7 steps for launching effective lead generation ads

For growing small business owners, lead generation is a powerful—and necessary—tool. It allows businesses to acquire new leads, which can then be converted into paying customers. As a small business owner, your time and budget are limited, so you’ll want to invest time, money, and resources into the lead generation ads and strategies that are most likely to lead to sales.

Lead generation ads target consumers at the top of the sales funnel. In other words, those who have likely never interacted with your business. Keep reading for lead generation ad examples, tips, and must-have resources for launching your campaign.

What is lead generation?

Before we dive into lead generation ads, we must first understand lead generation.

Lead generation is the process of uncovering new potential customers, or leads. These leads are relatively unfamiliar with your business and therefore positioned at the top of the sales funnel. To move leads down the sales funnel and closer to making a purchase, you’ll conduct a variety of marketing initiatives.

The kind of initiatives you pursue will depend on your business, niche, competitive edge, and target audience. According to sales experts, it takes an average of eight touch points to make a sale. Meaning, you—or your marketing team—can combine different strategies to push leads across the finish line. For example, after a potential customer is introduced to your company, you might try:

• Launching an email marketing campaign: If you own a local boutique for toddler or baby clothes, you might send an eblast of upcoming seasonal must-haves or send an email for 10% off a customer’s first purchase.
• Publishing a new blog post: If you own a local car wash, consider authoring a go-to guide on knowing when your vehicle is due for maintenance. By writing high-quality content, you position yourself as an expert in the space.
• Revamping your word-of-mouth marketing strategy: New leads are more likely to make a purchase at the recommendation of a friend. If you own a local bakery, consider launching a BOGO sale—offering a free or discounted treat if a repeat customer brings a friend to your establishment.

What are lead generation ads?

Lead generation comes in many forms and can be paid or unpaid. Unpaid, or organic, lead generation strategies include email marketing, social media marketing, and content marketing—where the only cost includes your business overhead.

Paid lead generation strategies, or lead generation ads, involve paying another business to promote your products or services. Like organic marketing, paid advertising comes in many forms, including:

• Search engine advertising: Advertisements on search engines are often referred to as pay-per-click (PPC) ads. Your business is charged when a web visitor clicks on your advertisement.
• Social media advertising: A social media ad campaign promotes your social media profile, website, or product catalog to potential followers.
• Display advertising: Display ads promote your company on other websites. When site visitors click on your ad on a partner website, they’ll be brought to your site.

What’s the difference between lead generation ads and traditional advertising?

Lead generation ads are a type of advertising, but not all traditional ads are lead generation ads.

As the name suggests, lead generation ads exist solely to attract new prospects—those previously unaware of your business. For example, promoting your Instagram post to existing followers is not lead generation advertising, as your followers already exist in your sales funnel (and some might be existing buyers). However, a paid social media campaign exclusively targeting those who have never followed, viewed, or engaged with your content is a lead generation ad campaign.

The goal of a lead generation ad is simply to collect new prospects’ data so you can nurture them over time. In comparison, your general advertising strategy may look a bit different. For example, rather than immediately pushing prospects to make a purchase, consider guiding them to a top-performing blog post, client testimonials, or your portfolio of recent work.

When should you leverage lead generation ads?

Lead generation ads are a powerful tool when you’re looking to grow your business, attract new buyers, or tap into a new market. If you’re wondering whether lead generation campaigns might benefit your business, consider the following scenarios:

• You’re a new business: If you just opened a new business, such as a bookstore, you won’t have repeat buyers yet. A lead generation campaign can help build brand awareness among locals, helping to capture new leads instead of relying on prospects to walk by your storefront by chance.
• You want to target a new audience: Imagine you own a landscaping service and you’ve built a loyal clientele of single-family home owners. However, you believe you could expand by targeting the B2B market, serving golf courses, resorts, or restaurants. A lead generation campaign could display your portfolio of work to corporate businesses, helping you tap into the market.
• You aim to expand your product or service offering: A cosmetologist who built a successful client list doing hair and makeup and expanded their salon’s staff and services to include massages, manicures, and facials could implement a lead generation strategy to help attract new leads searching for those recently added services.

