Why the most overlooked part of digital marketing is actually your most powerful tool

You’ve built a brand. You’ve taken the time to develop your website and digital presence. You’ve crafted an SEO strategy. You’ve identified your target audience – aka, your most profitable customers. You’ve created a unique message to resonate specifically with that audience and haven’t wasted a single minute getting that message out there via digital advertising. Right now, you’re probably thinking that you’ve got everything moving full steam ahead – and, in many ways, getting this far puts you way ahead of the curve. But there’s one part of this digital marketing equation that you’ve probably overlooked: conversion rate optimization.

Defined as the art and science of getting people to act once they arrive on your website, conversion rate optimization is, more or less, the operational side of digital marketing. It’s not as “sexy” as all that outbound, creative work you’ve been doing to build the side of your brand that your customers see. However, what you may not realize is that conversion rate optimization can actually make a huge impact on how you grow. It provides insights into which of your marketing tactics – on your website and via digital advertising – are driving your business goals forward versus those that are underperforming. So, in essence, conversion rate optimization can make all of your marketing efforts a lot more effective.

Why then, in spite of all the clearly defined benefits of conversion rate optimization, does it tend to be the forgotten part of digital marketing? One of the biggest reasons is because it’s hard work. For all intents and purposes, it’s purely scientific. You create a hypothesis. You test that hypothesis against a control. You measure the effectiveness of both variables over a period of time. You draw conclusions from that test and then implement changes on your website or in your digital advertising efforts based on what proved to be most effective. And then, you start that process all over again with a new hypothesis.

This essentially means that the work of conversion rate optimization is never really “done.” Sorry, you don’t get instant gratification. It requires time and patience. The very ongoing nature of conversion rate optimization can feel daunting because there is a never ending number of factors to test – and in various orders – to see how your can maximize the effectiveness of your digital presence. And while each test is an opportunity to learn something new, sometimes the end result doesn’t even support your initial hypothesis. But you have to embrace this ongoing test-measure-repeat cadence to see how even small changes can drive serious performance gains (i.e. doubling conversion rates). With conversion rate optimization, you have to trust the data because data doesn’t lie – even if your creative sensibilities hoped for a different outcome.

Another reason why conversion rate optimization doesn’t always see the light of day in many organizations is due to a lack of alignment between the marketing and tech teams. Simply put, marketing must convince the tech folks – who typically have the final decision – to buy into it and actually agree to allocate resources to support it. The challenge is that the tech team has its own priorities, which likely have nothing to do with increasing conversion rates. When it comes to your brand’s website, what only matters to them is whether it’s working or not. “If it’s not broke, then don’t fix it” is typically the mentality of a task-focused tech team. All those little, never-ending, and time-consuming iterations that you need them to deploy and manage can be easily perceived as a massive headache in the making. So, it’s no surprise that convincing them on this front can feel like an uphill battle.

But, as a marketer, conversion matters to you because you know that being able to convert more leads into actual customers is the best way to deliver long-term business value through marketing. It’s also the most measurable way to demonstrate the success of your marketing efforts. After all, conversion rate optimization can make all those results stronger. But you can’t do it all on your own. You need strategists to come up with a non-stop supply of hypotheses, design support for all those iterations you’re testing, the ability to deploy and test new variables quickly, as well as the data to help you see what’s working. So, when you can’t get the support internally, it’s a massive roadblock to results.

We know this at LQ. That’s why we’ve taken an entirely different approach to conversion rate optimization. We know just how important it is for brands to do this kind of work. So, to help ease the pain, we oftentimes offer our expert services on a pay-for-performance basis. Not only is this a huge incentive for us to help brands drive real performance gains – which is what we love to do most – but it’s one way we can demonstrate how we “talk the talk and walk the walk.” This is one of the biggest reasons why Microsoft Bing named us “Optimizer of the Year.” We challenge ourselves every day to take new approaches to conversion rate optimization to help our customers create a better and more compelling brand story. It may seem like the “blue collar” work of digital marketing, but it’s not really; it’s just as important – if not more – than all of your other marketing tactics. We know the large rewards that stem from it. If you want to learn more about what it entails, we’d be happy to help.

