Spotify
Amazon Music
Apple PodcastsIn this podcast, Dean Denny, the founder of Owendenny Digital, discusses the importance of generating high-quality marketing qualified leads. He emphasizes the need for qualitative analysis when evaluating the effectiveness of gated content offers and lead magnets. By matching leads to LinkedIn profiles, company information, and industry verticals, businesses can gain valuable insights into the customer journey and tailor their content creation process accordingly.
Dean highlights the significance of optimizing lead quality over quantity and recommends investing in higher-quality leads to outperform competitors. He concludes by encouraging listeners to review their CRM data and leverage the information to strengthen their marketing strategies and funnel optimization.
In this podcast, you will learn:
1) Qualitative analysis matters: Evaluating the quality of marketing qualified leads is crucial for successful campaigns. Matching leads to LinkedIn profiles, company information, and industry verticals provides valuable insights into their stage in the customer journey.
2) Optimize lead quality over quantity: Focusing on high-quality leads rather than solely on volume yields better results. Investing more in acquiring higher-quality leads can give businesses a competitive edge.
3) Tailor content creation: Analyzing lead data allows businesses to refine their content creation process. Understanding what leads are looking for and adjusting messaging accordingly can improve lead quality and engagement.
4) Don’t overlook the customer journey: Assessing where leads are in their business journey is essential. Sending leads through a funnel that aligns with their stage of readiness and needs ensures better conversions and customer retention.
5) CRM data is invaluable: Leveraging CRM data provides valuable information for optimizing marketing strategies. Tracking leads, analyzing their characteristics, and using that knowledge to refine campaigns can lead to more effective customer acquisition and retention.
Timestamps
[00:01:16] Generate quality MQLs with numbers.
[00:03:25] Track leads, measure cost, improve quality.
[00:06:47] Qualitative analysis of leads.
[00:09:34] Improving lead quality through research.
[00:10:52] Gated content strategy
[00:12:09] Grow business through direct response advertising.
Hey everyone. How are you going? This is open-source growth. My name is Dean Denny. I’m the founder and director of Owendenny Digital, Australia’s leading digital marketing agency for software companies, online brands, and so much more where we take the best of direct response advertising, media buying, and marketing growth strategy to help software companies achieve T2D3 growth and a whole lot more. And today guys,
I’ve got a really cool little hack that you can use inside of your business before you go out and build a full stack customer-getting machine. Now, this is a really interesting one, because right now at Owendenny digital, we are testing a handful of gated content offers. So, if you have landed on our website recently, you will see that we are running LinkedIn ads checklists, Google ads checklists, Facebook ads checklists, um, SaaS user growth guides. We’ve got a whole lot of gated offers.
That we are testing with our market. And the reason behind the fact that we’re testing all these different gated offers is because we want to understand how can we generate as many marketing qualified leads as possible that not only provide us with great volume, but also great quality. Now a lot of people, especially the digital marketers who do this solely by numbers, they play the quantitative game. If you are running.
Marketing qualified lead campaigns or. You know, PDF campaigns or gated offer campaigns. Anything that enables a user to exchange their contact information for a part of a resource or a document or a free training or a guide you’ll essentially generating marketing qualified leads who may not have any form of commercial or transactional intent with your business at this point.
Now, what’s really interesting here though, is that. If you are your typical direct response, advertising media buyer, you’re just going to be look at the quant, which is the quantitative. Now what does quants mean? Quantitative means the numbers. How many downloads? How many clicks, what was the conversion rate of clicks to downloads or clicks to subscribes? And how can we optimize for this number?
Now there is a huge challenge in the software vertical, which we experience every single day, where people are constantly chasing the numbers and they’re painting their SaaS companies by numbers every single day. They’re just thinking, oh, well, if we get more free trials, it means we’ll get more users because on average, you know, 3% of free trials turn into paying users, they have a lifetime value of this and yeah, that’s all great.
Like you do need to understand the quantitative side of your customer acquisition machine. But where we are seeing the greatest value. In developing a full stack customer getting machine, which takes people from marketing qualified. To sales, qualified through a series of nurturing emails and workshops and live events, et cetera, et cetera, through to jumping on to sales calls throughout and through to becoming clients who provide you with not just a great client agency relationship, but also a great lifetime value for your business.
