Define Your Qualified Leads for Successful Digital Ads

While marketing budgets have stalled or receded in the last year, the demand for results has not, according to the Gartner CMO Spend Survey 2017-2018. In fact, one of the key findings was, “It’s time to assume accountability for business performance and show that marketing can grow the business while making hard choices.”

On the positive side, digital advertising can deliver measurable business results, and the Gartner CMO Spend Survey found 67 percent of CMOs plan to increase their spending in digital ads in 2018.

Remember that those results must tie to your company’s growth goals. One way to do that is to drive qualified sales leads.

Start with sales and marketing alignment.

Generating leads that don’t have real business potential is a waste of both time and dollars. Sit down with your sales team to outline the questions to ask on your landing page forms to gauge potential.

Lead qualifications inform your targets.

After you define what qualifies as a lead, use that to identify audiences who have the most potential to meet those characteristics and target your ads to those groups.

Lead qualifications inform your channels.

The qualifications and target audience information also guide which digital ad mediums to use. For instance, a focus on generating business-to-business leads may require LinkedIn ads or driving tradeshow visitors to your booth would rely on geofencing (location-based advertising).

Prepare tracking and reporting.

Finally, develop a system to track those leads once they go to Sales so that you can report on the total qualified leads, and resulting sales, can be tied back to your digital ads.