Long story short: if you think you’re doing everything possible to reach, target, and engage prospects and eventually turn them into loyal customers, there’s a good chance you’ve missed the most critical part of the digital marketing equation: conversion rate optimization. Sure, it’s not the sexiest, but it delivers real, measurable results and makes all that sexy and fun creative work you do more effective in the long run. After all, why invest in your digital presence if you aren’t willing to take the time to make it as strong and effective as it can possibly be?

This post is bi-lined by Christina Martin, Executive Director, Real Estate Marketing at USAA and a seasoned Digital Marketer with over two decades experience in financial services, including roles at Moneygram, United Capital Financial Advisors, and First Horizon Home Loans/First Tennessee (MetLife Home Loans). She shares her perspective here from speaking at Leads Con 2017 in a session entitled: From Search Campaign to Lead Qualification & Transfer – Using Data Analytics to Drive Volume. USAA is a LQ Digital client.

It may be time to take a different approach to avoid spending budget on wasted leads

It’s no secret that digital advertising has been steadily on the rise for a number of years now. In eMarketer’s latest quarterly projections for 2017, digital ad spend in the U.S. alone will grow by 15.9 percent to a whopping $83 billion in total revenue. Of course, it should come as no surprise that Google and Facebook continue to dominate this space, commanding 60 cents of every dollar spent.

These trends don’t show any signs of slowing, even as more marketers turn their attention and budgets to mobile advertising. In fact, the digital advertising industry is about to set a new milestone: by 2018, digital ad spend will surpass TV ad spend for the first time – and continue growing. That shouldn’t be news to marketers. The time to take action was yesterday; just look at the data. As digital continues to pull share away from TV, there’s no question that it should make up a big part of any marketer’s media plan in the year ahead. This basically means that the way we approach, plan, and execute digital advertising campaigns needs to fundamentally change if we expect to break through the noise and connect in a meaningful way with all-too-easily-distracted digital-first consumers.

So, given the relentless rise of digital ad spend, your knee-jerk reaction may be: “we must spend more to reach more consumers.” Generally speaking, you wouldn’t be wrong in making this assumption, but, in doing so, you are missing a big piece of the puzzle. Sure, by spending more on digital advertising, you will undoubtedly get a leg up on the competition in terms of overall impressions. But just because you reach more consumers doesn’t necessarily mean you’re reaching the right customers with compelling messages that motivates them to buy into your brand’s value proposition and eventually become actual customers. The problem here isn’t your spend; it’s how you’re spending your advertising dollars as well as what you’re doing to engage your target consumers.

Consider this a myth busted: greater spend doesn’t mean more positive results. If anything, it just gets you a lot more wasted leads and wastes your precious marketing budget. Industry-wide, it’s not all that surprising anymore to run into situations where, say, only eight percent of leads generated by a digital advertising campaign actually convert into something more substantial. When you do the simple math, that means the remaining 92 percent of those leads are basically useless or, in other words, deliver no value whatsoever. And in spite of the fact that many brands oftentimes see little return on their advertising spend (ROAS), they continue to pour more budget into advertising in hopes that the tables will eventually turn in their favor. It’s a nice idea, but, quite frankly, the wrong approach.

Additionally, it’s important to remember that digital advertising is not linear, nor is it executed via a “black and white” strategy either. ROAS in one channel may have a residual and beneficial impact in another, especially as ad spend grows. Social advertising is a great example of this. A recent Facebook study conducted with Nielsen Total Ad Ratings found that marketers who use Facebook ads to complement TV their ad spend can “boost audience reach and enhance the efficiency of their campaigns, particularly among younger audiences and light TV views.”

What’s the big takeaway here? It’s about time marketers got smarter about how they use (read: not spend) their digital advertising budgets. Here are a few pitfalls to avoid. First, ads need to be placed in the right channel. We know that all consumers are not created equally; digital advertising platforms aren’t either. Placing an ad in a channel that either fails to reach the right consumers or doesn’t incite the kind of action you need from them is a big waste of your budget. Don’t place ads on “popular” platforms just because they cater to a large audience. If your target consumers don’t spend their time there, you shouldn’t either.

