013: Paid Search Lead Quality: PPC, UTM, CRM, and More with Brianna Deboever (Office Hours)

C: Podcast




Brianna Deboever discusses how marketing can be a great blending of worlds when it comes to being creatively and analytically minded. She and Danny chat about how important it is to track, understand, organize, and share lead quality rather than just quantity when optimizing paid campaigns. Finally, they review how CRMs and UTMs come in very handy to do just those things to bring about a successful, high-quality lead-generating campaign.

An Optidge “Office Hours” Episode

Our Office Hours episodes are your go-to for details, how-to’s, and advice on specific marketing topics. Whether it’s a discussion on how to approach a new trend or tool, guidance on choosing the right strategy, or our best tips to make your marketing campaigns shine, we’re here to help!

Join our fellow Optidge team members, and sometimes even 1:1 teachings from Danny himself, in these shorter, marketing-focused episodes every few weeks. Get ready to get marketing!

Key Points + Topics

  • [1:52] Brianna went to school for math, and after some direction from a mentor, she went down the actuarial path upon graduating. She discovered this was not the career for her as it lacked the social and creative elements she needed to thrive. So, she switched careers and took the Masters in Marketing program at the University of Houston, where she met Danny and became a part of the Optidge team. Her favorite thing about marketing is that she can be both analytical and very creative. She finds it very satisfying and fulfilling to help businesses succeed. 
  • [4:00] Today, we discuss lead quality. We have to start with a couple of definitions:
    • CRM: Customer Relationship Management
      • This is a system, program, or software that allows a company to organize and track a lead’s journey from first contact to eventually becoming a paying customer. When a lead comes into the sales funnel, they bring a lot of information – email, phone number, original point/medium of entry, service interest, and more. A CRM stores all that information in a way that’s useful to the company to capitalize on and (hopefully) sign on a new customer. 
    • UTM: Urchin Tracking Module
      • UTMs are a set of parameters that are appended to a URL. These parameters give information about where the anonymized user has come from, such as the source, like Google, Facebook, or Microsoft; the medium, like organic search, paid text ads, or social; and the campaign, when applicable, if you’ve given a campaign a specific name. When a user lands on your website, the UTM provides that data which is then brought into the site’s analytics. 
  • [7:35] How do PPC agencies usually optimize their campaigns? Typically, an agency works within a limited budget to generate as many leads as possible. Practically, you’re optimizing on the Cost-Per-Lead (CPL). But there’s another layer to things than just the quantity of leads. If you exclusively focus on the count, there’s a piece of the puzzle you don’t know – the viability and quality of those leads. In many cases, something that might be tracked as a lead, like initiating a chat, filling out a contact form, or making a phone call, could be spam bots or natural human error. If you don’t filter out those low-quality leads, Google will continue optimizing based on that flawed data and pushing your campaigns out to those low-quality conversions.
  • [11:19] There are better ways to get the information about lead quality into your campaigns. The simplest way is to set up distinct landing pages for different campaigns. This would allow you to filter out if someone visited the site from a paid text ad if that is the only way that page is accessible vs. an organic visit from an indexed landing page. However, you will have cases where a user will come through one medium initially but return later via a new medium and then convert. This is where UTM tracking comes in. No matter where a user comes into the website and how they convert, their info and the path they took is captured through their UTMs. You can know all the way down to the campaign ad ID and keyword and tie it all back to the customer. 
  • [14:17] It’s game-changing when we tie UTMs to leads in a CRM. You can organize the information, see which campaign a customer came in on, and then the customer can tell us if it was good or not. We can then use that information to tell us how many high-quality leads were brought in by a given campaign. That then informs our optimizations of campaigns, and we can focus on getting high-quality leads while maintaining a reasonable CPL.
    • [15:20] A UTM is like a map. Imagine you’re on a highway and don’t know which exit to take. The UTMs will tell you which path is best, so you don’t wind up going down a bumpy road. 
  • [16:08] Many businesses, especially those outside the e-Commerce realm, bring in leads via phone. How is this tracked? The way Optidge tracks phone calls is by using dynamic tracking phone numbers. An ad is assigned a specific phone number. That way, when a user calls that number, they’re then routed to the company, but their information is captured, and the call can even be recorded. Then we can review the conversation, the focus, the quality of the customer service, and more. Based on this information, the call and lead can then be graded, and we can filter out bot calls and hangups. This helps us determine the cost per QUALITY lead rather than just the general CPL. Then we input that information back into Google so it can optimize based on only the high-quality calls, like those lasting longer than 30 seconds.
    • In the early days of Optidge, we worked with a certified public accountant (CPA). Every phone call we listened to that was answered by a specific woman went poorly. She provided bad customer service, took poor notes, and simply didn’t sell the service well. When we told the client, he asked, “Did you guys know that’s my wife?” Ultimately, it worked, but this is why listening to the phone calls is imperative for success by both the agency (us) and the client. 
  • [21:55] Some businesses shy away from phone tracking because they feel the presence of numerous, often temporary, phone numbers can be confusing and dilute the recognition of their “true” phone number. However, we would point out that the pros certainly outweigh the cons. If you’re investing thousands monthly in advertising, you need to know what that investment brings to the company. There are ways to be regionally specific with phone numbers, and people rarely save a company in their phone from a number they called once off an ad. 
  • [24:05] The world of CRM is a large one. It’s vital for a business to properly set up and use a CRM to understand its leads and lead quality. We’ve found it’s best to have one person specifically tasked with updating and grading leads. You can also enter the conversion value, basically how much the customer ultimately spent, and use that information for Google to further optimize your campaigns. However, this isn’t an option for lead cycles longer than approximately 90 days. 
  • [28:02] In order for a CRM to work and truly benefit a company and its marketing efforts, it must be a priority. Nobody will get information to help with conversions if it’s not a priority. Having one or two people who are in charge of the CRM and its effective usage is one of their main goals is imperative. This person can also ensure that the CRM is updated at a reasonable cadence with accurate information about the quality and journey of a given lead. 
  • [30:05] Optidge currently uses Hubspot and appreciates how easy it is to set up and use. It’s very intuitive. Some other CRMs are very complex, with intricate and lengthy setups and training. Hubspot allows you to track the flow of a lead from entering the funnel to conversion. Even with multiple users actively using the platform simultaneously, it is still easy to keep organized. 
  • [31:54] Optidge has a client who does ABA Therapy, and when they initially started filtering through leads, it became clear that a CRM would be pivotal for success. Many of the leads we brought in looked very good; they checked all the boxes. But, it turned out there might be a few minor details that made them not a good match for this client. Perhaps they didn’t have an accepted insurance. Maybe they didn’t yet have an official diagnosis. Through the CRM, we could see which characteristics resulted in a successful campaign. 
  • [34:03] Part of Brianna’s role at Optidge is training team members and clients regarding the CRM. She believes it’s imperative to establish early in the training that this is part of the process to make this relationship and campaign successful. Also, it’s important to identify the one person who will be filling out and managing the CRM from the outset. It all works much better if we can train them and get them to buy into the system and process; it all works much better.

