Show Notes:
It’s Phase 3 of the GPS Method, the Convert phase which is the lead generation phase. Everyone should be doing lead generation as part of their marketing strategy. Why? Well, the more leads you generate, the more you can nurture them through email and create more buyers.
Plus, this is where you will spend the bulk of your budget, so getting this right is crucial and continuing to improve lead generation for your business is crucial to the success of your marketing efforts and overall campaign performance.
In this episode, we walk through how to determine the best funnel for your audience, top funnels converting right now for our agency clients, industry-standard metrics so you can make better decisions on how your campaigns are performing, along with how to get more leads for less money.
Listen up and listen good so you can make sure you get the most bang for your buck!
Mentioned on the Show:
onlineconverter.com/compress-video
Share-worthy Quotes:
“Profitability is queen as it’s super, super important. BUT testing is king!”
“Lead gen is where you spend the bulk of your budget, so getting it right is crucial!”
“Ads won’t fix a broken offer, so you need to make sure your funnel converts”
Get the Transcript here:
Episode 4 – The GPS Method Phase 3 | Convert
Hey, hey everyone. Welcome back to the Ad Agency Secrets Podcast. I hope everyone is having an amazing week. I know I am. I’m getting ready for Christmas like most of you are, decorated the tree already. And even though I started decorating my house the weekend before Thanksgiving. Yes, I was one of those people. I’m still decorating the outside of my house because we are having a mini non-spoken competition in our neighborhood. We are all apparently trying to be the Griswolds, but there could only be one Griswold and I’m determined for my house to be it. So I’ve got more outdoor decorations coming in the mail from Amazon this week that will be going up. Yes, because I’m crazy. And so I’ll be sure to take pictures of it when it’s 100% done and post them online for you all to see. But until then, I am super excited to dive into today’s episode where we are talking about phase three of the GPS method, which is the convert phase, the lead generation phase.
Now everyone should be doing lead generation as part of their marketing strategy. The more leads you generate, the more you can nurture them through email and create more buyers. The goal is to be able to own your leads, not have Facebook or Google or another platform own them. We want to buy the leads from Facebook and then get them off of Facebook and onto our list where we have a bit more control over them. In addition, this is where you spend the bulk of your budget. And so getting this right and continuing to improve your lead gen for your business is crucial to the success of your marketing efforts and really the success of your overall campaign performance. Let’s kick this episode off by talking about how choosing the right funnel is imperative to the success of your marketing efforts. What does that mean?
Well, we briefly spoke about it in another episode, in episode one, actually, but each niche and avatar require different methods to market and sell to. People looking to lose weight versus people looking to start a business may react completely differently to different marketing methods. So when choosing your funnel, think about the following four things. One, how much time does someone have to invest? Two, are they in more of a learning mode or investment mode? Three, would they prefer an on-demand method like a prerecorded method or a live method with potential live Q&A or live support? And four, what’s the best method in which they will attend or engage with your content? Meaning, will they watch a video or will they rather listen to the audio? Do they want done-for-you templates or would they like more guided hands-on support?
Then start thinking about the sales vehicle, such as your webinar, challenge, video series, and determine best funnel to start with and how you want to structure it best for your audience.
Now I can tell you some of the top converting funnels working for our clients at the DW Agency right now are five-day challenges, automated webinars, and tiny product funnels. So if you’re utilizing any of these right now in your marketing, then you’re in a good spot as long as you determined it’s the best funnel type for your audience. Here are a few tips on each of these, so you can improve your conversions.
For challenges, it seems the shorter, the better, and meaningless days. Otherwise, retention and engagement go down and momentum is lost. We’ve had clients do 14-day or even 30-day challenges. However, as I stated, engagement and momentum dwindled, so they ended up shortening their challenges, which dramatically increase their profitability. So three to five days really is optimal.
For webinars, keeping them down to 60 minutes or less, usually lead to a higher wash-through rate, which leads to more sales because more people stayed on, which means more people saw the pitch on the webinar. So keep that in mind when recording.