Second, once you figure out where your target consumers spend their digital time, you still have to crack the code on how to speak to them – at least, in a way that gets them to act. Simply put, your message needs to resonate. Here’s some good news: practically every part of your digital advertising campaign can be optimized in real-time. Unlike that TV spot or static billboard you have running, you can test multiple digital ad units at the same time to see what works and cut out what doesn’t, instantly. Playing the digital advertising game is more than just purchase, create, publish, and wait. Every step in that process can be refined non-stop to drive results. Don’t just sit around until a campaign ends. If your message isn’t resonating, change it. The longer you run an ad with a mediocre call-to-action, the more budget you waste. Simple, right?

Lastly, if part of your digital advertising effort involves asking consumers to fill out a form to get more information, then be ready to get them that information immediately. Don’t make them wait. This isn’t dating. There’s no reason to be coy, but you shouldn’t stalk either. If you ask consumers to fill out a form for more information, only ask questions you absolutely need them to answer in order to make initial contact with them. If part of that information includes them giving you their phone number, then pick up the phone and call them back immediately. Doing so in less than one minute after receiving an inquiry can more than double conversion rates. Unfortunately, this is all too often where leads go to die. You’ve succeeded at getting consumers through the funnel to a point where they give you their contact information, only to keep them waiting. You’ve placed an ad on the right channel with the right message. Don’t lose that momentum while you’re already ahead.

If you’re following where I’m going with this, be sure your digital advertising spend is less about generating more leads and more about generating the right leads. This may be a lot to grasp at first because we’ve all become accustomed to measuring success through volume-based “vanity metrics” (more leads, more clicks, more impressions). Unfortunately, volume rarely equates to ROI. Why? Think of it this way: what’s the point of generating hundreds of leads if none of them actually convert? (Hint: it’s a waste of time and budget!)

Brands need to refocus their digital ad budgets on targeting only the most profitable customers or, more simply, the consumers who will generate the greatest overall lifetime value. There’s plenty of data and insights available to pinpoint and find the exact consumers we want to reach. So, in all honesty, knowing what resources are available to us to ensure every digital advertising campaign we run gets us closer to our most desired and relevant consumers, it seems silly that we’re still talking about wasted leads today. With the right planning, it’s avoidable.

To bring this idea around the “profitable customer” to life, I’m going to use an example from a talk I gave at LeadsCon Las Vegas earlier this year. USAA worked with LQ Digital to test paid search performance for a campaign effort intended to help veterans to purchase a home using their VA loan benefit. The goal was to reach VA-eligible veterans who weren’t already USAA members in a cost-effective way. So, that’s what we did – and LQ made it possible to track leads at every stage of the funnel, from initial search to loan purchase, to help us understand if we were, in fact, reaching the right customers at the right time.

Fortunately, we know a lot about what our members care about most and, from past campaigns, have learned what converts the best whenever we’ve got a new offer to share. For this campaign specifically, we worked with LQ to create a number of assets, from paid search ads to landing pages, that we knew would generate both interest and a response. Given the intensity and time-sensitive nature of this kind of purchase, we knew that adding things like call-back phone numbers on search ads (desktop and mobile) and providing a form to fill out on the landing pages would be most effective.

Here’s an interesting curveball (but something you should ultimately see less as a curveball and more like a best practice). Although the foundations of this campaign were built almost purely on digital, the magic really happened when a customer picked up the phone. During the run of this campaign, we saw the majority of qualified leads come from click-to-call (CTC) inbound mobile calls. These drove the highest conversion rates – more than desktop and mobile clicks – as well as a lower overall cost-per-lead (CPL). Additionally, of those consumers who clicked through and filled out the inquiry form on the landing page, our member service representatives were standing by to call them back immediately. Who knew that using online to drive offline conversion would be such a success?

Long story short: a solid digital customer acquisition strategy isn’t necessarily digital-only. Digital advertising alone is effective at getting the right consumers into the purchase funnel; a real conversation can move them through the funnel. Mobile CTC conversion rates alone speak volumes about the impact real human-to-human interaction can make to close a sale or win a new customer. Never discount the phone; it could be your greatest lead conversion asset.

To wrap this up, it’s safe to say that digital advertising isn’t really effective unless you:

1. Know your target audience (“profitable customers”)
2. Understand where they spend their digital time
3. Develop (and test) messages that resonate most
4. Be ready to pick up the phone when they call or make an inquiry
5. Track and measure ROAS at every stage of the campaign journey

While this may seem like a simple recipe for success, many brands still make a number of avoidable missteps that ultimately lead to waste – wasted budget, wasted leads, wasted effort. Digital advertising can work hard for your brand as long as you take the time to set your campaigns up for success.