Guest + Episode Links

Full Episode Transcript

Danny Gavin    00:05 

Hello everyone. I’m Danny Gavin, the founder of Optidge, marketing professor, and the host of The Digital Marketing Mentor. Today, I’m super excited to have Brianna Deboever, who is a Paid Search Strategist at Optidge, to chat with us today. She’s a degree in mathematics and started out early as working as an actuary, but she realized she had a call for marketing. Brianna has been with Optidge since 2020 starting off as a general digital marketer and has grown into an amazing consultant and absolutely vital member of the paid search department. She also attended college at my alma mater at the University of Houston. Finally, in the world of disk profiles, we both share SI’s. Today we’re going to sit down with Brianna and discuss a hot topic, lead quality. As a business, it’s important to get leads, but it’s crucial to make sure you’re getting quality leads together we aim to share just how to do that. Hey Brianna, how are you?

 

Brianna Deboever    01:18 

Good thanks for having me.

 

Danny Gavin    01:19 

All right, so let’s jump right in. Why don’t you tell a little bit about your background, where you went to school, what you studied, so you.

 

Brianna Deboever    01:25 

Gave a little overview there when I didn’t really know what to do in college. It really gravitated towards math and all things kind of analytical. I initially thought it was going to go premed as many people do and I found my way towards math and then it became a question of what do you do with that? I had a mentor in college who steered me towards. The actuarial track and I found success there, but I did not was really unhappy. It was not the career for me. I’m very people facing, I’m very creative and it wasn’t fulfilling. So after a few years I did make a career change after like some personal changes and career changes and did a whole career change couple years ago. And then that’s where I met you at University of Houston doing the masters of marketing. So i use that program as a way to make that transition successfully and it was best decision I’ve ever made. Now I love my job.

 

Danny Gavin    02:24 

And what about marketing do you love the most?

