This article discusses digital lead investing, reviewing its definition and strategies.
Do you want more leads? If you said yes, it would make sense. One of the main goals of digital marketing and businesses is to generate leads.
Objectives:
- Learn how to create a successful digital lead investing strategy to accelerate lead generation and conversions for your businesses.
- Understand if the digital marketing industry strategy is worth your marketing efforts in this digital lead investing review.
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What is Digital Lead Investing?
Digital lead investing is the process of building lead generation channels on the internet. Using digital marketing strategies, brands can automate web traffic to landing pages. This pushes more website conversions and leads.
Like stock investors, successful digital lead investors see lead results compound over time.
Inbound Vs. Outbound Digital Leads
Inbound Digital Leads
inbound digital leads become a lead without any direct, external contact from the marketer. Many call this process inbound marketing. I like to call it “marketing automation.
For example, earned media posts about your company can generate inbound leads. Without lifting a finger, leads interested in your company or offering come into your sales funnel without any direct prior contact. You could have other businesses generate interest for potential new leads.
Investing in inbound lead generation is smart business because it can significantly lower your cost to acquire your customer.
Also, instead of focusing on outbound sales, you can focus on other important tasks. In the meantime, your inbound lead funnels will trickle in new potential customers. That is true marketing automation.
Invest time and money upfront to create the sources of lead traffic, then shift your time elsewhere. Inbound lead generation can save you significant time in your day.
Outbound Digital Leads
Outbound digital leads become a lead with direct contact from the marketer. Many refer to this as outbound marketing.
For example, an email marketing campaign offering value in exchange for a company’s contact information can generate outbound leads. By offering value directly to a company, you obtain a potential customer without setting up any long inbound lead funnels.
While obtaining outbound leads requires more direct work than inbound leads, you can still invest in automation on the outbound side. Create sales templates and upload outreach lists to email marketing platforms to personalize cold emails to companies in mass. Personalize towards your target market.
LinkedIn is becoming a major playing in cold outreach. By now, almost every user has experienced a LinkedIn cold outreach into their direct message inbox, or maybe multiple a day. With the right target audience and pitch, digital outbound outreach can be highly effective.
This article will focus majorly on how to invest time and money into creating inbound digital leads.
Myths Versus Truths about Digital Lead Investing
There is a lot of information on the internet about digital lead investing. To help clear some things, we will dive into some of the myths and truths about digital lead investing. To read more about what the internet is saying, Forbes has a guide to review digital lead investing.
Myths
Myth #1: You should only focus on one channel.
While this statement has some truth, focusing only on one channel blocks many unique opportunities that other channels could offer. Good results come after lots of experimentation with many unique channels.
For example, focusing only on creating posts in blogs and publications blocks all the opportunities social media channels could hold. Also, if one channel shuts down, your business could be erased. It is important to spread your inbound funnel among many different channels.
However, though, you do not want to spread yourself too thin. Spreading yourself too thin could lead to minor or minimal results across your channels. For the best results, test channels in bunches, find a few channels that showed promising lead results and divide your investments between the ones with the best ROI.
Myth #2: You will see immediate results.
Like ordinary investing, digital lead investing takes time to grow into jaw-dropping results. The results are often exponential – not linear. Invest in a channel for at least 4-6 months before giving up. it takes time to see how your brand can fit into an existing channel.
For example, look how the Duolingo bird on social media blew up into memes about doing your “spanish learning for the day.” Their marketing department’s initial plan on social media was most likely not to create an angry bird screaming at the internet to study languages.
However, after staying on the platform and experimenting, Duolingo found a fit in the platform that skyrocketed them to the #1 language learning app on iOS App Store.
Truths
Truth #1: Lead generation can be 100% automated.
Upfront investment in lead generation can lead to automated, compounded results. The trick is setting up the funnels up in advance for the future. Having great call-of-actions is a major part of setting up automated lead gen funnels.
Aim to provide value and blow your customer away at each stage in the customer journey. Automating comes down to simply preparing for future opportunities based on past happenings.
Truth #2: Inbound leads can be your only sales funnel.
If you put enough upfront investment into automating your lead-generation funnel, you may not need to spend time doing outreach to target companies. There is no reason to do outbound sales when your calendar is booked on potential clients from inbound leads.
