The Perpetual Leads Engine

Core to the concept is deep audience segmentation and subsequently, behavioural targeting. This may sound simple, but too often we have seen overly simplistic targeting, splitting audiences into, perhaps, two age brackets and applying broad “interest” targeting. Our methodology seeks to create a larger number of distinct audience segments, reducing audience overlap and drastically lowering our cost per acquisition.

Our methodology seeks to build creative messaging around people behaviours, as opposed to our poorly framed opinions, targeting potential students on a one-to-one bases, as opposed to one message delivered to many.

Step 1 – Understand your objective and establish key metrics for success

Measuring success is critical and should be driven by a tangible metric. The obvious measure of success is the volume of leads coming through, but in parallel we should also be measuring the conversion of those leads to actual enrolments across courses to give a true cost of acquisition.

Step 2 – Use all available data to create rich and distinct audience segments

Universities are a great subject for lead generation via Facebook due to the rich audience data they are likely to have on hand. We have access to student emails, mobile phone numbers, location and course enrolments, all of which allows us to create a digital fingerprint of key audience matches for specific subjects we are targeting.

Beyond this, we then seek to mine additional data for further relational insights. For example, we can review the last two years of enrolment data to isolate complimentary subject matter. ( e.g. students interested in aged care may also be interested in child care or people interested in studying film may also be interested in design theory).

Step 3 – Build Custom Audiences and look-a-likes on Facebook

Simply put, Facebook allows us to target users by y demographics and psychographics. When this data is complimented with richer segmentation provided by other data sources, we can drive far more effective and targeted communications.

Within Facebook’s business manager, you are able to upload a custom database and then align custom audiences within the platform to your highly segmented list. From here, you can start to apply highly targeted test-and-learn messaging to each segment, including cross-selling new courses to existing students who may be interested in related courses.

Facebook then allows us create look-a-like audiences to our custom segments, building a larger audience pool based on the behaviours of your original custom list. This is a powerful means of improving the relevancy of your ads, resulting in far greater performance of your creative.

Step 4 – Create Contextual Creative

Creating contextually-relevant ads matched to our custom segments is critical in developing high performing creative executions. Beyond this, look to use other elements like statistics, implied scarcity and declarations of popularity in your ad copy to drive interest and click-through.

Building a minimum of lead generation ads per adset will generate more data for you to analyse and optimise towards over the course of your campaign.

Step 5 – Optimise, Optimise, Optimise!

The reason we call this methodology the Perpetual Leads Engine is because it’s always changing via optimisation. It is not a set-and-forget approach and requires constant attention and adjustment to leverage percentage learnings and incrementally improve performance over time.

Let your ads run for at least a week before you start making optimisation decisions. One of the biggest mistakes businesses can make is to begin altering ads before there is enough reach and performance data to justify doing so.

Create a weekly snapshot report and look for data behaviour to influence your next campaign, user ad messaging and images that are performing better, look for users who are on operating systems that may be performing better, and the placements your ads are performing well in.

If implemented properly, these steps can help incrementally improve your lead generation efforts, resulting in a more efficient Cost Per Acquisition (CPA) of the campaign.

The Perpetual Leads Engine approach has achieved great results. Prior to its implementation, our key University client had CPAs ranging from $15-40 depending on the course. Post implementation this has fallen to $4.80 – $13.40, a reduction of around 67%, resulting in far greater reach and results for their media budgets.

Find out more about leveraging the power of Social Media Marketing for your business.