 

Brianna Deboever    02:27 

I love you know the reason I wasn’t happy in the first career I wound up in is because I lacked that creative outlet. I love that with marketing. It’s both. I get to be analytical and I get to be super creative. So I one day I’ll. Spend all day in spreadsheets analyzing numbers, and that’s great. But then the next day I’ll build a landing page and design something completely new and it’s very satisfying. It’s so helpful to businesses. I really feel fulfilled by, you know, pushing these businesses forward and helping these people.

 

Danny Gavin    03:01 

Yeah, I love that. And it’s good for everyone to know that you could love math, but also love to design landing pages and it’s and that’s what i always tell people marketing has the spectrum. And either you can choose to live like on either extreme, just creative, just analytical, or you can find the position where you can do a little bit of everything, which is really wonderful. Let’s jump into our main discussion today, which is about lead quality. So first, before we start, let’s go through a couple definitions because we’re going to be talking and using some acronyms and people just don’t know what those are. So let’s first tell people what a CRM is and then we’ll also talk about what are utms.

 

Brianna Deboever    03:39 

So CRM. Stands for customer relationship management. And when a company is bringing leads in, those leads have information such as emails, phone numbers, location, zip codes, names, all that information. Keeping a log of all that information is very important. So the customer, the CRM is basically a system for bringing in all those leads and all their information and organizing it in a way that’s useful. To the business, there’s many ways to do it. There are very basic ways to do it and what we’ll talk about it and they’re very complex ways.

 

Danny Gavin    04:18 

Yeah, that’s a great definition and another important part of a CRM is you know, following that journey of that lead throughout becoming an opportunity and then becoming a customer as well. So you can, you know, easily track, OK, you know we got 50 people from our campaign, 25 of these people moved on to the next stage. We’ve actually had a demo with them and then you know, ten of them actually turn into customers, so you can. Track that initial engagement, but then also the life cycle of that person from beginning to when they actually become your customer.

 

Brianna Deboever    04:46 

And storing all of that information and having a history of all that information is key. What we’ll talk about issues, but you know, it’s we’ve seen companies that they’re not even you know, storing their leads at all or tracking what happens to them. They just reach out to them and do the business and that’s it. But then how do you learn and get better using that information. So that’s where CRM really is useful.

 

Danny Gavin    05:08 

Right now, let’s talk about Utms. This is a phrase that gets thrown around a lot, and a lot of people have no idea what they are so.

 

Brianna Deboever    05:15 

Utms can sound scary, but it’s pretty simple. It’s basically a set of parameters that are appended to a website, a URL that a user visited, and it gives us information. About where the user came from, the general information that UT M’s can provide. There’s UTM source, so the source of the lead or the searcher such as Google, Microsoft, Facebook, and then there’s the medium, whether that be an example would be organic search versus paid search, the final UTM campaign. If there’s a campaign associated, for example, like paid search, or if you’re even, you have it. Organic campaign initiative that can be identified there, but you also can identify even further down. So what kind of creative did they come in on? What ad did they come in on, what keyword did they search leading to clicking on your ad and making a visit, that kind of thing awesome and the best part about those pieces of data that when the person actually does land on the website, we can capture that data and get more information about them. And you know, when you look into Google Analytics, you can say, OK, how many people? Clicked on that ad or how many people came from that specific campaign. And for all those history buffs out there, UTM actually stands for urchin tracking module, which is a bit of a mouthful. Urchin was originally a web analytics software developed by Urchin Software Corp and designed to track the behavior of unique website visitors. Google actually bought it in 2005 and the acquisition led to the creation of Google Analytics, which is the most popular web. Aid analytics tool across the Internet that most of us are used daily and many times throughout the day. All right, so now that we have those definitions down, let’s talk about the average pay per click agency. How do they optimize their campaigns?

 

Brianna Deboever    07:10 

Pvc campaigns always the end goal. You’re usually working within a budget, a limited budget. People and businesses usually don’t have infinite funds. Funds are allocated to pay per click campaigns. For one reason or another. So you’re working within a limited budget and then your goal and your KP I’s are likely to generate as many leads as possible within that budget. Really what most agencies are working on and optimizing off of is that cost per lead and getting that cost per lead as low as possible, because then if you can get that as low as possible, you’re squeezing out. As many leads as possible for the cent and that’s great, that’s really great and we do that for sure, but there’s also an additional layer.

 

Danny Gavin    07:56 

So practically that means that I’ve got campaign A and it’s getting me 10 leads for 50$ and i’ve got campaign B and it’s giving me 5 leads for 25$ although one campaigns getting me a lot more leads. But that cost, that lead is really expensive. So I may want to focus more time on that other campaign where the cost per lead is a lot less. Can kind of push more money that way, or see how I can get more out of.