7 best practices for creating effective lead generation ads

Follow this step-by-step guide with practical tips on how to create an effective lead generation ad campaign for your growing business.

1. Determine how you’ll measure success

Most forms of advertising—particularly digital advertising—come with built-in metrics, allowing you to easily measure engagement. That said, a “conversion” (i.e., the desired action you want prospects to take) for a lead generation campaign might not be an online purchase. Because new leads exist at the top of the sales funnel, you might measure success in:

• Clicks: If brand awareness is the goal, a potential lead clicking through your ad to your website might be a success.
• Sign-ups: If a new lead signs up for text alerts, follows you on social media, or signs up for your email list, you could consider this a win. Over time, you can send leads targeted, high-quality content, transforming the new prospect into a qualified lead—or one that’s ready to make their first purchase.
• Downloads: The overarching goal of a lead generation campaign is to capture new prospects to move them down the sales funnel. Therefore, if new leads download e-books, worksheets, or other freebies, your campaign is likely on the right track.

2. Understand where leads ‘hang out’ online

When designing your lead generation campaign, one of the first decisions you’ll make is where to purchase ad placements.

To get the highest return on investment (ROI), you’ll want to choose a platform where potential leads spend their time. For example, if you run a B2B business, you might experiment with LinkedIn ads, and if you’re a growing business looking to make a footprint within the local community, you might consider Yelp Ads.

Yelp Ads are a powerful lead generation tool allowing your business to:

• Target customers searching for the products or services you offer: With Yelp Ads, your local business is displayed in key places on Yelp.com and the Yelp mobile app, such as above or below relevant search results in the “Sponsored Results” sections and on your competitors’ pages. For example, if you own a local car wash, your company will be displayed prominently to consumers searching for trusted car washes in the area.
• Refine your ideal customer niche: Yelp Ads allows you to home in on your target audience by location or keyword. This could result in a higher ROI by targeting high-intent users ready to make a purchase.
• Track performance using key metrics: The Yelp Ads dashboard displays key performance metrics in real time, allowing you to fine-tune your campaign for the best results.

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3. Design and write compelling ad creatives

With digital advertising, you have only moments to make an impression, so every graphic and line of ad copy counts. Here are a few tips:

• Stick to on-brand graphics: Keep your designs on-brand, using the same imagery, color palettes, and typography so new leads can easily recognize your content.
• Pack a punch with your copy: Try to get your point across in two sentences or less, and avoid long paragraphs that will cause readers’ eyes to glaze over.
• Be clear about your call to action (CTA): Leads don’t want to feel as though they’ve been fooled. Tell visitors exactly where you’ll send them before they click. For example, if you own a hardware store, don’t offer a free guide to DIY paint projects, then send them to a product page to purchase a gallon of paint on your ecommerce site.

4. Leverage lead forms and landing pages

Clicking a digital ad is a single step within a larger journey—one that carries a lead throughout the sales cycle. To transform new leads into prospects, you’ll want that journey to be as seamless as possible. Consider the following tips:

• Design a landing page specific to your ad: While your ad will contain a mere two lines of copy, a landing page provides abundant space to convey your message in more detail. To create a positive user experience, design your landing page specifically for ad viewers. That way, those who clicked through won’t feel as though they were duped into viewing a random web page, blog post, or product page.
• Segment your landing pages: If your chosen digital advertising platform allows you to display different ads to different segments, you should do the same with your landing pages. For example, if you own a local catering business and create two ad sets (one targeting corporations looking for in-office catering and the other looking for personal or in-home catering) consider designing two landing pages that focus on each respective service.
• Keep your lead forms simple: Marketing experts agree that the more fields allotted to a web form, the less likely it is a visitor will fill it out. Keep any lead forms as minimal as possible. (Pro tip: Skip the “How did you hear about us?” question. You already know where new leads came from: your web form.)