Agency takes high honors at this year’s Bing Agency Awards

Every year, Microsoft’s Bing brings together its key agency partners at the annual Bing Agency Awards to celebrate and reward the most impactful, creative, and effective work using search advertising to help brands get the right ads in the right place at the right time – in other words, at the very moment when consumers are ready to make purchase decisions.

This year’s event was the biggest yet. Hosted by the Daily Show’s Trevor Noah at New York City’s famed Capitale, Bing brought together over 350 search industry experts for a black-tie event that put a spotlight on incredible agency work across 15 different categories.

Competition was fierce, but in the end, LQ Digital was named the 2017 Optimizer of the Year, awarded to the agency that best leveraged Bing Ads tools and insights throughout the year to create smart and truly innovative optimization solutions.

This award celebrates the agency that relentlessly pursues perfection, boldly pushes limits, and takes calculated risks by testing new methods and immediately identifying what tactics drive the most impact – all of which amounts to having a perpetual willingness to learn and conviction to always be ahead of the curve. These are all qualities that make up our incredible team!

LQ Digital’s General Manager, Patrick Wang, accepted the award on behalf of the agency:

“I’ve always thought of optimization as a blue-collar job. It takes hard work, intuition, smarts, and, of all things, it takes tenacity – it takes that effort day in and day out to try the newest things and figure out what works for the clients…to tell a better customer story.”

A big congratulations to the entire LQ Digital team for earning this well-deserved award!

Why being a “creative genius” is no longer enough in today’s digital world

Once upon a time in the era of traditional marketing, devising strategies for developing memorable brand creative across TV, print, and other media was a marketer’s primary responsibility. There were some performance-driven direct response variations on this theme as well, but the brand creative itself was the genius “big idea” for all campaign communications.

Then, digital became king almost overnight, giving marketers reason to panic. They were now faced with a creative dilemma: how to strike the careful balance between telling a compelling brand story and earning quantifiable clicks. And as measuring marketing performance quickly became the new norm – where new metrics were emerging each day across different platforms, devices, and media types – everyone from the CMO down started thinking like a “performance marketer.” Data suddenly became the new creative brief, signaling a seismic shift from “Don Draper” thinking to a newfound focus on hyper-targeting, deep segmentation, real-time optimization, and personalization. Campaign strategy was no longer about the proverbial “silver bullet.” The focus shifted to intimately knowing, finding, and delivering on consumer needs.

Fast forward to the present day. Digital marketing in the U.S. alone is poised to reach $120 billion by 2021, accounting for 46 percent of all projected advertising spend. This represents a combined 11 percent y/y growth from 2016 to 2021 across paid search, display and social media advertising, online video, and email marketing – and that pace doesn’t seem to be slowing down anytime soon. Why? Because digital is a solid marketing investment. Compared to other media, digital can be measured with absolute precision to help marketers spend smarter and more efficiently.

At LQ, we’ve learned that succeeding in today’s digital-first world means thinking and acting a lot less like marketers and, oddly enough, more like economists. Digital economists, that is. To help explain what I mean by this, it’s worth revisiting our Economics 101 days to understand how we can approach customer acquisition through the lens of:

1. Unit Economics
2. Supply + Demand
3. Marginal Cost < Marginal Revenue

Unit Economics

Unit economics is defined as the direct revenues and costs associated with a particular business model, expressed on a “per unit” basis. In other words, it’s about breaking down the revenue and costs related to a particular customer to understand what ultimately drives profitability.

Let’s use a lemonade stand to illustrate this concept. Say you charge $1 per glass of lemonade. Now, let’s breakdown what goes into that $1. The lemonade costs you 6 cents to make; your location, table, and umbrella amount to about 9 cents; your labor is 25 cents (we are in California, after all!); and your marketing – flyers in the park and other signage – is only 2 cents. Your unit economics for that glass of lemonade are roughly:

• Revenue: $1
• Expenses: $0.42
• Profit: $0.58

Based on this breakdown of costs, unit economics says that I am able to generate 58 cents of profit for every customer who purchases a glass of lemonade from me for $1.

