Markets are saturating, lead buyers are consolidating into fewer, larger players, and big brands are bringing digital marketing talent in-house.

The tides have changed. Social media marketing is not the 'disruptive' niche it once was. It's mainstream, and the moat surrounding this lucrative playground continues to rise.

However while one door closes, another begins to open. In this article I will reveal where a new and much greater opportunity lies, with actionable steps detailing how to immediately capitalise on this disruption.

Historically lead generation has been a relative walk in the park.

Anyone with a laptop could google how to setup a Facebook ad campaign, draft some ad copy and throw in a few stock images. Facebook would do the hard work by automating campaign optimisations and CPMs were dirt cheap. Best of all, once you had a winning ad set you didn't even need to touch it.

Incumbents didn’t understand social media but it was disrupting their legacy marketing. These firms wanted exposure but didn’t want to go all in to bring it in-house.

These factors gave rise to a wave of independent marketing companies who stepped in to capitalise.

Todays story is very different however.

The same factors that once presented lead generators huge opportunities, have now become their biggest threats.

Low barriers to entry. Very low barriers to entry have caused an over saturation in the market. More people want to start an independent business and marketing is a common pick. This means it’s more difficult to get your voice heard when prospecting new clients.

Reduced margins. Social media advertising is no longer new and competition continues to rise. This means your ads have to compete with bigger brands who can invest more to refine and optimise ad copy. It also drives up your CPMs and CPCs.

In-house marketing. Companies are bringing marketing in house. After years of outsourcing, firms are now familiar and confident with the opportunities social media and digital ad platforms offer. Now proven, the upfront investment of internal digital marketing is more easily justified.

But not all is lost.

How often do you click on a competitors ad, maybe read through the landing page. If you’re really interested you submit your name and email to proceed to the next step of the service. This is marketing research 101. Everyone does it.

But how often do you follow up to answer the phone when called, or continue online to make a payment, and see the service right to the end acting as a real ‘mystery shopper’. Start to finish. I bet almost never. However this is exactly where the opportunity lies.

For many service providers, what you will find is a mess of repetitive online forms, clunky customer portals, unwanted harassment from call centres and/or insecure sensitive data capture mechanisms. The list goes on. All of which make you question the competence of the service provider you're interacting with.

Lead generators pour hours into optimising ad targeting, copy and landing pages in order to capture site visitors’ contact details. After this point in the customer journey however, they would rarely offer their expertise in optimisation. But why would they? What else would you expect when the most common payment method is payment on lead capture (PPL). This misaligned incentive mechanism leaves lead buyers, who attempted to outsource lead gen, stuck stuck optimising their back end processes internally. However the customer journey optimisation process requires a very similar skill set to the skill set of a lead generator, therefore if the company had to outsource the lead generation in the first place, chances are they do not have the pre-requisite skills inhouse.

In this diagram, Steps C onwards represent items required to be carried out in order for the customer to complete their purchase. These may include: Answering general questions, verifying identity, e-signing agreements, uploading documents, making a purchase, managing purchases and/or accessing upsells.

This mismatch in process optimisation has left the door open for plethora of inefficiencies. Combine this with Covid-19 and you’ll find firms are currently scrambling to adopt software that streamlines customer acquisition and retention.

This is the area being disrupted today and presents huge opportunity for creatives to come in and optimise the entire client journey.

In an ideal world a lead generator would be able to pitch and present an end to end customer acquisition solution for a particular product or service. This would allow the independent marketer to make optimisations based on conversion metrics to the entire customer journey, not only the ads and landing page.

One problem. This would require the lead buyer to relinquish significant control of the entire customer journey, as oppose to a single landing page. In addition, the lead buyer needs access to make modifications based on internal factors like what the service entails or external factors like compliance requirements.

Though, if a solution like this could be offered then showing this shiny new funnel to a prospective lead buyer would immediately stand your independent marketing firm out from the crowd.

Sounds like a lot of code though, right? Luckily, at Claims Gate we've written all the code for you. We offer you the no-code tools to deliver this exact solution.

A collaborative approach to customer acquisition and retention that allows independent companies to supercharge customer onboarding and customer management.

Here's a step by step guide on pitching and implementing a collaborative customer acquisition and retention process with Claims Gate.

1. Line up a prospective client you wish to work with.

2. Create a workspace on Claims Gate for free at https://get.claimsgate.co.uk using the branding of your target client and build a funnel for one of the services of your prospective clients. Ensure to encompass as much of the customer intake as you can. Think qualification, lead capture, identity verification, document e-signing, etc. Documentation arriving soon.

3. Send a link of the newly created demo funnel to your prospective client. You can invite them to collaborate on the funnel. This allows them to view the funnel and make any changes they need to for compliance etc.

4. Negotiate pricing with the client. We recommend negotiating a CPA as far down the funnel as possible to best align incentives. Note, if the client is paying for the use of Claims Gate, you will need to transition ownership of the account to the client in order for them to setup the billing.

5. Kick start your advertising campaigns into the newly created funnel.