5. Target the audience segment right for you

Business owners are often tempted to target the masses rather than zero in on a niche audience. However, oftentimes, and especially when it comes to advertising, it’s more effective to speak to a smaller audience who’s already interested in what you have to offer.

Consumers are bombarded with numerous advertisements per day. If a potential lead stumbles across an advertisement that’s not applicable to their specific wants or needs, they’ll keep browsing—thereby reducing conversion rates and draining your budget. To ensure you’re targeting quality leads, try the following:

• Create a target customer persona: Have your marketing or sales teams build an outline of your ideal customer. Create an exhaustive list of key demographics, including geographic location, age, relationship status, income bracket, and other factors.
• Experiment with retargeting: As mentioned earlier, it takes multiple touch points to make a sale. Advertising retargeting is an effective lead gen strategy where your ads are continuously displayed to those who previously engaged with your campaign, thereby increasing the chances of a conversion.
• Utilize lookalike audiences: A lookalike audience is one that mimics characteristics of existing customers. Lookalike audiences are a popular tool used by many digital ad platforms (like Facebook advertising via Facebook Pixel), where your ads are displayed to consumers most likely to engage with your content.

6. Run A/B tests to optimize performance

Like any business initiative, refining your lead generation advertising strategy takes time and patience. By taking advantage of tools at your disposal—like A/B testing—you can quickly achieve your campaign objectives. A/B tests can be built on a number of factors, including:

• Your target demographics: Create two customer personas, and run the same ad campaign targeting both groups. In the future, run a second campaign targeting the segment that showed the highest engagement rates.
• Your ad copy or graphics: Digital ads contain minimal copy and imagery, making it difficult to nail down the perfect message. Run two ads targeting the same target audience and investigate which design leads to the highest conversion.
• The device: Many digital ad platforms allow you to run advertisements on desktop, mobile devices, or both. Run carbon copy campaigns on both devices, seeing which ad formats bring the highest engagement.
• Your lead forms: As stated earlier, minimal lead forms historically bring the highest engagement rates. If your digital ads receive a high number of clicks, but site visitors won’t fill out an instant form, consider reducing the number of fields. Or try collecting different lead information, like asking for an email address instead of a phone number.

7. Nurture leads through automated workflows

Lead gen ads target consumers relatively unaware of your company. Therefore, you’ll need to continuously engage new leads to convert them into first-time customers.

Digital marketing automation drives engagement, boosts conversion rates, and preserves internal bandwidth. After a new lead clicks your initial ad, consider the following workflow:

• Guide them to a targeted landing page: The new lead should arrive on a landing page designated for your specific ad campaign. There, the lead fills out an online form so you can save their contact information in your CRM system.
• Launch an email campaign: With their email captured, design a three-part email series positioning yourself as a trusted thought leader in your industry. Use strong CTAs guiding the reader to an educational webinar, downloadable freebies, or even third-party reading. Strong educational marketing helps build loyal, engaged audiences.
• Follow up with a retargeting campaign: Once a lead has been nurtured by your email campaign, consider conducting a retargeting ad campaign. Unlike a lead gen ad, this ad targets those at the bottom of the sales funnel poised to make a purchase.
• Email a first-time buyer discount: To push leads across the finish line, email them a coupon or promo code for a first-time buyer discount. Rather than link to your broader ecommerce site, link to specific products or services the lead has expressed interest in.

Launch your lead generation ad campaign

Lead generation ads help companies raise brand awareness, target new potential customers, and promote new product lines. In essence, lead generation campaigns build a large pool of potential buyers that will (hopefully) one day make a first-time purchase.

If you’re aiming to launch a digital lead generation ad campaign, define your target consumer, find out where leads spend their time online, and determine how you’ll calculate success. From there, you’ll design compelling graphics, experiment with A/B tests, build targeted landing pages, and ultimately drive leads down the sales funnel through automated campaigns.

For more ideas on launching your lead gen campaign, check out these 15 online advertising examples.