Instead of focusing on profits, a digital marketer might measure success purely based on quantifiable campaign metrics: total spend, number of leads generated, cost per lead, cost to close a sale. A digital economist, on the other hand, prefers to approach success by asking bigger picture question: “How can I increase my profits by adding more units?”

When we speak to our clients about profitable growth, we start by asking a few important questions. How do you make your money? What’s the average cost to acquire a new customer? How long do customers stick around? How much do you earn from them (LTV)? Then, we dig a little deeper to understand how the answers to those questions vary by product, geography, demographics, and so on. The end goal here is to understand what levers we can pull to move a business forward in a profitable way. This informs how we approach a unique customer acquisition strategy for each of our clients. Unit economics essentially guides our way.

Supply + Demand

Supply and demand is formally defined as the amount of goods and services available for people to buy (supply) compared to the amount of goods and services people want to buy (demand). In its simplest form, it speaks to market dynamics and competition. Either way, this principle is at the heart of digital acquisition.

The world of digital marketing is an auction-based environment. Before kicking off any campaign, you need to ask yourself how much you are willing to pay to acquire a customer, considering what the market clearing price is.

Let’s look at another example. Say you’ve identified two specific customer segments that you’d like to target in your next campaign. Both are worth $50 to your business. Time to start bidding. You quickly learn that it costs $25 to acquire “Customer A” and $75 to acquire “Customer B.”

The difference in cost to acquire these different customer segments may tell us something unique about the market: 1) that the total supply of “Customer B” is potentially less than “Customer A,” and that they are harder to find; 2) that competitors are willing to pay more to reach and engage “Customer B,” which makes it even harder for you to break through the noise; or 3) that you may be able to extract more value from “Customer A” because there are either more of them available to you in your target market or their attention is not being commandeered as much by other competitors (or both!).

If we approached this scenario in averages, as many marketers tend to do, if half of our new customers were from the “Customer A” segment and the other half were from the “Customer B” segment, then you could say that we acquired them for an average cost of $50 per new customer. And since a new customer is worth $50 to us, we therefore broke even.

Unfortunately, that’s not how economists think, nor is it how we would actually behave in an auction. The truth is, we would bid aggressively on “Customer A” – and we would bid to win – bidding up to $30, $40, or even $45 at most to acquire each new “Customer A” to ensure we still make money from each new customer acquired. In that same train of thought, we’d be forced to abandon any hopes of acquiring “Customer B” because we’d lose money the moment we entered that auction for any price above $50.

Long story short: you need to not only know who your target customer is, but also understand the market clearing price to win their attention, always proceeding with profitability in mind.

Marginal Cost < Marginal Revenue

To put it simply, marginal cost is the additional cost incurred for the production of a single unit of a product or service. Relatedly, marginal revenue is the gross revenue earned from selling one additional unit of a product or service.

Economics tells us we should continue to increase volume as long as marginal revenue exceeds marginal cost. The crudest example of this is a single seat on an airplane. The plane, the fuel, the flight crew, and all other fixed costs will be spent to operate the flight, whether or not we add one more passenger. The only marginal cost that might come with filling another seat at the gate could be the cost associated with providing an additional free in-flight beverage. So technically, airlines should never really charge more than $1 (or some minimal amount) to add one more passenger at the gate because the marginal revenue will always exceed the marginal cost vis-à-vis the fixed costs already incurred. Any additional revenue is just gravy. If you travel often, you know that airlines do not behave this way.

Marketers overlook this all too often when talking about adding volume on digital channels. Why? Because they have a tendency to think in terms of overall costs and short-term metrics, such as return on ad spend (ROAS). Here’s a great example. A current client of ours was getting 70 percent of the volume at around $0.50 per click. To outbid competitors, they would have to get the last 30 percent at $1.50 per click. We advised them to take on more volume, which cost about $20,000 more, but their response was: “That’s way too expensive!”

Well, not really. Their marginal revenue still exceeded the marginal cost of taking on that extra volume. Campaign 1 cost them $10,000 and generated $50,000 in revenue (5:1 ROAS) while Campaign 2 cost them another $30,000 and generated $90,000 in revenue (3:1 ROAS).

They thought we were looking at the metrics in the wrong way; from their point of view, the new spend was inefficient. In an economic view, however, they are still achieving profitable growth by spending a marginal cost of $20K more to earn a marginal revenue of $40K. Honestly, a company should bet on those odds any day.