 

Brianna Deboever    08:21 

It right exactly.

 

Danny Gavin    08:22 

Let’s talk about what’s the problem with that? What’s the problem if we’re just focusing on cost per lead?

 

Brianna Deboever    08:28 

If you’re focusing on cost per lead, and really you’re focusing on lead volume, essentially there’s a piece of the puzzle that you don’t know how viable or how high quality those leads are, and depending on the types of goals you’re tracking within the account, you could be tracking phone calls. Form fills somebody reaching out on a chat that’s on your website. All of those things and actions could be counted as a lead. However, are they actually a lead? Are they actually a high quality lead that can contribute to the bottom line for these businesses? In a lot of cases. What we found is no. There are spam bots who pick up phone numbers and make calls all the time. And that could be counted as a lead if you don’t have a system to figure out how quality and how viable a phone call is, for example.

 

Danny Gavin    09:21 

It just shows you. So you could be going down a rabbit hole like in our example before, like if I’m going after the campaign that’s giving me the best cost per lead. But it’s possible that all those leads aren’t really good and therefore, you know, I’m optimizing for goal, but because I can’t see past it, I go in the totally the wrong direction and it could lead to. You know the PPC agency feeling, oh, look how great we are, look how many leads we got and look how cheap they are. But then the customer and the business says, what are you talking about? Like 85 % of my leads are bad, so what’s the point?

 

Brianna Deboever    09:51 

Is it, is it actually working? I’m not so sure. In addition to that, just in terms of how Google’s algorithm works, if you are continuing to push for that lower cost per weed and you don’t know or and you’re not giving Google that information on if it’s good or not. Google will keep optimizing and finding more of those leads inherently. So it’s important about finding like finding that information and also telling Google.

 

Danny Gavin    10:15 

Yeah, cuz Google’s going to run with whatever you give them. So if they don’t have that information about what’s this good, was it bad, they’re just going to go down what they think is good or bad. Sounds like understanding the lead quality is really important. So let’s kind of go through how people can better get this information in their campaigns and what’s going on. So step one. I’m sure there’s a simple way of doing it, you know. How can I tell the difference if someone came from a Google ad or a Facebook ad? Can you share with us how one would be able to build that?

 

Brianna Deboever    10:46 

I think the simplest way is landing page and where you’re sending users and you can segment channels whether that be organic, paid, Facebook just based on where you’re sending those users. So if you have a custom specific page for a paid search that is excluded from SEO and Facebook. Well then you know, OK, pretty much everybody coming to this page is coming from an ad. If they convert on this page, we can say with some certainty that it’s a paid search lead. Similarly for if you have a page that you only want used on organic search or Facebook.

 

Danny Gavin    11:25 

That makes a lot of sense. So basically I could see, OK, all the leads that come through this page, let’s say it’s Google ads. They’re high quality. And then all the leads that come through that page and they came from Facebook aren’t high quality. And therefore, I know, OK, you know, maybe I should turn off Facebook. But obviously, as I explained that, it’s like, ooh, that can cause some problems. That really doesn’t give me enough information. You know, sometimes people come to a landing page and they don’t fill out the form or call and maybe they’ll come back later to the main website. So what about those people? You know, they came from Google originally. And now they’re coming to the website. It would be really nice to be able to track those people as well. Basic is great. And if you could do a little bit, it’s better than nothing. But how can we go the next step? And I think that’s where utms come in. So let’s talk about how does UTM tracking enhance the ability to analyze leap quality.

 

Brianna Deboever    12:14 

Utm tracking really will first no matter where a user visits, whether it be a landing page that is used specifically for paid search for. Just the company’s website that’s indexed on Google search, wherever they wind up and wherever they convert, we can capture their information and kind of the trail they took through a UTM So it’s less about where they came in and more about we can capture that journey with parameters like with those UTM parameters. So if somebody did come in via paid search but. They were on the landing page and then they wound up on the website and there was a form on the website and they ended up filling it out there. Our source and medium would still be Google paid search, but the URL would be on the website. So we know, okay, this person came from paid search, but they wound up on the website and that’s where they actually converted.

 

Danny Gavin    13:12 

So that’s amazing. So you’re basically telling me that someone can come from a Google campaign, travel around a little bit? And then they fill out a form, and on that form we’ve got the results like, OK, their name, their phone, but then also in that form you can also say, OK, where they actually came from and what keyword they actually clicked on in order to fill out this form.

 

Brianna Deboever    13:30 

Yeah, you can know all the way down to the campaign and the ad ID and yeah, the keyword that brought that person in.

