While inbound marketing is one of the best ways to attract leads, there’s no reason to not include some outbound techniques in your lead generation strategy. But they have to be the right outbound techniques.

When used together with SEO and content marketing, paid advertising can be hugely effective for generating leads. More than 64% of people will click on a Google Ad when they’re considering purchasing an item online.

PPC, in particular, is extremely helpful for new businesses, or businesses that are brand new to digital marketing. That’s because it allows you to generate great results in a short amount of time.

Of course, it’s not enough to simply start throwing money at paid advertising. Without a clear strategy, it’s easy to blow your entire marketing budget on PPC without seeing ROI. Here are a few ways to make sure your paid advertising will result in lead generation:

Link to a Landing Page
Often, PPC ads will direct visitors straight to a company’s homepage. This is a big mistake. Landing pages are the pages that visitors will land on after they’ve clicked on your ad. This is a page that has been created for one purpose. This could be getting people to register for your webinar, download a special report, or purchase a product.

When you link directly to your homepage, visitors can get confused. They’re suddenly faced with a menu and plenty of choices that may have nothing to do with the ad they clicked on.

Instead, create a landing page with a clear goal and call-to-action. Make it obvious what you would like visitors to do, and show them what’s in it for them. Remove any other distractions, including menu buttons and navigation links.

Nurture Previous Visitors
One of the biggest benefits of PPC? Retargeting. This is when you target users that have already interacted with your business in the past via email, social media, your website.

The vast majority of your visitors will not convert. They’re still thinking about your product, or they’re just not ready to buy the first, second, third, or sixth time they visit your site. But you want to make sure your business is top-of-mind when they’re ready to purchase.

You can continually remind potential leads about your brand through ads on Google, YouTube, and Facebook. This helps increase the likelihood that they’ll buy from you when they’re finally ready to purchase.

Continually Adjust
With paid advertising, you gain insight into a wealth of analytics. You’ll need to use these analytics to continually check that your keywords, landing page copy, and ad copy are all working well together. This will increase your quality score- which shows Google that your ads are high quality, but will also make it more likely that people who click on the ad will convert to leads.

One way you can do this is by split testing every aspect of your ads and landing pages. These include call-to-action, layouts, form fields, colours, headlines, form locations, and more. The smallest changes can result in a massive increase in conversion. 

Not sure where to get started with paid advertising? We can help. If you’re hoping to increase leads this year, get in touch today.