketing strategy, SEO can yield results that last years.

If PPC is pay to play, SEO is the person who spent years crafting their skills and deserves to be on top. Instead of having to constantly pay for traffic to your website, SEO allows you to rank organically for search terms that would cost you thousands of dollars a month through PPC.

The only caveat is that it takes much longer for SEO to turn results than PPC. Writing articles and optimizing pages is a time consuming and difficult process. If done right, SEO has the ability to supercharge the way you do business by constantly delivering new clients to your doorstep. If done incorrectly, SEO will do nothing for you.

That’s why it’s important to vet the companies you hire and to learn a little bit about SEO yourself. If you are unsure of where to start companies like Moz, Semrush and Ahrefs are great informational resources. Additionally, if you are looking to hire an SEO company, please reach out to us at 7.ten Marketing. We would love to hear more about your goals and how we can help you reach them! 

The Bottom Line

Digital lead investing is pivotal to growing your business in the online era. The barrier to entry for using these tools and implementing strategies is so low there’s really no excuse to not use them. SEO, PPC, and Social Media are the most powerful tools at your disposal in this day and age. With a little sweat equity and a solid strategy these platforms can become revenue generating machines.