 

Danny Gavin    13:38 

Utm’s provide us with all that extra value and then you can actually relate it to the customer. How have you seen this make all the difference with campaign optimizations?

 

Brianna Deboever    13:47 

It is game changing when we bring, we tie utm’s to leads that we are then bringing into some form of CRM. And with that CRM we can kind of organize and say here’s a lead and all of that leads information and this is the campaign it converted on and this is the keyword it converted on and then the customer can tell us was it good or not. And we can combine all of that information to say, oh hey, these campaigns and these keywords drove more or less quality leads. And that helps us make optimization decisions within the actual ad account and say, you know, this is really where we want to push spend. Perhaps cost per lead is always important, however. Getting good leads is more important. So sometimes it’s thinking about how do we get more of those leads while maintaining a reasonable cost per lead and combining that information and those two goals to really reach the clients.

 

Danny Gavin    14:49 

Goals like I’m just envisioning like utm’s are like the map, right? And you’re driving down the freeway and you don’t know which way to turn. Should I go right? Should I go left without the utm’s? Like I’m just going to make OK? Well, I see less bumps in the road there. Let me just go, right. But when I know my destination, it’s a lot easier for me to know where I’m going and it just opens up. It kind of makes you wonder, Brianna, why not everyone does this but right, because, like, how can you do paid search or even, you know, Facebook ads or any sort of paid media without that, without tying the two together?

 

Brianna Deboever    15:20 

It’s crazy, yeah. Otherwise you’re really in the dark. And Danny, you are the King of visualization, because that is very good.

 

Danny Gavin    15:28 

So while it’s smart to track visits and visitors and contact form fill ins. We may be only seeing half the story. So we know that for a lot of businesses, especially ones who wait, we’re tracking lead forms, right? So not like ecommerce. Ecommerce is typically they go to the website, they purchase. But for a lot of B2B and service based businesses, people don’t fill out a form. They actually, you know, pick up the phone and call the business directly. So OK, you’ve created this really nice system for when people fill out forms to be able to track where they came from. But what about the people who pick up the phone and call? How do we know where they came from?

 

Brianna Deboever    16:00 

1st it’s just really important. To make sure you’re tracking all of those types of actions that somebody could take, because we’ve seen it in many cases where you think somebody’s going to fill out a form and it turns out the whole industry just wants to pick up the phone. So phone calls are extremely important. The way we deal with phone calls is we implement call tracking numbers, so we basically purchase a number. That is the first number that somebody calls, but then they are routed to the client and to the business they are calling. And what that allows us to do is using that call tracking software, we can capture that phone call and all the information related to that phone call. We can see where that phone call came from. We can listen to the entire phone call. How did it go, how did the customer service member. Served the customer and then also what were they asking for? Was it relevant to the business? Was it relevant to the client at all? It was it a good lead? And then we can basically score all of those calls and say, you know, this is a possible lead, this isn’t. And frequently you’ll see we’ll get tons of calls that hung up after one second or 10 seconds and that’s likely a bot and immediately we’re able to. They’ll throw those out. What that does is we can say, okay, we got X amount of quality phone calls and we got Y amount of non quality phone calls and then we can actually see, okay, what is their cost for quality phone call, how much are we actually paying to get these? It could be you’re getting 10 quality phone calls and 50 other calls. So really that would very much skew your cost per lead and what you are reporting to the client in terms of success. So I think that’s one major part of it. The other part of it is telling Google that information and one way that you can do that is based on certain aspects of the call. We’ll do like phone call length. If a phone call is 45 to 60 seconds then we’ll feed it as a conversion into Google and say hey Google you can optimize off of calls like that, but calls less than that we don’t want you to optimize off of. You don’t even count it as a conversion. So then the calls that are like 10 seconds long, we don’t want Google to continue finding those for us.

 