See the challenge is that if you’re going by quant, You’re going to think. Oh, okay, great. Everyone who downloads X lead magnets, going to provide us with so many more deals because we’re able to get them into the database faster and it’s going to be cheaper and it’s going to be great. But as I’ve said on previous podcasts, that’s not always the case because if you are constantly chasing low cost marketing, qualified leads, your quality, not quantity. Your quality of these leads is going to drop over time.
So. For instance, what we are doing at Owendenny is we’re testing multiple campaigns, but with every single lead that comes through the door, and I’m not going to reveal what lead magnets working the best. But you can read between the lines here with our existing campaigns. We are looking at. The volume of leads that are coming through, but also each and every person who signs up for those marketing qualified lead offers now.
This is really simple. The fastest, the quickest and dirtiest way to do this is to number one, ensure that you have a CRM. So if you’re generating marketing qualified leads, we use HubSpot. We swear by the thing. Make sure that your leads are coming and getting plumbed into a HubSpot CRM or something similar. So you can go about tracking your costs, the number of contacts generated, and then you can have all your contact information there. And then.
The next thing we’re doing is we’re matching those names. And those domains to the appropriate country, we’re naming, we’re matching them to the appropriate industry, the appropriate vertical, the appropriate business name, the company, their position. And that’s where we start to see a very interesting picture because of the fact that with our marketing qualified lead campaigns, we’re able to see where they are as, uh, in their business, how big their companies are, where they live, what industries are they in? What sort of leads are they chasing?
Based on the way we’ve crafted our marketing qualified leads. We’re able to get a very good understanding of where these people are. In their business. So this is why it’s really crucial to test your quality here of your marketing qualified leads that you are generating, because if you don’t do that,
What’s going to happen is that you may get all the way down the line, sending hundreds of thousands of emails out every single week to try and get people onto whether it be a free workshop or generating sales calls. But if they’re at the wrong stage of the customer journey, based on the qualitative analysis you’ve done.
It’s going to be game over. They. Not only being the wrong part of the customer journey, but they may be. In the wrong type of business, they may be in the wrong size of business. They may not even be close to engaging you for their services, or it might mean. They’re not be close to engaging you or to signing up with your software because it doesn’t really suit them there. And then, so this is kind of like a twofold lesson here. Number one, when you launch your marketing qualified, lead based campaigns for your gated content to generate.
Volume to build out your database, be sure to do the qualitative analysis. Figuring out what company they work with. Do the old LinkedIn stalk. Figure out what size the company is, see what position they have in the company. See, what’s really fascinating. And I’ll just tell it how it is here when we launch a good lead magnet, because we’re in the direct response advertising space and we’re a digital marketing agency that offers this.
We often will have two types of leads that come through or maybe three. Number one, the business owner that isn’t quite ready to engage us. We have number two. Other are getting agency owners or other marketing professionals who are attached to marketing agencies who want to upskill themselves for either promotion or they want to go about establishing their own business. And.
Taking the best insights of what we’ve got and funnel hacker. So that’s number two or number three, we’ve got the high quality prospect. Now you need to be able to triage these three in our business to determine what’s really working from your marketing qualified lead campaigns. Because if you don’t get that right.
The whole thing will fall over. So. It’s really interesting. That not only do you need to do the qualitative analysis on these marketing qualified leads that you generate? You also need to then look back at okay. I’ve generated. All these marketing qualified leads. These campaigns provide me with the most qualified marketing qualified leads.
And why is that? And that’s what you need to get really curious about. What are you saying in your ads? What do you, what does your lead magnet, what does your gated. Off content offer, or what does your checklist, your free guide, your training, your calculator, or your spreadsheet? Like what does that tell the customer?
And what promise are they buying into? You know, in the digital marketing agency game, most people are just buying into gimme as many leads as possible. Help me reduce my cost per cost of acquire a customer. Um, help me increase my customer lifetime value. Right. That’s what most people are buying into.
And help me navigate this platform or how me get this particular type of customer, right? Like that’s what most people are buying into. But within that, there are pockets of good. Customers, and there are pockets of good prospects. So then once you get curious and once you start to recognize, oh, okay, cool.