It’s Time to Think Like Digital Economists

Like economics, digital marketing is a numbers game – and those numbers don’t lie. But the difference with digital economist thinking is that it gets you to measure success in terms of lifetime value, not volume. Also, it ensures that you remain fanatically focused at all times on targeting, reaching, engaging, and converting only the most profitable customers for your business. If you take a step back and think about it, this mindset shift will not only help boost your bottom line – and help you achieve your business objectives better than ever before – but it will also improve the overall effectiveness and efficiency of your marketing efforts. It’s honestly a win-win – that is, as long as you allow yourself the freedom to get out of your digital marketing comfort zone.

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If you think your home page is your digital front door, think again.

“If you build it, they will come.” For many, this has been the underlying strategy for website development, with much of the focus placed on home page design, content, and navigation. Unfortunately, just building a website and throwing it into the digital ether, hoping that your target consumers will organically stumble upon it, is a job half done.

Based on Forrester’s The State of Search Marketing, 2017, 42 percent of people find websites through natural search engine results, from the likes of Google, Bing, and Yahoo!, while 36 percent rely on Facebook to guide them through their digital journey. This means that nearly 80 percent of traffic to websites comes from a combination of search and social. But this doesn’t necessarily drive traffic to your home page. It’s more specific than that. A click on a search link or a Facebook ad will more than likely drive consumers to a landing page with relevant product, customer, or promotional information. As such, you could argue that many of your customers come to your site through the side door, the backyard, or the garage.

If 42 percent of traffic is coming to your website through natural search results and another 16 percent through sponsored search engine results, then we might as well argue that the Google search results page is much more of a digital front door for your business than your very own home page. Seeing that well over half of traffic to websites comes from a combination of both paid and organic search, you would think that brands would go out of their way to dominate the search results page whenever possible. Unfortunately, we know that’s simply not true. Companies aren’t doing enough to keep this digital front door open. They aren’t using all of the digital customer acquisition tools at their disposal to achieve maximum exposure and premium placement on the search results page.

When a consumer types in a search query, it’s the equivalent of raising a hand and saying, “I have a specific need. Please help me.” This is pure gold. When you have access to this kind of intent, you have no choice but to do whatever it takes to engage consumers with your brand. Sometimes it requires multiple means of engagement, especially as the search results page is quickly evolving to index more content beyond organic search results alone – paid ads, local listing information, partner offers, social media posts, etc. And it’s no secret that Google has gradually pushed organic search results further out of sight and out of mind, with the number of organic placements above the fold changing from four three years ago, to only one today. At the same time, paid ad units above the fold have dropped from seven to four.

To put it bluntly, if you aren’t owning the search results page, your front door to consumers is slammed shut – especially knowing how the evolution of the search results page is making it even harder for consumers to serendipitously discover websites like yours.

Maximizing the search results page is like maximizing shelf space at the grocery story. Think about the last time you were walking down the cereal aisle. You most likely had over one hundred different options to choose from. So, how do you choose? For starters, you’ll likely look at the cereals at eye level first, which, for the purposes of this example, are all by General Mills. Since you don’t have time to peruse every brand, there’s a good chance you’ll choose a cereal directly in front of you. If you don’t like what you see, you still have a lot of other options to choose from on the other shelves. The point is, General Mills has locked in a premium position in the cereal aisle, intentionally done to draw consumers in.

This is no different than wading through the content on the search results page. When a consumer inputs a search query, they want an answer – and fast. The likelihood of them clicking on a link at the top of the page, whether it’s a paid or sponsored ad (like the General Mills shelf) or other contextually relevant indexed content, is fairly high. It really comes down to what search results best address the search query at hand. If they end up needing to scroll further down the search results page to find exactly what they’re looking for, seeing your brand show up in multiple positions will only increase their chances of knocking on your digital front door.

What this means for you – and your website – is that SEO is not enough on its own. It gets your site indexed on the search results page organically, but given the fierce amount of competition above the fold, SEO alone will not generate the amount of website traffic you desire. This becomes even more pronounced for businesses in highly competitive and saturated industries.

To dominate this “shelf space,” your paid, partner, and earned marketing must work together seamlessly. This could involve a combination of search engine marketing (paid search ads, pay-per-click, pay-per-call), affiliate marketing, paid product listings, and directory listings. Depending on the nature of your business or the type of action you’re trying to drive, your approach to owning the search results page may vary. But make no mistake, you need to own it.

