Why the future of Lead Generation is in your pocket.
Most entrepreneurs and companies know that generating new leads is the heartbeat of every business.
This is true since men first started trading goods and services, however the way businesses attract new potential customers has changed over time, especially in recent years with the internet revolution.
If you were an online marketer in the early days of digital advertising, you remember how we used to generate leads. The formula was pretty simple:
You create a landing page → You send traffic to it with ads → Your visitors fill the form and become leads.
And to be honest with you, it worked pretty well. You could get a lot of leads and sales even just investing a few bucks.
However, after a few glorious years things got harder.
Many advertisers moved their budget online competing for consumers attention, making advertising costs skyrocket. On top of that, people started to increasingly browse the web from mobile devices, making the old fashioned landing pages a bit clumsy.
Many businesses started struggling in generating new leads and worried about how to sustain their business growth.
Things seemed stale for a while, until in 2015 everything changed.
☝️ Facebook leads the way.
In 2015 Facebook, one of the major players in the market, launched Facebook Lead Ads, a new revolutionary type of ad.
Lead Ads is significantly different from any other options available because it makes it easy for users to become leads. In fact, with Lead Ads..
- The form fields are already filled with the user’s personal information
- Users can “subscribe” without leaving the app
These couple of features allowed marketers to generate leads much faster and cheaper than before. Just to give an idea, compared with traditional advertising, Facebook Lead Ads allowed to generate on average 5X the amount of leads and drop the cost of acquisition over 85% across several industries.
At the time Lead Ads came out, I was working in the digital marketing industry for a while, so I soon realized that, despite the huge benefits that this new technology was providing, lots of marketers would still go through the pain of syncing their new leads manually in their databases or email marketing services.
This was a huge problem because marketing funnels must be timely: 76% of people expect to receive a welcome email immediately after subscribing to a list, and companies that respond promptly to leads are 7 times more likely to convert those leads into sales.
That’s why, together with my friend and co-founder Alex, I decided to tackle this problem by launching an automation platform called LeadsBridge, and four years of steady growth later, I can tell you that it was a winning bet.
In 2018 alone we became Facebook Marketing Partner, we worked with over over 10’000 advertisers and managed over 60 millions contacts.
However, this is still the beginning of our journey. As more people join social media networks, many companies divert their marketing budgets online and the major publishers develop new solutions. The industry is changing fast.
👉 LinkedIn follows.
Following the huge success of Facebook Lead Ads, in 2017 LinkedIn has launched a new product called Lead Gen Forms.
Similarly to Lead Ads, LinkedIn Lead Gen Forms makes it easy for advertisers to generate quality leads using forms that are pre-filled with LinkedIn users’ data.
As soon as the product was out lots of our clients started to ask us whether it was possible or not to integrate it through our automation platform.
The demand has been strong ever since, so we immediately started working on it by doing some market research about it. We observed that over 630 million professionals use LinkedIn and that 93% of B2B marketers believe it is the most effective site for lead generation.
We also found that 63% of B2B marketers saying that social media drives leads for them, with an impressive 43% of them attributing sales to LinkedIn in the past years.
It didn’t take long to understand that this was an important opportunity for us and a valuable asset for our clients. So we started working on it to develop a specific solution.
Beyond the opportunity in itself though, in our analysis we noticed a few trends in the lead generation industry that I want to share with you.
If you are a business owner, you should know that the future of lead generation is right in your pocket.
🤳 Mobile takes over.
What really stood out in our research is the data about mobile navigation. When you look at the data showing the percentage of mobile device website traffic worldwide, you can observe that since the beginning of 2017 mobile accounts for approximately 50% of web traffic worldwide.
In the US, fewer people are accessing social networking sites via laptops, with the majority of users now exclusively using mobile devices. It is predicted that 51.7% of US social network users will be mobile-only in 2019. Maybe more telling than anything is the graph showing Facebook Ads revenue by device, with over 94% of the total coming from mobile.
The message for advertisers is clear: today the audience is browsing mostly via mobile, and every marketing effort must be thought-out with this in mind.
So what about the good ol’ days of sending traffic to a landing page?
The truth is that the process to generate a lead with traditional landing pages can take up 3–5 minutes if the pages are slow to load, the visitor has to read a long copy and then fill the form manually.
Nobody ever takes that time when navigating from mobile.
That’s why publishers decided to adopt native solutions like Facebook Lead Ads or LinkedIn Lead Gen Forms. These types of ads cut dramatically the funnel by making it shorter and immediate, so it only takes 5–10 seconds for a user to become a lead.
For those who are not familiar with native ads yet, let’s take the example of Linkedin Gen Forms.
As I said, this type of ad helps you acquire more leads by removing the barrier of filling out the form and opening a webpage. But what results does it deliver?
Some companies using Lead Gen Forms saw a 50% reduction in cost-per-lead compared to their own website landing page conversions. Some other saw their leads flow increased by around 300% with the CPL also dropping dramatically.
Of course these results matter especially when incorporated into a fully automated marketing strategy, and we are proud to say that very soon LeadsBridge will integrate with LinkedIn’s marketing solutions.
(We will talk more about this during a live webinar on September 25th at 10am PST, join us here.)
Conclusion
Lead generation is moving towards a frictionless experience. People are allergic to slow navigation, long reading, and sharing their data all over again. They demand a seamless experience to get what they want, and get it fast.
On one hand it’s up to publishers to remove the unnecessary steps by building native solutions, and we believe other publishers will follow the example of Facebook and LinkedIn.
On the other hand, it’s up to marketers and advertisers to adjust their strategies accordingly. If we keep focusing on a moment on the B2B world, we know that still a shocking 18% of marketers are ignoring mobile, saying they do not intend to invest in a mobile-responsive site in 2019. This is quite worrying.
If companies want to ensure a sustainable growth for their business in a mobile-first world, they should evolve their strategies to consider the latest innovations and shifts in consumer needs.
At LeadsBridge, we are happy to do our part to help them.
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