If I start changing my messaging from say, generate more leads versus reduced your cost to acquire a customer. What does that do to the lead quality? Chances are, you’ll find someone. Who is more advanced with their. They’re direct response advertising journey, and they’re thinking, oh, okay. And this is quite good. I need to be able to reduce my CACs so I can get as many customers through the door as possible. But then if you compare that to someone who’s talking about how to triple your customer lifetime value versus reducing your cost to acquire a customer that may even provide you with a more sophisticated.
Direct response, advertising specialists, then again. So. What I’m getting to here is that it’s not cut and dry when you’re generating a whole volume of a large volume of marketing qualified leads where you’re getting real gains is. Looking at the marketing qualified leads you are generating from your MQL based campaigns.
And then looking at the lead quality that’s coming through, look at every single one of those people. See if you can match it to a LinkedIn profile, a company, a company size industry, vertical, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And what they’re actually doing. Are they running LinkedIn ads? Are they running Facebook ads?
Are they running Google ads? Do you know anything about the SEO? Um, backlink profile and then you get a real understanding of where that person is inside of there. Business journey. Because then you can use this. To reinforce. Your gated offer content creation process. To go about improving your lead quality once again. And that is what’s really powerful. See a lot of people build their.
Typical gated content to a strategy call or their gated content to free trial. Based quote-unquote offers, like I know that Ryan dice and Sabri Suby have made it very popular to, you know, develop like a lead magnet and then offer a strategy call. And that’s the whole nature of reducing their cost to acquire a customer.
Through that sort of. You know, two stage. Funnel, and I know Russell, Brunson’s a big proponent of this. However, if you do this wrong, And your. You’re literally setting up your gated content. Um, offer landing page, which is just based on volume. And then you send them into your upsell page for a free strategy call or a free trial, and the quality of your users that are signing up on the squeeze page for the gated content offer is terrible. No, one’s going to be signing up to the lead magnet.
No, no, no. One’s gonna be signing up to the strategy. Call my apologies. So like, we’ve got to get this right guys, like if you are a SaaS growth marketer or if you’re a digital marketer or an e-commerce cat, like whoever’s listening to this today, this is really, really important stuff. Because. If you don’t get this right, your whole funnel falls over.
So, this is why I’m a huge advocate and you’ve can probably hear on this podcast for higher quality leads, pay more for your leads. Pay as much as you possibly can for your marketing qualified leads. Providing the high quality, because you will outperform your competitors hand over fist every single time. Remember Dan Kennedy said he could spend the most to acquire a customer is the winner of this direct response, advertising growth marketing business. So.
This is why. And this is my call for you. If you are generating MQL. Please get into your CRM today, go through your leads and see how good their quality is. Stack it against a LinkedIn profile, stank it against a LinkedIn company profile. Have a look at what they’re doing in the Facebook ads. Library have look at what they’re doing on their LinkedIn profile. See if you’ve got SEM rush so you can determine how much money they’re spending on Google ads and what their backlink profile is.
And then once you can start seeing which MQL campaigns are actually generating you, high quality leads. You then can take all that information and then reinforce your MQL content creation process. Once you’ve got that locked in and dialed that’s when it’s time to optimize your next step in your Ryan Deiss slash Russell Brunson’s slash Sabri Suby gated content plus strategy call plus demo offer funnel.
That is it everybody? I hope you got something out of this. This is. I think this is one of my best podcasts to date. And may I say. And if you’ve got some value out of this, please share this with your colleagues, friends, or a founder that needs this. We do this for free for SaaS founders, online business owners.
You know, course creators, agency owners, whoever who’s willing to open their mind to an empowered way of using direct response advertising to grow their business. This is what it’s all about here at Owendenny digital helping business owners, software founders, uh, online brand. Owners, whatever, grow their business through the latest and greatest in marketing strategy, direct response advertising and world-class media buying.
If you liked this podcast, please do subscribe. We do pump these out every single week for good people like you to grow their business. And if I don’t speak to you soon, I hope this has been valuable. I want you to go about implementing this and if you need any additional help, go check out the job notes below.
Not the job notes. The show notes below. So where you can go about booking a free strategy call with me. Or booking just a quick 10 minute chat to see whether or not Owendenny digital can help you and your software company grow. Through the latest and greatest in what we do. I’ll speak to you all soon. This has been valuable to talk to you we’ll talk again now.
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