Do you ever wake up at 4 in the morning eyes wide open, heart beating out of your chest in an ice-cold sweat?

With thoughts, is there enough cash to pay employees? Will revenues increase faster than my cash burn rate? Can I service my dept and repay the loans to get my dream off the ground?
Any way you slice your ‘pie of concern’ the opportunities facing CEOs are tangible, visceral, palpable, and real.

Yet, no concern is more critical than a constant stream of leads, revenue, and cash.

So how does a startup grow and get cash?

Case study strategy how a local B2B startup business generated 100s of leads a month for 5 months.

“Three Ways to Grow any Business”

Jay Abraham says there are only three ways to grow any business.

1. Increase the number of clients
2. Increase the average transaction value of each purchase
3. Increase the frequency of repurchase

Jay Abraham is an extraordinary marketing authority. Jay has helped his clients increase revenues by billions! Meaning we can trust his strategies. Three choices. And a start-up has only one choice.

A startup has one option to Grow – Increase the Number of Clients!

Get more clients. There exist fourteen tried and trusted lead generation methods. These fourteen are slow and steady, medium speed or fast and immediate results.

• Referral systems
• Acquiring clients at break-even upfront and making a profit on the back end
• Guaranteeing purchases through risk reversal
• Host-beneficiary relationships
• Advertising
• Using direct mail
• Using telemarketing
• Running special events or information nights
• Acquiring qualified lists
• Develop a Unique Selling Proposition
• Increasing the perceived value of your product/service through better client education
• Using public relations
• Using public relations
• Influencer marketing
• Content marketing

Yes, the fastest way to generate leads is to pay.

The business plan for this particular client stipulated aggressive growth. The brief was ‘simple’ – get high quality leads from small and medium businesses niche.

Case Study: The Results

From November 2018 until June 2019 we generated 585 leads at an average CPA of €13.41.

The 585 total was 3 leads a day, averaged over the six months.

These leads are for a product at the €1000+ price point. Further, the product is on a sliding scale based on yearly revenue. This client did not supplement revenues with a low priced front end or back-end offer.

Admittedly, leads for €13.41 are not the lowest cost nor the cheapest. The overall business goal was quality, not quantity leads. The business goal was high-quality cash in hand leads not “any lead that would give an email address“. The range of CPA was between €1.5 to €59.60.

Lower-priced leads are always available. On every platform and every channel.

The Ideal Client

The ideal client was business owners, founders, and CEOs of SMEs, with 5-20+ employees, and €500K+ yearly revenue.

These 585 high end leads contributed to my client’s revenues increase in the range of €267K – €335K for the 5 months.

The Start-Up Business Strategy

Doing the right thing is more important than doing the thing right. The marketer must deliver the right message to the right prospect at the right time – or it is no longer the right message.

Flint McGlaughlin, Founder and Managing Director, MECLABS

Because startups have only one option the acquisition strategy was simple: get clients!

Assets Available

“What do you have we can use to attract and get leads?”

This brand is new and has minimal recognition in the market. The client has a website, a smallish email list <1.5K, and a Facebook Page with about 1.5K page likes.
We did not use ‘funnels’ designed on a fancy specialist funnel designing software. The sales, registration, and thank you pages were built on a WordPress website.

First Steps

The first, was to get an answer to the base questions a) what is the offer? b) is there a product-market fit?, c) are there competing products (which is good, because then there are buyers)? d) is the product proven

The second step is creating and refining the ideal client avatar.

We used the Targeting Trifecta System™ to find targeting opportunities. This exercise resulted in a large list of interests. An interesting result is one interest produced 70% of all results.

The Base Marketing Funnel

The base funnel was simple – advert > Sales page > registration page > TY page.

But, three parts of the puzzle were missing at the start:

• A thank you page – the page people land upon after submitting their contact details
• Conversions pixels – installed on the sales, email, and TY page
• Retargeting audience – see below

Case Study ‘Money Talks’

The business that can spend the most to acquire a customer wins. – Dan Kennedy

The initial strategy conversation was about the numbers. The lifetime value and the average order value. After running the number we decided upon a target CPA of €15-17 with an upper CPA of €20.

Mind CPC is not the same as CPA. Customer Acquisition Cost is the cost to acquire a paying client. Whilst – Cost Per Acquisition is the cost to acquire a non-paying client.

A lead, one name and email is a non-paying user. E.g. a non-paying user is a 1-month free subscription to Netflix. Or a free user of Dropbox, or a user of LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, or Google.

Recall, if CPC is higher than Customer Lifetime Value your business cannot succeed (in the long haul). Because you are spending more to acquire clients than the revenue you will earn over the lifetime of them being a client – CPC > LTV

AOV is the average order value. LTV is the lifetime value and is the total revenue during the entire time one client stays your client.

Retargeting Audiences – Present offers to Brand Aware People

Interesting is the ability to retarget adverts to people. Retargeting is not exclusive to Facebook. Retargeting is possible with Google, Twitter, LinkedIn and others.

The retargeting options are to reengage the people who landed on the sales/offer page. Landed on the registration page but did not register.

The retargeting options were to reengage the people who landed on the sales/offer page. Reengage people who landed on the registration page but did not register.

We created five retargeting website custom audiences, WCA.

