How to Generate the Leads that Sales Wants with Paid Social

Congratulations, you have just gotten budget approval to launch a new social media campaign. As a marketer, you’re always looking for ways to impact the bottom line and what better way to do that than by creating a steady stream of potential new customers. So now it’s time to fire up the ads and watch as your leads turn into revenue, right?

Not quite.

While a high quantity of leads can undoubtedly be good, it’s not enough. According to research done by eMarketer, the highest priority of B2B marketers is increasing lead quality, while increasing volume only ranks in third regarding importance.

It’s not sufficient to collect just any leads—even if there are a lot of them—they need to be right for sales outreach.

In this post, I will run through how marketing can create a great paid social ad campaign and work with sales to ensure that both sides are happy with the leads it generates.

Create Ads Worth Clicking On

Let’s face it: if you can’t create worthwhile ads, your campaign is destined to fail, and no amount of budget will change that.

There are several critical factors in this process:

Copy

Regardless of the social network, you’re on, you want your ad copy to drive engagement. Write in an upbeat, conversational manner, remembering that you are speaking to humans on the other end. Make sure to address the needs and pain points of your audience. Lastly, share actionable tips, but try not to be bossy.

Design

Pair your copy with beautiful imagery to make your ads pop. Use relevant video if available, if not, photos will do. Human eyes notice visuals before text, so make it count.

Gated Content

Now that you’ve got their attention, direct prospects to a landing page or ad form to exchange basic contact information for valuable content. Some people might fall at this hurdle, but those who remain will have distinguished themselves as interested, and as potentially great leads.

Find Only the Right People

Now that you’ve created dazzling ads with compelling content, the job is done, right? Wrong. It’s not just what you have to say, but who sees it. If you promote to too wide of an audience, you’ll get low-quality leads and blow your budget in the process.

Know Your Audience

You must know your audience to target them effectively. Location, interests, job title, and other demographics will be important to define and agree on before you start advertising.

Who’s Buying?

In many cases, the end user and the purchaser are different people. If awareness is your goal, end users can be good to target, but if you are looking only for conversions, theirs will be empty clicks.

Timing is Everything

While it involves more effort, monitoring your ad timing is crucial. If your target audience is only online during certain hours, you want your ads showing in that timeframe—any other time is wasted budget. Some ads may be affected by current events, so monitoring their timing to avoid controversy is important as well.

Collaborate to Fine Tune the Process

Getting these leads over to sales is only half the battle. The other half is figuring out what’s working and what isn’t to improve future leads. This requires sales feedback—without it, creating qualified leads is impossible. I once worked on a Facebook ad campaign that generated free trial requests, but my sales team was inconsistent in recording their interactions with prospects. They gave me anecdotes, but I needed lead conversion and engagement data to make the right decisions. Sales kept telling me they wanted qualified leads but were unable to hold up their end of the bargain in making that a reality. Without the right information, I was unable to make the necessary changes to the ad campaign to get sales the leads they wanted.

To avoid this situation, you’ll want to establish clear roles and responsibilities before campaign launch, while emphasizing accountability. If done right, you can create a positive feedback loop in which sales feedback helps shape the parameters for targeting the qualified leads that they crave. By recording and analyzing patterns of both those who convert as well as those who fall off, you will be equipped to optimize both your ads and targeting for future success.

Conclusion

Paid social media campaigns provide a tremendous opportunity to generate new business, but only if done right. Getting leads is easy, but getting the right leads is what generates results.

What do you think about my roadmap? Have you been able to get marketing and sales on the same page in your lead gen efforts? Let’s continue the conversation in the comments.