And then when we go to tiny products, usually price points starting between $27 and $47 have seemed to convert best. Just ensure you have an order bump and at least two upsells. Your job is to increase the ACV, your average cart value. The higher, the average cart value, meaning the higher the average sale is, the more profitable this funnel will be. Now keep in mind, I gave you tips and best practices, but testing is king. We have anomalies where clients have 90 plus minute webinars and they are crushing it or clients with seven-day challenges that are converting well. The tips I just shared are a consensus of the majority of our clients. So you have a key place to start, but always trust the data and follow the data.
For example, I have, you know, me and my examples guys. I have a client who sells packages between 5k and 20k and her call to action for people to book call and get on the phone with her sales team. And so I wouldn’t dare think just off the top of my head that a challenge would really work for her because I assume these people have more money than time and therefore won’t join and actually participate in a five-day challenge. Oh man, so glad this funnel was tested. This is their highest converting funnel. Why? Well, for a couple of reasons.
One, my client is amazing on camera, amazing. And people love listening to her. She just exudes happiness and positivity, and most importantly, credibility with her knowledge that she shares. The second reason is there’s so much competition in her space and people bombarding her audience with ads and offers. I think it’s just a breath of fresh air for her audience to do a challenge where the expert is actually dedicating multiple days with them, giving her time. And they actually walk away with a clear, tangible outcome at the end with actually getting results. For people who take this challenge, 90% of them are getting results during the challenge because that’s how powerful the content is, which leads to trust and a book called for the sales team. Again, testing this showed us this funnel works and why it works so well.
Now you may already have your funnel up and running and may have already run some ads to it. So let’s talk about some industry-standard metrics to look for. This way you can determine how your campaign and funnel are converting to help you make better decisions. And a reminder, these are I feel like I do this reminder a lot guys. These are general industry standards. So not always 100% accurate. I’m going to preface that a couple of times while going through this.
For the lead cost, let’s go through some quick numbers. Webinars, challenges, video series, we look for an average of four to $8 per lead, depending on the niche and depending on if it’s B2C or B2B. So business to consumer, business to business. Again, this is an average as we have some clients with a $15 webinar lead cost or $15 challenge registering cost, and that’s considered good based on their niche, based on their average cart value, and based on their return on ad spend.
For downloadable PDF lead magnets, we look for about a two to $5 lead cost. Again, this is on average. Now, I want to stop and add a flash flood warning here. Lead cost isn’t everything. If you’re profitable, then focus on that. Focus on where the return on ad spend is coming from. Meaning if you have an asset bringing in $10 leads and you think that’s expensive, but it brings in the sales, it brings in the money. I would prefer that any day over an asset bringing in $3 or $5 leads, but zero, no sales are coming from that ad whatsoever. So profitability is king. Okay, well, actually profitability is queen because testing is king, but you get my drift. Profitability is super, super important.
Now we’re going to go over landing page conversion rates because you’re going to see why your landing page is so powerful in lead gen. Here are some quick numbers and I’m going to preface this with the fact that I personally have high expectations for this, because I don’t believe in the ads doing all the work. This is a holistic approach. The entire funnel has to work. Plus something I say a lot is that ads won’t fix a broken offer. So you need to make sure that your funnel converts itself.
For webinars and challenges and video series and case studies, something that’s actually going to take up more of someone’s time to digest the information versus just downloading a PDF guide, which is wham bam done. So if it’s going to take up more time from the end-user, we look for about a 45% conversion rate. Now, if you’re hovering between 40% to 45%, that’s fine. But 45% is the goal and anything below 40% is no Bueno and needs fixing ASAP.
Now for downloadable PDF lead magnets, again, those are things that people can just like a script or a guide or a step-by-step. Something that someone can just download and walk away with. We look for about 65% or higher. Yes, you heard that right. People start to freak out. My lead magnet converts in the 80% range. So if yours is converting in less than 65%, it needs to be worked on. Guys, a landing page conversion is huge. If you realize yours is converting at like 30% and you increase it by, let’s just say 10%, your lead cost will massively drop, massively. So be sure to work on your page conversion. You might be thinking, “Whoa, I’m nowhere near hitting those numbers, Jessica.” Don’t worry. I got you, boo. I got you. All right.