Danny Gavin    18:32 

Wow, that’s fascinating. So you have a dynamic phone number that pops up depending on where the person comes from. When they call that number, you can see ah, where they came from. You know, there’s lots of softwares that let you do this. I think the old one, the original is Mongoose metrics. There’s call Reel, call tracking metrics. There’s a whole bunch out there and like you said, the cool part is not only does it tell you information about the phone call, but then you can actually pump that info back into Google automatically so you don’t have to manually go and take that info and let Google know what’s going on. So it’s really like it’s a one stop shop of getting that info in. A funny thing that you mentioned which reminds me about like you listen to the phone calls and see how people answer so there’s a story or in early optic days we were working with a CPA. And we did call tracking with him and man this lady, every time she answered the phone, it was horrible like she did it sounded like she didn’t ask the right questions. She didn’t take that down the right notes and really didn’t work well. So you know like one of the advantages we’re listening to these calls so we can actually go back to the business owner and give them you know some information on what’s going on. And we basically told him like hey this person who’s answered the phone has really got to go. Like they just there aren’t helping out your business and these are the reasons and the guy turns to us is like. Do you guys know that? That’s my wife no. We’re like, Oh no. Like, our job here is not to cause marital issues, but that was really funny. But that. But you get the point of like, oh, wow, yeah, you got to listen. And more often than not, you should give access to your clients, and, which I know that optage does, so that they can listen to the phone calls because, you know, it’s one thing to tell people how to answer calls, but then to listen to how they actually do it it’s it can be. The distance between the two can be very far.

 

Brianna Deboever    20:15 

Oh yeah. We’ve found a lot of scenarios where there are areas to really optimize the process. And if you’re paying to get phone call leads, well, the person answering should know exactly the process and how to turn that person into business in a really seamless way.

 

Danny Gavin    20:32 

I know a common complaint from businesses or kind of reason that they don’t want to do call tracking is because they’re worried like, oh, you mean so now there’s like. 40 phone numbers out there that lead to my business. And what if they put that phone number in my phone at you know, or in their phone, you know and then we get rid of the phone number later. So there is this. I feel like with younger businesses it’s not, but sort of more old school businesses they’re a little bit worried. So how would you deal with a client who says I don’t really want to do this call tracking thing?

 

Brianna Deboever    21:02 

If you’re going to be investing potentially thousands a month in paid advertising. Knowing what you’re bringing in with the investment is just of utmost importance. It’s the key to knowing if it if it works, if your investment is worth it, basically your return on investment. There are ways to, you know, get around issues with dynamic phone numbers. Yes there were. There are all these numbers out there, but they can be location specific so we can use the exact area code and location. That the business is operating in so it’s not confusing to users ultimately is there may be one off cases where somebody stores a number in their phone. That’s extremely rare and the vast majority of the time it’s just essential tool to know what’s happening with your dollars? I know that myself. Like when I call certain businesses, if I haven’t memorized the number yet, we’ll just go to Google and search for it so. The pros totally outweigh the cons and it’s just something you know, it’s like in life we wish we had 100 % control, but most of the time we have 0 % control. So we’d rather choose those items that will help us really understand what works and what doesn’t. And call tracking is an amazing tool and I think those businesses that embrace it go really far. Ok. So now we have a great understanding of using UTM tracking for forms. Call tracking for calls. We know there’s chat as well. Now let’s go more into the world of the CRM, that customer relationship management system. So how can companies properly use the CRM to truly understand leads and lead quality?

 

Brianna Deboever    22:50 

You alluded to this earlier, but it’s important to track first the journey from first contact many contacts down the line, and then when they converted and became a paying customer and kind of knowing and understanding that journey and tracking it whether that be in a spreadsheet, whether that be in an actual CRM software. It’s really important we found to have somebody like one person who’s very that’s their job. It is to really manage that CRM and go in for each lead and tell us is this a high quality lead. Is it medium, is it low? In some cases maybe we can do viable or not viable, but having that feedback on each lead from the customer themselves, who is the experts they know who actually could become a customer or not giving us that feedback directly in a CRM So it’s about putting that information in the CRM from the customer, but then also sharing that with your marketing team so that they can make. Better decisions?

 

Danny Gavin    23:59 

Bring up an interesting point. You said like and how much the customer actually spends at the end of the day. So we know that like with e, commerce which is not really what we’re talking today, you know people come to the website, they’d buy something. We clearly know whether it was a quality lead, right. Did they actually purchase and how much they purchased. But in this case, people reach out, hey, I want to get a new air conditioner and we don’t necessarily know OK is a quality or leap not would be would be a scenario where OK do they even have enough money or not. Are they just, you know, that’d be one example, but then further down the line, they actually buy this unit and the service and spend ten thousand dollars. So in the end of the day, not only can we see if it’s quality or not, but we can actually tie back the revenue. So Brianna, is there a way to take that revenue? Like if I see that lead made ten thousand dollars eventually, is there a way to take that and use that information in Google and optimize further?

 

Brianna Deboever    24:54 

There is. You can upload conversions to Google. So once you have that full picture of a lead, it will have a conversion ID tied to it and you can basically say, okay this conversion ID was worth ten thousand dollars and pump that information back into Google and essentially tell the algorithm, get me more of those, that’s what we’re looking for. So by filling out the entire picture, you can then pump that back in. And get more.