Of course, we are not recommending throwing away all other kinds of marketing. But, with enough investment, many companies can create long-lasting organic traffic and clicks that can keep business booming without much direct work.
After achieving consistent inbound lead generation results, you can spend more time on important things like making your clients happy!
5 Steps to Successful Investing in Digital Leads
To help organize your journey to digital lead investing success, we created a five-step formula for investing in potential lead-gen channels:
- Define your goals
- Determine your budget
- Know your audience
- Find high-traffic channels
- Add natural value to channels
Step 1: Define your goals
Define what you want to accomplish through digital lead investing.
What action do you want leads to accomplish?
- Book an appointment?
- Sign-up for your new app?
- Subscribe to your newsletter?
- Share your landing page with others?
Understanding your goals will help you be goal-oriented and track the return on your investment.
Step 2: Determine your Budget
Determine your total budget. You should look to span a budget out for over 4-6 months at the least. It is important to understand what you invest into channels is what you will get out of it. However, make sure to budget enough for testing potential channels. Testing channels before going in can help ensure excellent ROI when you go all in on a channel.
Step 3: Know your audience
Understand who out of the market is most likely to convert. Audiences will gather together on specific channels you want to be on. Learn more about audience choices and preferences.
Younger audiences may be easier to reach on a platform like TikTok than a business publication. Similarly, a business leader may be easier to reach on a business publication than on TikTok. Knowing your audience will help you know where they may be trafficking.
Step 4: Find high-traffic channels
After understanding your audience and where they interact, find the highest-traffic channels. This may be a common Google search, or a common publication they enjoy reading.
For example, a fisherman wanting to buy a new fishing rod might commonly ask for recommendations or informational articles regarding the qualities of great fishing rods. Finding these valuable channels is the essence of digital lead investing.
Step 5: Add natural value to channels
After finding a high-traffic channel that fits your audience is time to provide value – not sell your products. In a competitive-attention economy, marketers need to provide value to be heard. To get their future potential business, you might ask for their contact information in exchange for a value offer.
Continuing with the example of the fisherman looking for information on fishing rods, this stage is your chance to provide value to the fisherman by creating an article titled “X Qualities of Great Fishing Rods.”
When the fisherman and others in the audience look in the channel, your fishing rod company will be ready to help.
3 Lead Generation Strategies to Invest in
What marketing services should you invest in for lead generation?
- Search Engine Optimization
- Paid Media or Earned Media
- PPC Advertising
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) – Lead-gen Strategy 1
Search Engine Optimization or SEO, is optimizing your site and content for valuable keywords on Google and other search engines. It is all the rave in digital marketing. Invest in SEO to achieve organic traffic results that drive sales. SEO starts with the investment to create content. Decide whether you are doing local marketing or national marketing. Check out this article to learn how to find a good SEO consultant.
Paid Media or Earned Media – Lead-gen Strategy 2
Paid media is paying for media in relevant publications, while earned media is from third-party discussions about your business. Our marketing team calls the combination of the two content marketing. High-traffic articles can rank on Google for SEO and build the credibility necessary to convert customers later in the funnel.
Find digital channels to provide valuable content towards consistent website traffic.
Pay-Per-Click (PPC) Advertising – Lead-gen Strategy 3
Pay-per-click advertising hosts a variety of avenues for generating clicks. Unlike Pay-per-view advertising, pay-per-click advertising avoids paying for anything not generating movement in the funnel. However, while it may create movement in the funnel, you need to ensure the quality and legitimacy of the clicks.
Facebook advertising is an example of PPC advertising on social media platforms. Social media ads are an effective way of spending towards ROI. But, as said earlier, social media ads can contain bot-related clicks. Focus on valuable leads when generating leads.
Why Invest in Digital Lead Generation?
To get more leads! More leads equals more business. More business equals more money. You can even spend that extra money to generate new customers. It is a big process.
Further questions to ask yourself:
- Is my website ready to convert a purchasing decision?
- How much can you pay for digital lead generation strategies?
- How much is that digital lead worth?
- Where is my online target market?
Interesting in Leads or Credibility Growth?
This digital lead investing review was written by Adogy, a Digital Media Agency specializing in building credibility and awareness through media placements. Our team of SEO and brand marketing experts can build a media placement strategy for your brand or brands. We have two customizable services: digital press and organic traffic.
If interested, schedule an introduction call with us on our website. Learn how we can advocate for your brand.
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