Now, here’s the kicker: there’s absolutely zero value in owning the search results page if your website or landing page experience doesn’t deliver on the search query or fails to provide essential information that converts a click to an actual customer. In fact, in Forrester’s The Best and Worst of Paid Search, 2016, it was found that 22 percent of landing pages reviewed did not relate to the keyword (from the search query) or were optimized for mobile. Why spend to get premium placement on the search results page if your website can’t go the extra mile?

The harsh reality is, getting found online isn’t always easy. It actually involves a lot of moving parts – from building and optimizing your website to strategically deploying paid search – that must operate in lockstep to drive measureable results. As you design that shiny new home page, try not to get too fanatic about perfecting the content, wordsmithing the calls-to-action, or systematically sprinkling keywords throughout. Consumers are less likely to see this as your digital front door because, for better or worse, Google owns that real estate now.

Marketers should stop counting leads and shift their focus to Lifetime Value (LTV)

Not all customers are created equally.

Some stumble upon your brand, drop in to test out your product or service, and maybe make a small purchase – only to never come back. Others are instantly enamored by your offer, build a connection with your brand, and quickly turn into customers for life. It’s hard to say which path a new visitor to your business will take if you’re simply casting a wide net with your marketing efforts. Hoping that a few of your new “leads” stick around leaves a lot to fate and can quickly drain whatever marketing budget you have.

All too often I hear marketers throw around “leads generated” as a success metric worth bragging about. While it might be a good indicator of the overall impact of a marketing campaign, it fails to deliver on your real business objective: driving profitable growth by increasing your long-term customer base.

Besides, a lead is not an actual customer. It’s merely the potential for someone to become a customer. At that point, the ball is in your court to make that lead believe in your business. That takes time, money, and valuable resources before that conversion ever happens – and when it does happen, there’s still no guarantee this new customer will continue coming back for more.

Consider Blue Apron’s lackluster story of going public. At the time of the IPO, the company claimed one million customers, but was still far from profitable. Why? Because many of those customers were still in the “trial” phase of their relationship with the brand. They were willing to give the meal kit service a shot, but not necessarily ready to commit to an ongoing subscription. Unfortunately, this assumption proved to be true, with the company now facing a surprisingly high estimated churn rate of 72 percent within six months. Add to that the cost of acquiring a new customer over the last twelve months, estimated at a whopping $460 per customer, and it’s becoming a challenge for the company to break even. This is a perfect example of leads not delivering long-term value. Blue Apron saturated the market with offers and promotions – from digital to direct mail – but that’s about as far as they got.

When this happens, you have to ask yourself, “Was this worth the cost?” The easy way to answer this question comes down to a relatively simple calculation of Lifetime Value (LTV)/Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC). If you aren’t at least breaking even, it’s time to rethink your overall customer acquisition strategy. To put this in context, the most sophisticated businesses regularly achieve customer lifetime value at three to five times the cost of acquiring a customer. This is where you want to be. It’s not sustainable to consistently have the scales tipped in the opposite direction.

Marketers have got to be smarter, savvier, and much more efficient when it comes to customer acquisition. They need to think like economists and operators, not like campaign managers and traditional marketers. They need to shift their focus from “generating leads” to “finding the right customers.” This means building a strategy that ultimately delivers long-term profitable growth.

As one client recently said to me: “I’m moving from a cost center to the revenue team.” That’s the spirit! Your business objective is to be profitable. As such, your marketing team needs to deliver more than just new customers; it needs to deliver great ones. Unfortunately, it’s hard to achieve that goal if you don’t stay laser-focused on earning the loyalty of “profitable customers.” Mind you, the responsibility for this doesn’t just sit within marketing or sales. The customer must be at the heart of every business decision made, from the Board of Directors down.

The truth is, customer acquisition is a lot like matchmaking. You should be looking for the right fit, not just the right now. Obviously, your end goal is to have as many potential customers as possible “swipe right.” But when they do, you have to be ready to get that relationship going. This is what drives customer lifetime value. So, given the choice between volume and value, wouldn’t you rather spend time, money, and available resources on building long-term relationships with the most profitable customers? (Your answer should be, “yes!”)