74% of B2B marketers spend more than $50 on average to get one sales lead, according to Marketing Sherpa, a research firm. Yet many of these leads are low quality, with a small portion turning into an opportunity for a new customer acquisition. So why are marketers paying so much?
According to a new whitepaper by Mintigo, this is a question of scalability. Search and Display Pay-Per-Click (PPC) advertising is one of the most common methods for generating new leads. However, PPC works great at the beginning, reaping all of these low hanging fruit at relatively low cost per lead. However, once all of these easy targets are exhausted, advertisers who want to scale their campaign need to buy more keywords or buy less relevant media, causing the cost per lead to spiral.
This problem is exacerbated for B2B marketers who need to target a very specific audience that's relevant for their product or service. These marketers may find themselves wasting precious dollars on sifting through irrelevant and disengaged audience trying to get to a few relevant targets.
But there is a solution. Once cost per leads start to increase quickly in inbound Search and Display campaigns, advertisers need to start thinking about complementing it with outbound marketing. Outbound marketing such as email campaigns can be very targeted, reaching only those relevant potential clients. The key challenge there is to get a high quality and a relevant email list.
How do you make sure that you have a relevant list? Today, targeting the right people has become more of a science than an art. New technologies can sift through huge quantities of data on the social web and find just those who are relevant for a product or service with high likelihood to convert.
Technology is making outbound marketing much more efficient and scalable than ever before. So if your PPC advertising doesn't scale well, don't just throw more money at the problem—instead, make a smarter investment in outbound marketing.
Whilst the principle is correct what this doesn't take into account is the later impact on Brand of appearing to a wider more generic audience. So whilst the cost is initially higher the advantage to a Brand at a later stage in the process can justify the outlay. My opinion on e-mail campaigns is that they are a great way to enage and inform users however a high percentage of the time their details have come from users who have already interacted with a Brand, therefore it's role is more effective in balancing the cost associated with a more generic based reach however ultimately it doesn't generate new brand interest.
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