Single-touch lead generation simplifies the way you record and attribute the provenance of the leads in your CRM or contact list.
Used right, it can be a useful way of attributing leads, as it’s easy to get bogged down with lead generation in CRM fields such as UTMs, referrer data, or ad click identifiers.
With a single-touch approach, you cut through the marketing noise and single out a single source as your lead generator.
That way, once a lead has been entered in your CRM, you have a simple, definitive single interaction point to focus on.
Find out more below.
Two Types of Interaction
Single-touch lead generation falls broadly into two types. They are:
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- First-touch attribution: The very first interaction a prospect has with your company is recorded as the source of the lead. Perhaps the user clicked a Google ad or interacted with a campaign run on LinkedIn – this information is recorded in the CRM.
- Last-touch attribution: A user might interact with a social media ad, click through to your website from Google, read a blog post, click a retargeting ad and then fill out a form. In this case, the retargeting ad is given the lead in the database.
Benefits
First-touch can be an effective lead attribution model.
For example, many companies in the SaaS space find that a first-touch attribution model works well in allowing them to track user signups.
Online retailers can also benefit from first-touch lead generation when tracking website traffic sources – for example, by tracking social media ad click-throughs that end up in the customer making a purchase.
Limitations
Single-touch lead generation is a winner-takes-all approach to lead generation that has its uses but can overlook some of the nuances of how leads are really generated.
This type of attribution has its limitations, especially if other touchpoints have played an important role in driving customer interactions and generating the lead that eventually ends up in the CRM.
This means the insights it provides about campaign performance are limited, so using first touch alone can make optimising marketing strategies difficult.
Example: Content Syndication
The single-touch model of lead generation is commonly used when your content is hosted by B2B content syndication specialists like Headley Media.
When you partner with a content syndication specialist to distribute your whitepaper, e-book, webinar or whatever it might be, you will usually purchase a defined number of single-touch leads, where you pay a fixed Cost Per Lead (CPL).
Readers are then subject to a data validation process to confirm their contact details, relevance, and quality.
If readers pass the data validation process, the lead is delivered, and your CRM can record the single-touch lead as coming from the platform used to host your content.
Budget
A single-touch lead generation scheme comes in useful when thinking about how to allocate a marketing budget.
That’s because it affords marketing teams clear, unambiguous insights into key metrics around content engagement, which can be used to calculate cost per lead per channel, for example.
At the same time, you get comparative insights like Google Ads vs Facebook Ads vs LinkedIn Ads.
And it makes the sums easy to do – for example, it’s super easy to calculate CPA (cost per acquisition) and organise a budget to shift your spend to the platforms or channels that provide the biggest bang for your buck as far as CPA is concerned.
Conclusion
Single-touch lead generation is a quick and easy way of understanding where your leads come from.
It can drive efficiencies and give you important insights into the lead metrics that all marketing and sales teams care about.
