The best advertising channels for lead generation

Whether for B2C or B2B, every company must consider the best strategy to reach its target audience and spark interest with the ultimate goal of selling its products or services.

It seems difficult to ask prospects to sign up for an offer without first providing value or enough information to reassure and convince them. That is why it is important to work on your entire conversion funnel.

In this article, we will focus on generating warm leads, i.e., qualified leads. These leads represent prospects who are more likely to convert and will be handed over to the sales team...

We will therefore exclude all leads from contests or other techniques that primarily aim for brand awareness rather than conversion.

Here are some examples of content that allow you to generate leads:

E-books/White Papers
Syllabus for training organizations
Sign-up for a trial period or product demo
Registration for a webinar
Newsletter, specifically in the fashion industry.
It is important to note that depending on the industry, some content like newsletters may not be relevant at all.

🤔 So, how do you get leads?

There are two schools of thought, or rather three:

SEO pros who swear by inbound marketing, meaning generating traffic and leads naturally without having to spend a cent on advertising campaigns.
Paid Media enthusiasts who generate the majority of their business through paid advertising.
Inbound marketing seems healthier and more economical at first glance, but you have to be patient before seeing positive results, and you shouldn't overlook the human cost of producing and distributing content.

Advertising has the disadvantage of being riskier and requiring a budget, but it has the advantage of allowing the advertiser to reach a specific audience that is not yet familiar with the product or service.

The third, healthier approach would be to balance these two levers to leverage both short-term and long-term effects.

As Klox specializes in digital advertising, our goal is to show you which levers are best suited for your business.

🚀 Performance levers

Search Ads

Prerequisite : A landing page with a clear value proposition.

The ultimate performance lever. It allows you to capture user search intent and redirect them to your page to collect information in exchange for content.

Best Practices: You can even add a lead form extension to your Search ad to maximize your chances of collecting information. It won't cost you any more than a standard ad.

Display

Prerequisite : A landing page with a clear value proposition.

This lever is often underestimated because its conversion rate is naturally lower due to less user engagement.

However, banners cost much less than other formats, allowing you to generate enough traffic through volume to achieve very attractive and qualified costs per lead.

Conversely, video ads on the web or in apps are not part of our selection, as production and media buying costs (4x higher than banners) cause the cost per lead to skyrocket.

Social media and their native forms

Prerequisite : an account on each network! That's it 🙌

That is the huge advantage of this format. Social networks offer advertisers a native form, allowing anyone to run "Lead Generation" campaigns. This is great news for many marketers who wouldn't know how to build a web page and don't have developer resources to help them.

Other advantages: When the form appears on the screen after clicking on the sponsored post, certain requested fields like first name, last name, and email are pre-filled. This drastically improves the user experience and, consequently, form completion rates.

Best practices: Since the user is not redirected to your own landing page, you must clearly communicate your value proposition directly within your sponsored post. Pay close attention to your headline, description, and image.

YouTube Form Ads

This is actually a form extension added to the TrueView for Action format, which is a pre-roll video with a Call to Action (CTA) integrated below the video and at the end of it.

YouTube Form Ads example

📈 Branding levers for performance

Although performance channels are more popular because they allow for direct measurement of campaign effectiveness, branding-oriented channels should not be overlooked, for two reasons:

Performance channels are generally more accessible and are the first ones used by advertisers in general. In some industries, competition can be very fierce and costs extremely high.
Tracking tools exist to measure the effectiveness of your campaigns.
Unlike performance channels where the user can interact directly with the ad and provide their information, the goal here is to drive traffic to your site or app.

That is why it is essential to have clear CTAs to maximize the conversion of this traffic.

Television. Our tools allow you to quickly activate geo-targeted TV campaigns on the channels of your choice without having to spend tens of thousands of euros.
DOOH (Digital Out of Home). Tell us who your target audience is, and we will provide you with all the digital outdoor billboards that will allow you to reach your prospects.
Podcasts. Rarely integrated into advertisers' media plans, the CPM (Cost Per Mille) is very attractive, and the recall rate is very high since the environment is not—yet—flooded with ads.

Need more info? Contact us!

🔎 How to prepare effectively?

No matter who you are, it is necessary to know your audience well and understand how much a new customer is worth to you in the long run.

Here are a few concrete examples:

For a SaaS company, it is important to know your Customer Lifetime Value (CLV) to be able to properly set your cost-per-lead and cost-per-acquisition targets. It is also important to analyze the drop-off rate between the number of new customers and the number of leads generated in order to gain insights.
Depending on its program, a business school knows that a new student will stay for 3 to 5 years, all things going well. The CPL must be calculated based on this data.
A fashion brand might know that, on average, a customer buys three items each year and that, on average, xxx new newsletter subscribers generate one new customer.
Need help defining relevant goals?
It is therefore important to find the right balance between performance-driven levers and those focused on branding to help you stand out from your competitors.

At Klox, we work with companies across various industries. Get in touch with us if you would like to receive success stories specific to yours.