These days, you probably can’t make it through the day without one of your sales professionals informing you of the latest client who now wants a cost-per-lead (CPL) campaign. The reality of the CPL business for publishers is that, dollar for dollar, most CPL programs will yield less revenue than a simple fixed-placement campaign would for the same effort and inventory.
With some of your best clients and hottest prospects now demanding CPL, you’ll need to adjust. Here are six steps that can get you started.
1) Determine what you can really offer.
In their most basic form, CPL campaigns come as a request to syndicate a client-provided white paper with a guaranteed number of leads meeting the advertiser’s target demographics. Nearly any publisher can find a way to begin doing this right away using standard inventory and a simple online form.
At the other end of the spectrum, lead-generation services include any of the following: lead scoring based on behavioral and demographic characteristics; lead-nurturing services that attempt to bring leads along the buying cycle through multiple marketing touches; and telephone pre-qualification to determine readiness to buy. All of these will drive up the amount that you can charge per lead, but also require significant investments in people, inventory, time and technology.
My company, FierceMarkets, has focused on the early and middle part of this product spectrum, combining standard asset syndication with custom asset creation to generate more leads, with better content, from more engaged audiences. In one recent example, our editors created a reader survey and subsequent benchmark report, underwritten by a sponsor, that could be sold on a CPL basis at a higher rate than the client’s own white papers. This not only prevents user burnout on the client’s assets, but positions the sponsor around content that readers will actually use to benchmark against their peers.
2) Decide who will do the work – and give them a reason to.
Successfully executing lead-generation campaigns definitely takes a village. You’ll need the expert input of editorial, audience development, ad traffic, publishers and sales to keep your campaigns on track and correct them when they are not. That said, every village needs a mayor who will bring it all together, so identify a team member who can own each performance-based campaign and give them financial incentives to do so. We assign each campaign to a member of our Marketing Solutions team – similar in responsibility to ad traffic, but with a results-driven mindset – and we compensate those team members on hitting our annual growth goals for CPL revenue.
3) Determine how you want sales to engage clients on CPL.
In the CPL sale, as opposed to the traditional media sale, the sales professional acts as equal parts convincer and gatekeeper. At Fierce, we have been explicit with our sales team in saying that lead generation is not something to kick off a conversation with, but rather a place to go as needed. We have developed a checklist that enables sales to pre-qualify advertiser requests for CPL by getting key information about their assets, targets, expected costs, etc. Not only does this help the rest of the team determine what can be delivered and at what price, it weeds out the unserious and unrealistic among your prospects.
4) Set the price of leads in a way that values your audience and your work.
We’ve taken the approach that performance marketing is at its heart a custom business, and therefore does not belong on a rate card. Each campaign has so many variables – the flight dates, the asset quality, the medium (webinar vs. event vs. white paper), the demographic filters, the market, the brand recognition of the client – that setting a rate card devalues the audience you’ve worked to build.
While there is no rule, try using benchmarks from your fixed-placement business to inform your CPL pricing. If you’ve been selling out inventory or webinars and have reports on response rates, some simple math will give you a sense of the breakeven point where an average CPL will yield as much revenue as a fixed placement. If you feel compelled to take a low-rate CPL campaign, communicate through the sales team that the campaign will not carry a guarantee and will likely be de-prioritized below others who yield more revenue.
5) Own the results, but call ‘em like you see ‘em.
Once you agree to a lead guarantee, it’s yours to meet. However, ownership is not martyrdom. When a campaign underperforms, it usually has very little to do with the publisher and a lot to do with the offer, the narrowness of the filters or the supplied creative.
We’ve become increasingly direct in our qualification (described above) and in our feedback, and we’ve constructed CPL contract language that gives several options for us to deal with underperforming campaigns, including extending the delivery window. In several instances, we have been able to suggest to a client to loosen its filters after it became apparent that company size or job title restrictions were drastically limiting volume. We also push clients to provide multiple assets and allow us to edit creatives so that we may optimize a campaign away from content that we feel our audience won’t find interesting.
6) Finally, use your knowledge to build better tools and processes.
When I talk with other publishers, the first questions always seem to revolve around technology. “What database are you running on?”, “How are you dynamically serving offers?”, or “How many transactions can you handle?” are some common ones. While we are building all of those tools to become more efficient, living without them for the first 12 months was our opportunity to learn what we needed and to prove that CPL is a legitimate business model for Fierce. Once you actually feel the pain points, you can begin building business-driven, rather than technology-driven, tools and processes.
Maurice Bakley is Chief Operating Officer at FierceMarkets, a digital media company whose B2B portfolio includes email newsletters, websites, webinars, and live events focusing on the telecom, life sciences, healthcare, IT and finance industries. Bakley drives growth at Fierce through innovation in the areas of audience acquisition, technology development and marketing solutions, with a particular focus on building the company's lead-generation capabilities and performance marketing revenues.