Here are a couple of tips to help increase your landing page conversion.
Number one, and this is something you probably did not think to look at, but I’m going to give you this quick golden nugget that will hopefully increase more eyes on your landing page, which helps to lower your lead cost, and this is your link click to page view percentage. Here I’m talking about how many people click on your link and actually land on your page. This is based on your page delivery. The metric we look for here is about 80%. For example, if 100 unique people click your link and only 68 unique people land on your page. That’s 68%, which means you’ve lost 32% of the people who clicked the link, which again is no Bueno. You’re spending your hard-earned money here. So you want as many eyes on your page as possible.
One place I go and my team goes to check out URLs and their page speed is GTmetrix.com. If it’s a C or lower and easily worked on. Guys, I’ll put that in the show notes as well, GTmetrix.com. So if it’s a C or lower, that means your page needs to be worked on. I suggest going to places like tinypng.com to compress any images on the page. Even though I feel like just selling him one image, do it anyway. And even your background images that you feel like, “There’s some really light background image,” that needs to be compressed as well. And we also go to onlineconverter.com forward/compress-video to compress any videos. This will help increase your page speed and delivery. That was your first golden nugget.
The second golden nugget to increase page conversion is to simplify your page. Most of the time we add so much stuff to the pages, such as the about me section. I don’t know why, but I always see about me sections on really simple webinars or even lead magnet downloads. Sometimes there’s tons of copy on these pages explaining what the free offer is. Almost like we’re trying to sell them something paid and it’s overkill. Now sometimes it converts fine, but if you notice that your page isn’t converting well, I would highly recommend simplifying.
There are other things you can do to tweak this, like tweaking the copy to make it more enticing. That’s a good one. Ensuring congruency between your ad copy and your landing page, making sure the button for them to click on is above the screen fold. So before they have to scroll on their mouse. And there’s others, but to start, simplify your page by removing unnecessary sections. We have some clients who honestly just have an image on one side and on the other side is just a headline, maybe a sub-headline, and then the place to enter their detail, like their name and email. And that’s it. And it converts well because the ad did its job explaining what the offer was so that the page didn’t need to do much else. It made it an easy no-brainer for someone to just put their name and email on and to go to the next step.
Now, if you didn’t already know this, I also just showed you how to lower your lead cost in that. So I kind of combined how to lower a landing page and how to also lower your lead cost. All right. We’re going to go into what actual metrics to look for inside of ads manager and how to lower lead cost in phase five with the GPS method. But to recap what I just spoke about, here are the two ways we discussed to lower your lead cost. That’s increasing your link click to page view increases on your eyes. So increase in your link click to page view, increases eyes in your ads for the same cost, which will increase your odds for more opt-ins. So more eyes on your ads means more potential opt-in. So really increasing your link page to page view is important.
And then second guys is increasing your landing page conversion rate. That’s one of the best ways to get your ad cost down. And it’s something that you actually have more control over. Like we will have so much control over Facebook, but we have more control over your landing page. And so instead of converting 30 people out of 100 for your downloadable PDF guide or your script or whatever it is that you are offering, instead, convert 65 or more. That’s a humongous difference.
Now again, if you’re really looking to lower your lead cost, you will really need to monitor numbers in ads manager to ensure that you’re getting the most bang for your buck. But like I said, we are going to discuss that in the optimize and scale phase, which is two episodes from now. Be on the lookout.
And that wraps up phase three of the GPS method, the convert phase, lots of actionable steps here. Make sure you took notes, start implementing these today. Coming up next in episode five, we will be talking about phase four of the GPS method, the close phase. These are your sales ads. While this phase is not where you’re spending the bulk of your money, it almost always has the highest return on ad spend. And so paying close attention here could take you from a 1.5 return on ad spend to a four-plus return on ad spend. We’ll dive into the best practices for your sales ad so you can set them up right from the start, the types of ads we use that bring us in the highest profits. What is it you may or may not be doing, and also the budget that you would allocate to this phase. So don’t miss out. Thanks guys for joining me, and I will see you guys in the next episode. Bye.
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