By Iestyn Page, head of digital advertising for Newsquest Wales & South West

When looking at the sales and marketing funnel it predominantly comes down to two key areas, grow awareness and get more leads. Look at these three digital marketing tactics to get more leads and grow awareness for your business:

1. Facebook lead ads

I would imagine that if you are doing any kind online marketing it is search advertising. If you aren’t, then you should be.

Search advertising, also known as PPC, is the cornerstone of any digital marketing plan and is great for bringing in leads to your business. However, only relying on PPC for leads would be putting a lot of eggs in one basket.

Facebook is one of the best branding awareness mediums out there, it is also great for collecting leads.

People spend 35 minutes a day on Facebook, which ranks second to YouTube for time spent on a social media site. Facebook also has an ad object specifically designed to capture leads, Facebook lead ads.

Like most forms of Facebook ads, this ad will show on both desktop and mobile news feeds.

When users click on the ad, it creates a form that is customised to acquire the information that is important to you. Any information that is already shared on Facebook, like a user’s name, email, etc, will be prepopulated in the form, making it easy to fill out.

You will also have the added benefit of reaching more of your specified audience with Facebook’s detailed targeting options.

2. Instagram ads

Since buying Instagram in 2012, Facebook has added ads to the social network and included it in their audience network, which means that your ad can be seen on both social media platforms.

Why is this important for your business?

One in five minutes of time spent on mobile devices is spent on Instagram or Facebook, so your ad will have ample amounts of opportunity to be seen.

Additionally, ads on Instagram provide great branding. According to Facebook Business, 60 per cent of Instagrammers say they learn about products and services on Instagram.

3. SEO

As mentioned before, PPC is very important, but it does not account for everything that appears on the search engine results page on Google or other top search engines.

It is important for your website to show up without ads.

The way to achieve this is through search engine optimisation.

SEO is the process of optimising the back end of your website through keywords and other factors that tell search engines which keywords your business should appear in for searches.

While ads do appear first in the search engine results, 32.2 per cent of people recognise those ads and scroll past them in favour of the organic results.

Having an ad for your business appear in paid results and a listing for your website in the organic results may also add credibility to your business.

These three strategies can increase your ROI and set you apart from your competition.

If any (or all) of these strategies intrigued you, but you don’t know where to start, don’t hesitate to get in touch with myself Iestyn.page@newsquest.co.uk