Lead generation supports sales activity and is a vital part of international marketing. Here are 4 frequently asked questions by international marketers, answered:
● How do I start driving leads in international markets?
● What can I do to improve lead quality?
● What can I do to reduce cost-per-lead?
● How do I measure marketing success?
How do I start driving leads in international markets?
If you’re a new market entrant, it helps to ensure that you have sufficient reach and frequency in the market to warm up cold audiences. This can help improve the efficiency of your lead generation efforts.
Assess the reach of your marketing campaigns
Use the Forecasting Tool in LinkedIn Campaign Manager to understand estimated audience size based on your targeting criteria. The accompanying Segment Breakdown further analyses your audience by professional attributes so you exactly know who you’re able to reach. Learn how to drive leads on LinkedIn with this guide.
This is how ASE Group did it:
● Challenge: To increase brand familiarity and favourability with global audiences
● Solution: Launched an always-on, content-led campaign to engage audiences and showcase thought leadership
● Result: 2X higher engagement rate vs industry benchmarks
Assess the frequency of your audience engagement
Research suggests that it takes 6 to 8 marketing touches to generate a sales lead, which is why ad frequency matters. In addition to looking at how frequently you’re advertising on LinkedIn, you can also activate LinkedIn Audience Network to reach the same audiences when they visit trusted third-party apps and sites.
This is how Expensya did it:
● Challenge: To drive high-quality leads in new markets like Spain and Germany
● Solution: Had 4-5 creatives in rotation to optimise ad frequency for better brand recall and performance while preventing ad fatigue
● Result: 4X higher lead generation volume
Build on known engagement
Retargeting audiences who have interacted with your content is one of the most effective ways to drive conversions.
Here’s how you can do it on LinkedIn:
Unlock website demographics with LinkedIn Insight Tag
Start by understanding the demographic profile of your website visitors when you install the free LinkedIn Insight Tag on your website. This small snippet of code reveals who has been spending time on each page of your website. If these audiences fit your international audience profile, you can build a custom audience segment in LinkedIn Campaign Manager to retarget them.
Learn more about Website Demographics.
Validate your targeting with Campaign Demographics
Once you start running campaigns, your Campaign Manager dashboard will provide a demographic breakdown of audiences who have engaged with your ads, by location, job function, company name and more. You can use this information to understand the traction you’ve gained, which audience segments are primed for retargeting.
Learn more about Campaign Demographics.
What can I do to improve lead quality?
If you’re driving a good number of leads but the leads do not fit your customer profile, it may be worth reviewing your targeting strategy. In other cases, the lead profile may be correct, but they are not ready to be converted. Here’s what you can do:
1. Exclude, don’t just include
If your lead profile is not consistent with your target audience, consider refining your targeting. On LinkedIn, you can exclude audience attributes to make sure your ad dollars are being spent on the right audience.
2. Replicate your ideal customer profile
Using LinkedIn’s Matched Audiences feature, you can upload a list of current customers and find audiences with similar attributes using the Lookalike Audiences feature.
3. Review your nurture programme
If you are generating leads from the right buyer profile but they are not converting, the issue could be sales readiness. This often means that they require more nurturing. Sharing un-gated content at this point can help.
This is how SAS did it:
● Challenge: To enhance lead quality and pipeline revenue in Southeast Asia
● Solution: Adopted a full-funnel approach, first building awareness with engaging content, then using Sponsored Messaging to drive leads among key decision makers
● Result: $2.54M in sales pipeline generated, 2035% ROI
What can I do to reduce cost-per-lead?
Cost-per-lead (CPL) only assesses how much it costs to get your audience to share their contact information with you; it doesn’t capture the quality of the lead or measure the long-term value that lead will translate into. However, if CPL is an important metric for you, here’s what you can consider:
Take a closer look at your targeting criteria
Are you targeting too narrowly? Think beyond just top cities when you’re trying to unlock opportunities in new markets. In the US, for example, over 80% of LinkedIn members are located outside the top 10 cities. Consider targeting by country, rather than cities, in this case. Use the Forecasting panel in Campaign Manager to see how much your audience size increases when you update to country vs. city
This is how Circle In did it:
● Challenge: To build brand awareness and drive sales leads for its global solution
● Solution: Targeted broadly and reached a large audience before initiating conversation with audiences that showed greater intent
● Result: 42% lower cost-per-lead quarter-on-quarter
Ensure that you’re reaching the full buying committee
Research tells us that an average of 6.8 people are involved in a B2B buying decision. Consider expanding your reach beyond decision-makers to engage other relevant personas who could influence the purchase decision. One way to do this is to target by seniority instead of job title to reach future decision makers/influencers.
This is how Refinitiv did it:
● Challenge: To reach quality audiences for better sales conversion
● Solution: Ran an account-based marketing (ABM) programme on LinkedIn, using Matched Audiences to nurture key stakeholders at their target companies
● Result: 34% higher CTR with ABM, 38% higher CTR with Matched Audiences
How do I measure marketing success?
Even if lead generation is your ultimate objective, tracking performance metrics across the entire marketing funnel can be helpful. Understanding how well your brand awareness and consideration campaigns are doing can shed light onto your lead generation performance.
Top funnel: Brand awareness
Marketing objective
Grow brand awareness
Improve brand sentiment
Own thought leadership & brand consideration
Commonly used metric
Impressions
Video views
CPM/CPV
Reach
Social engagements
(likes/shares/comments)
Clicks
Video views
Number of posts
Number of followers
Additional recommended metrics
Share of voice
Brand lift
Brand sentiment
Topic ownership
Engagement
Mid funnel: Consideration
Marketing objective
Drive website visits
Commonly used metric
Number of website visits
Conversions on site
Additional recommended metrics
Time spent on page/bounce rate
Whitepaper downloads
Event enrollment
Bottom funnel: Conversion
Marketing objective
Generate leads
Convert/retain customers
Commonly used metric
Number of leads
Cost per conversion/lead
Conversion rate
Cost per conversion/lead
Additional recommended metrics
Number of quality leads (MQL, SQL)
LTV: CAC Ratio
(lifetime value: customer acquisition cost)
Churn %
Renewals
Customer lifetime value (LTV)
SAS made its presence felt in Southeast Asia and drove $2.54M in sales pipeline
To drive marketing impact in Southeast Asia, US-based analytics leader SAS launched a fully integrated digital campaign, using LinkedIn’s targeting capabilities to define and reach a diverse audience of IT decision makers and other buyer personas.
- Challenge: To enhance lead quality and pipeline revenue in Southeast Asia
- Solution: Adopted a full-funnel approach, first building awareness with engaging content, then using Sponsored Messaging to drive leads among key decision makers
- Result: $2.54M in sales pipeline generated, 2035% ROI
Build your brand in the minds of international audiences now