 

Danny Gavin    25:24 

I think that the only side note is with certain companies and I know some of the companies that you deal with, that sales cycle is very long, right? It could be that you get a lead and they only purchase a year later, maybe two years later. So pumping back that sales number in such a long time isn’t possible. So I think the ability to put that data back in is something like 90 days.

 

Brianna Deboever    25:46 

It’s a shorter time frame. It is a common struggle for lead Gen. And certain types of B2B businesses because it can take. Months to years to close a multimillion dollar client for example. So that’s why in those cases we can do other optimizations, take that keyword data and campaign data to make better decisions in the in the account and optimize. There are certain aspects of Google the upload that wouldn’t be available.

 

Danny Gavin    26:11 

And that’s fine because as we’ve spoken on previous episodes, we still need the human beings, right? So you can still look at that information, still see, because you have your CRM. What were the keywords over the campaigns now? What’s the dollar value that was created? And then go in and make your own optimizations. And that’s good, because we still need humans in digital marketing, not just machine learning and AI.

 

Brianna Deboever    26:35 

Yeah, that’s a whole other conversation.

 

Danny Gavin    26:39 

What mistakes do you see companies make when using a CRM?

 

Brianna Deboever    26:43 

A very common mistake is at first you have to prioritize it. If it’s not a priority, it will not. Get used, done and done properly and then nobody’s getting the information that’s helping them. So first, I think it’s making it a priority and understanding its importance. Second, it’s really important. Having basically one or two people who are in charge of the CRM and that is their, you know, one of their main goals is also key. It becomes very messy when there’s multiple. Hands in the CRM it becomes unclear, so and having somebody to make sure it’s a priority is for the company is key to making it work. The other problem is not updating it frequently enough. We find in a lot of cases we’re just not getting that lead quality feedback for one reason or another. Or they’re not telling us if we becomes a customer or not and we kind of constantly have to say, hey, you got to update this, you know, frequently so that we can make real time database decisions and improve those campaigns. I think those are three like if you can do all those three things correctly, it’s a priority, you have somebody in charge of it and you’re updating it at a reasonable cadence, then it works wonderfully.

 

Danny Gavin    28:10 

And I think that shows even more so concept that I like to say all the time that an agency client relationship is like a marriage. And in order for a marriage to work, you need both sides to be involved and to do what they need to. So often clients come along and say, oh, we want our agency to do everything and the problem is that an agency can’t do everything. So here in this case, when a client isn’t updating the leads and doing what they need to do and that just makes the job of the agency harder and they can’t really give their. You know a thousand percent % any CRM platforms whose capabilities you’re loving currently and like? Are there platforms that you want to recommend?

 

Brianna Deboever    28:47 

We love HubSpot. That optage that’s fantastic. The flow from becoming an initial lead and tracking that entire journey is very clear and easy. And if you have multiple, this is a case where you can have more people in there, but it still saves, stays quite seamless and easy to use and manipulate that data. You have much experience with HubSpot, how do you feel?

 

Danny Gavin    29:11 

About it, oh, I’m loving it. I think that it’s easy to set up and it’s also just easy to use. I feel like there’s other crm’s out there that are complex, like you just don’t know where to go and what to do. But when the CRM is very natural, it just makes it easier to adopt. Because I know I’m thinking about. Some CRM projects that we’re having coming up and you know there’s some organizations here that you know been around for 20 years that don’t have a CRM and they’re like, ooh, we want a CRM now. So wouldn’t you want something that’s going to be easy to use? And so that’s why I feel like there might be some platforms out there that are more powerful technically, but if you’ve got something that’s really powerful, but. People aren’t going to use and like you said, like updating is so important, right? If it’s just hard to update the stage of where someone’s at and to add in some notes of what’s going on, no one’s gonna use it, and then the whole point of having it is gonna be lost.

 

Brianna Deboever    30:04 

It’s one of those you don’t have to be an expert to use it, which is the key. Like you don’t have to be a tech expert, go in there and really know what to do. It’s you want anybody to come in and be able to update. That’s the key to success. And yeah, there are other ones out there that are definitely more complex and less intuitive.

 

Danny Gavin    30:22 

So Brianna, can you share any case studies and it could be like a win with using a CRM or maybe like a bad situation love to just have like a real life example.