Two audiences for each of the sales, registration pages, 5 and 10 days, and one for the thank you pages, 90 day.

We also retargeted by the time last visited and time spent on pages.

Second, to recover some of the money spent bringing people to the website in the first instance.

Third, a reminder to a website visitor is the right action for a business owner to take.

‘‘hey, you saw the offer, can I entice you to take my offer?‘?‘

Three Webpages Function as One.

Adverts drive people to the (1) sale/offer page. If interested they click through to (2) the registration page and register. When they register and get redirected to (3) the thank you page.

For example, during calendar week 4, 2019, we generated 46 leads, from 162 visitors to the registration page, and 575 people landing on the sales/offer page.

The 46 to 575 ratio is a 7.9% conversion rate for cold traffic!

We used four retargeting campaigns. Two for each of the two time periods, and two for each of the Sales/offer and Registration pages. The time periods were 1-5 and 6-10 days after landing on either page.

Four different adverts because the intent of each page visitor is different. The intent of people on the two pages is different.

Hence different variants of a polite reminder: ‘hey did you forget to register?‘

Using retargeting is proper practice. Showing adverts to people who registered demonstrates a lack of basic advertising etiquette. Besides bad customer service, bad form, and a waste of money.

As a ‘solve’ we subtracted the audience of people who landed on the thank you page from the retargeting audiences.

Audiences Used

Retargeting– see the explanation above.

Interests – using the Targeting Trifecta method, we generated a couple of dozen of gurus the ideal client followed. Dozens of websites they visited, and many websites where they shopped.
These three lists formed the basis of our ‘cold audiences’ targeting.

LAL – Look-a-like audiences. We used three main groups of lookalike audiences. 1- LAL of people who landed on the thank you page. 2- LAL of people who landed on the registration page, 3 – LAL of people who landed on the sales page.

Look-a-like audiences size depends on the total Facebook users in the country targeted. This client operates in a country with a total of 2.2 million Facebook users. Meaning a 1% LAL audience size is 37K people. And the 2-3% LAL is 88K people.

When using conversions campaigns larger audiences are better than smaller audiences.
With ‘small’ audiences, the total number of conversions possible, is limited, at the price we were willing to pay.

We did use these audiences, and like a hawk, we monitored daily the relevant metrics for increases in CPA.

Email – We uploaded a 1.5K email and matched 60% of them with Facebook ID. These were directly targeted (yes) and again we created 1, 2, 3% LAL audiences.

Results

“All action has risks, prudence is not avoiding danger (it is impossible), but calculating risk and acting decisively. Make mistakes of ambition and not mistakes of sloth. Develop the strength to do bold things, not the strength to suffer.” — Niccolò Machiavelli

We earned 585 leads with names, business names, websites, and emails addresses. 487 arrived through the website and 98 leads came from the Facebook Lead Advert format.

One interest, ‘who the avatar follows’ produced 70% of all leads. Not surprisingly, this is one of the largest audiences available. We also tested other interests including many name brand business ‘gurus’.

Creatives

We used static images, videos, carousel and Giff formats.

Images examples are below. Note the ‘Social Proof’.

Image A	Image B	Image C

Image A, and B are the superstar creatives. Together they produced 264 leads! Which is 46% of all leads! Yep, one creative. B is a copy of A.

Image C is one of three different creatives used in the Facebook Lead Ad creatives. This one creative earned 59 of the 98 lead form ads, which is 60%.

The photo in adverts A and B is a professional photo of people in business appropriate attire.

The images did not include any dogs, cats, three-eyed fish, or ‘suggestive’ imagery.

One reason advertisements A and B were successful is the high number of shares and comments.

The social proof whilst great, did not, in any way, classify as viral. Yet, the variants with a high number of shares and comments converted at a higher rate than adverts with low comments and shares.

Social proof is a positive signal to Facebook. They signal that the advert is resonating with the audience.

Positive signals reduce CPMs and CTRs. CPC drops distribution increases and importantly CPAs drop.

Carousals and GIFF

Carousal 1	Carousal 2	GIFF

We tested many carousel adverts and GIFFs. Both advert formats generated leads but, were not spectacular performers.

Video

Facebook loves video. We used multiple videos.

The format of the videos was interviewing. With one person talking to the camera and discussing experiences and benefits of using the product (service).

The video and audio production quality were professional. All the videos had intro and outro bumpers.

The CTA drove people to the sales/offer page. We did not test captions nor did we test other common video styles, lengths or formats.

The length of the videos was 2-4 minutes. The video was for branding, building video views custom audiences and direct registrations.

Video CPM was in the range of €2-3 and the cost per 3 and 10-second views of €<0.01, and €<0.03. Through play cost was €0.03. These video numbers range from average to high side. As the videos have very few comments and low share numbers.

We segmented the video view custom audiences by percentage watch time. The 50% or greater audience was then used in retargeting adverts. We also created look-a-like audiences from the 50, 75, and 90% video watch time. And injected them back into the top of our funnel as cold audiences.

All the videos produced an average number of video views and registration.

Eat, Sleep, Optimise and Test Everything

As an experienced marketer, I have a very good handle on which leaver to pull at the right time for the greatest benefit.

Every audience is different and different as time marches. Great marketers start at a point, do the ‘work’, watch progress, wash and rinse out the poor performing parts, and test more.