A Guide to Lead Generation through Advertising

For service-based businesses, leads are crucial for survival. As the demand for different services are increasing, so are the practices of lead generation through various digital and traditional mediums. Of both mediums, digital mediums are more preferred because they are still very cheap as compared to traditional marketing and Advertising.

However, a debate can also be made based on conversion rate of digital leads versus conversion rate of leads through traditional advertising. Surveys have shown that leads generated through traditional marketing, although costlier, have a better chance of conversion as compared to digital mediums.

This guide will tell you about all the ways you can generate leads harnessing both the traditional and digital mediums in today’s era.

Medium 1: Traditional Advertising

There is a saying: Old is gold. This is true for traditional advertising, because it is is still trustworthy mode of generating leads for many companies. Although there is a marked shift towards digital, traditional advertising has managed to keep its hold on lead generation for quite some time now.

Medium 2: Google ads

Google ads alone drive above 80% of the revenue for Google as a company. Google ads enjoy the trust of the audience, and the leads quality generated from Google ads is very high. People who fill up their form to contact businesses are genuinely interested, and salesman of the businesses need less effort to convert them into customers.

In addition to it, google ads offers a lot of ad variations, like search ads, in the form of paid listings which show up in search results, display ads: which present themselves in margins of websites of Google partners, video ads on YouTube and other websites, map listings ad on Google maps, Shopping Ads for product sales of E-commerce websites and others. It is one of the most trusted platforms for lead generation in digital advertising.

Medium 3: Facebook advertising

For b2c businesses, Facebook offers lead generation ad specifically useful in generating leads for different kinds of businesses. The benefit of Facebook leads is that they are very cheap. And apart from that, the Facebook algorithm automatically optimizes the ads to reduce the costs of running the ad.

Medium 4: LinkedIn advertising

In contrast to Facebook leads, LinkedIn advertising offers b2B leads. The biggest benefit of LinkedIn advertising is that people on LinkedIn have business mind set and they do not shy away from making big commitments and usually big deals happen here. This means that there is a lot of possibility to get good clients on LinkedIn.

The downside: LinkedIn advertising is costly- over 5 times that of Facebook advertising. But for businesses ready to invest into the platform, LinkedIn ads offers very promising returns.

Medium 5: Quora advertising

Quora is a question-and-answer platform specifically built and popularized for knowledge sharing. It has a team of moderators that regularly check for plagiarized content and make sure that only genuine content is visible on the website.

Quora also offers an ad platform, although it is small in scale when compared to Google, Facebook and LinkedIn ads. There is an option of lead generation ad in Quora advertising. The lead quality of Quora is good and it offers a mix of both B2B and B2C leads. It is less popular as a lead generation tool, therefore the ads on the platform are dirt cheap and a business can get a good number of leads without spending a lot of money.

Medium 6: Snapchat Advertising

Snapchat is the youngest entrant in digital advertising. Very popular among the youngsters, it offers an exciting opportunity for businesses looking to target young audience for their products. It offers different types of ads ranging from Brand Awareness to Website traffic and Lead generation as well.

Advertising on Snapchat has a few key advantages. Firstly, like Quora, it is very cheap. Secondly, you can target international markets, again in very cheap rates, provided audience with the age group 18 to 24 falls in your target audience bracket.