 

Brianna Deboever    30:33 

I have a client who does ABA therapy, and that’s a specialized form of therapy for children with autism. And so when fielding leads it became very clear that the CRM was the key to success and the reason being is because we would get leads that looked good, they had a child and we’re looking for AVA therapy in the right location. However, for the business you know we were realizing not necessarily and that’s because maybe they have. The wrong insurance. Not every clinic can take every kind of insurance. That’s not something you can really tell Google, but that’s something the business could tell us. They also could tell us if the child had a diagnosis or not and that’s very key to be able being able to start a BA therapy services. So we were first able to identify a lot of like characteristics of leads that were key to making our campaign successful or not. And then we really got buying from the client to start scoring those leads based on those criteria in high, medium and low kind of fashion and then using those high and sometimes medium quality leads. I could and like we talked about earlier with the u t m ‘s and with the phone call tracking, we could see all of that information together and then I could optimize the accounts and I could take ad groups and keywords that were. Generated generating more of the high quality leads and filter those out and give them more budget and get more of those high quality leads. And it turns out to be and continues to be very successful getting that feedback from getting a few patients a month. Now we can get you know 8 to 10 month.

 

Danny Gavin    32:24 

Which is awesome. Such a wonderful example, because the success all lies in the minutiae. It could be a family that needs your services, but because of four or five reasons, if they’re just not a good client, at least right now. Without knowing that information, it’s impossible to optimize properly. Thank you for sharing that example. So part of your role with Optage is teaching both colleagues and clients about these best practices and mentoring and how impactful they are on the success of campaigns. Do you have some keys to success?

 

Brianna Deboever    32:55 

Yes, I have found establishing in the very beginning that this is part of the process to make it successful. I think that’s very important. You set that expectation early on and. The expectation with the client knowing that okay, you know, there is a little effort required on my part that’s okay, it’s important. So if we establish that we can hit the ground running. I’ve also found recently if we can identify that one person who’s going to be managing and filling out that CRM right from the get go and having a little training with them, explaining how it works, getting the buy in from them. That makes all the difference as well. Sometimes we can get into the trickier situations where we told the client about the CRM, this is how it’s going to work. And then campaigns launch and a couple months later they’re like, it’s kind of hard to fill out the spreadsheet. And then we realize it’s, you know, okay, who’s that one person who can manage it and make that their job, figuring that all out ahead of time.

 

Danny Gavin    33:57 

So before we wrap up, I know you’re a bit of a world traveler. We’d love to know what are the top three places that you visited?

 

Brianna Deboever    34:05 

In Australia there was in new south wales there was a campground behind dunes, sand dunes next to the ocean with no service and like dingoes running around and we camped there for a few days and that was my number one love, going to visit bend oregon my husband’s brother lives there. We’re very close with him and his wife is very beautiful and outdoorsy 3 is Costa Rica I. Went there a couple times as a kid and it’s just so lush and tropical that’s.

 

Danny Gavin    34:34 

Cool and why did your parents like Costa Rica?

 

Brianna Deboever    34:37 

We just tried one year for family vacation and we all loved it so much we went back.

 

Danny Gavin    34:41 

Oh, I love that. It’s so cool. So what are you currently working on that is really lighting you up?

 

Brianna Deboever    34:45 

I’m really excited about a project we’re working in an area that we’re having trouble generating leads compared to other areas of the United States. For some reason, leads are behaving differently. And it’s harder to get them in the door. And so as a result, we’ve decided they just need more information about the business. There’s less resources out there to educate that population so they don’t always know what they’re looking for and they’re not ready to convert. We’re putting on A and designing a full webinar that will educate people on this business. Why it’s important. It’s the business is very important to parents and children, giving them a nice hour long. Chunk of information from experts and then they can just download that whenever they find us and then we can get in front of them with cute with a more informational based searches rather than business based searches. They’re looking for a service. So I’m really excited. It’s kind of a new angle we’re trying and I think.

 

Danny Gavin    35:42 

It’s a beautiful example of the paid search world where sometimes people think, oh are you like in keywords and bids all day, but no like here you are coming up with out of box ideas. Not just looking at exactly what your job description is, but coming up with a situation where you can help the business at a larger scale. I think that’s another example of how amazing digital marketing is absolutely so,

 

Danny Gavin    36:06 

Brianna, where can listeners learn more about you and follow you? 

 

Brianna Deboever

Ooh, I have a LinkedIn. I have an Instagram, but I don’t post on much. And yeah, but connect on LinkedIn, absolutely wonderful well, this has been such an informative conversation today, and hopefully we’ve brought some. New perspectives and ideas to the listeners. So Brianna, thank you for being a guest on the digital marketing mentor. And thank you listeners for tuning into the digital marketing mentor. We’ll speak to you next time.

 

Brianna Deboever    36:32 

Thank you. That’s wonderful.

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