How Can Programmatic Advertising Boost Leads to My Sales Team?

How can programmatic advertising boost leads to my sales team?

Programmatic ads can drive more SQLs for your business when you follow these steps:

1. Hone your audience with first-party data
2. Tailor your ad creative to your audience
3. Optimize the conversion path on your landing pages
4. Implement pipeline-driven measurement
5. Streamline the handoff to the sales team

Programmatic advertising is one of the most popular channels businesses use to promote themselves online. That’s because programmatic ads are known for driving sales-qualified leads (SQLs).

But maybe you’re not seeing a lot of SQLs come from your own programmatic campaigns. In that case, you may be asking, “how can programmatic advertising boost leads to my sales team?”

We’ve got the answers for you on this page — check them out below!

How can programmatic advertising boost leads to my sales team?

The short answer is that programmatic advertising boosts sales leads by systematically targeting, engaging, and converting high-intent prospects into SQLs.

But it’s more complicated than that. For programmatic to drive those results, you need to have a solid advertising strategy in place. If you’re targeting the wrong audience, sending the wrong message, or failing to optimize your ads over time, you won’t see the increase in SQLs that you’re looking for.

That’s why we’ll spend the rest of this page looking at exactly how you can build a strong strategy that will allow you to more effectively drive leads with programmatic advertising. 

Your 5-step guide to using programmatic ads to generate SQLs

If you want a solid programmatic strategy, there are several steps it’s crucial to follow. Those steps are as follows:

1. Hone your audience with first-party data
2. Tailor your ad creative to your audience
3. Optimize the conversion path on your landing pages
4. Implement pipeline-driven measurement
5. Streamline the handoff to the sales team

Let’s walk through each of those individually.

1. Hone your audience with first-party data

Before you do anything else, you first have to establish your target audience. And the best way to do that is by leveraging first-party data.

Through your website and marketing, you likely have access to an abundance of first-party data, so you should take advantage of it. You can make use of data like:

• Website visitors
• CRM lists
• Email subscribers
• Customer match audiences

Using this data, you can more effectively hone your audience targeting. That’s important because if your targeting is too broad, you’ll end up reaching a lot of low-intent users, resulting in wasted time and ad spend. But when your advertising is fine-tuned to reach only the most high-intent audience, you’ll see a much higher percentage of that audience turn into programmatic advertising leads.

Even retargeting everyone who visits your website is still likely too broad, since not every site visitor is a high-intent prospect. A smarter tactic would be to focus specifically on users who visited your pricing or service pages, not just your homepage.

Ultimately, the best approach is to layer different types of data to really narrow down your audience. For example, if someone has visited a pricing page on your website and signed up for your emails, there’s a high chance they’ll become a lead.

2. Tailor your ad creative to your audience

Once you’ve identified your target audience, you also need to make sure your ad creative is built around that audience. That means optimizing not only for the specific demographics and locations you’re targeting, but also for the stage of the funnel they’re currently in.

The idea here is to move beyond generic brand ads and personalize your messaging by audience segment. For example, you could use your programmatic ads to promote content like:

• Reports and guides for top-of-funnel (TOFU) audiences
• Webinars and calculators for middle-of-funnel (MOFU) audiences
• Demos and trials for bottom-of-funnel (BOFU) audiences

You should also make sure that your ads feature different offers for prospecting vs. retargeting.

3. Optimize the conversion path on your landing pages

No amount of audience targeting or ad creative will help you if your landing pages aren’t well-optimized. The landing page is the final step between the click and the conversion, and it has to make the path between those two points as frictionless as possible.

One way to make sure that’s the case is to prioritize message matching — that is, to ensure the messaging on the landing page is in line with the ad creative. Your landing pages should also feature:

• Clear value propositions
• Social proof (e.g., review snippets)
• Simple forms (not too long)

Finally, make sure each landing page is built around a single, compelling call to action (CTA). If you have multiple CTAs, or if it’s not clear what your CTA is, users will get confused and leave without converting.

4. Implement pipeline-driven measurement

Another important step to drive leads with programmatic advertising is to measure your results. Without this step, you’ll have no way of knowing how your campaigns are performing or what you can do to improve them. That means you need to track key performance indicators (KPIs) as your campaigns progress.

First of all, it’s important to understand which metrics to focus on. Metrics like click-through rate (CTR) and cost per mille (CPM) can be informative, but for programmatic, they commonly qualify as vanity metrics. Better KPIs to focus on include:

• Conversion rate
• Cost per lead (CPL)
• Cost per SQL
• Return on ad spend (ROAS)

Secondly, you need to ensure that you have a smooth data analytics setup. Your ad network will likely allow you to track your ad performance data, but it’s advantageous to migrate that data to another platform — like a customer relationship management (CRM) platform — for better centralization and analysis.

Based on your findings, you can get a sense for what’s working and what isn’t, allowing you to reoptimize your campaigns to drive more programmatic advertising leads.

5. Streamline the handoff to the sales team

The final step of the process is to finally hand your programmatic SQLs off to the sales team. But to do that, you first need to identify which leads are sales-qualified and which SQLs to prioritize. That requires you to have a lead scoring strategy in place.

For your lead scoring to be truly effective, though, it’s important to focus on the sales team outcome. That means incorporating programmatic signals into your lead scoring model to ensure that you’re forwarding only the most relevant leads to your sales team. For example, you might add points to a lead if they view a BOFU video ad, since that indicates a higher likelihood of conversion. 

When you send leads over to your sales team, be sure to provide sales follow-up service level agreements (SLAs) that define information like:

• How quickly a lead should be contacted
• How many contact attempts should be made
• How to prioritize the most qualified leads

All of this ensures that your sales team can follow up with only the most high-intent SQLs in record time, resulting in a far higher percentage of leads becoming customers or clients.

WebFX is the perfect partner to help you drive leads with programmatic advertising

The information on this page should give you a good starting point for your programmatic campaigns. But there are always more ways to optimize your campaigns and drive more programmatic advertising leads, and sometimes, it’s best to partner with a professional agency like WebFX.

If you want to partner with us for our programmatic advertising services — and therefore take advantage of our 30 years of advertising experience — just give us a call at 888-601-5359 or contact us online today!