The lead gen process is a way for sales and marketing to build, maintain and develop a healthy sales pipeline by building audiences.
You should always choose quality over quantity when it comes to lead generation.
Marketers often deliver many leads to their sales team to avoid missing out on high-quality prospects.
But a high volume of undesirable contacts can force sales reps to spend time filtering out low-quality leads from marketing qualified leads (MQLs) and building relationships with prospects that don’t fit the ideal customer profile.
This blog will tell you about some of the most effective ways to improve the quality of the leads you generate.
Quality Over Quantity
It’s typical for “The more, the merrier” to be the truest of wisdom affirmations. However, in the case of attracting business leads, this is untrue.
This traditional view is now changing dramatically. Business owners are wise, and 70% prefer quality leads over high numbers in generation alone.
Marketers appreciate the importance of targeting qualified leads, mainly due to their higher likelihood of buying products.
Marketers and business owners spend a lot of time, resources, and effort to generate new leads for their businesses.
But the leads you generate might not bring you real conversions every time. What should you do in such situations?
The trick to winning more business is to generate high-quality leads that are more likely to convert into actual paying customers.
What Is Lead Generation?
Any person interested in a company’s product or service is considered a lead. Not everyone is a lead, as people have different preferences and needs.
Many businesses make the mistake of marketing to everyone when they should focus on people interested in what the company has to offer.
Lead generation is a strategy sales and marketing teams use to develop and maintain a healthy sales pipeline through audience building.
It’s the process of attracting prospects to your business and increasing their interest through nurturing, all with the end goal of converting them into a customer.
Effective lead generation begins with marketing and sales co-developing lead qualification strategies, from defining a high-quality lead to determining lead scoring strategies and making iterative improvements.
Marketing and sales teams use inbound marketing tactics, webinars, paid advertising, events, and PR activities to introduce a steady stream of leads into their pipelines.
Once a lead generates, it enters your sales and marketing ecosystem to be nurtured and hopefully converted into a customer.
Curating a quality lead generation plan can take some time, during which there will be much trial and error.
As you learn the ins and outs of defining high-quality leads for your business, categorize your marketing campaigns that best resonate with your target audience and lead to conversions.
You can classify these campaigns under different monikers based on ideal buyer profiles, high-performing content, or best-converting marketing channels to refer to them in the future.
Attending to your target audience only through lead generation can ensure that your brand matches with the right customers.
Lead Generation Campaign Strategies
Find marketing channels that have the best chance of capturing high-quality leads.
These are usually the websites your target buyers spend the most time on when completing buying tasks, from identifying a problem and researching the solutions to reading software reviews.
Modern brands make use of various lead generation strategies such as:
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Email marketing
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Networking
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Coupons
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Live events and seminars
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Website landing pages
These are a few strategies you can use to attract potential customers to your product or offer.
If you’re looking to automate your processes, discover high-quality lead generation tools in this blog post.
What Is Lead Quality?
Lead quality is a factor that allows you to identify how likely your prospects are to become your paying customers.
Many marketers assume that driving more leads can help them generate more sales and revenue.
While increasing the size of your email list should be a top priority, your leads are worthless unless they’re qualified enough to make a purchase.
Lead quality occurs after going through a list of leads acquired through a lead generation campaign. Most campaigns will focus on lead quantity.
So marketers and sales teams will still have to go through all leads to determine their quality leads.
The higher the quality of your leads, the more likely they become your customers.
Exact measurements of lead quality may vary depending upon your lead generation strategy and the products you sell.
What Are High Quality Leads?
High-quality leads typically have a strong product fit, increasing customer lifetime value, and retention.
Good leads are prospects that are interested in your product or service and are in the market to make a purchase. These high-quality leads can assist companies in boosting sales and ROI.
They are easier for your sales and customer retention teams to manage, but they are usually more expensive for your marketing team to acquire.
You’ll need to collect enough information to gauge whether someone has a true, valid interest in your product or service — how much information is enough will vary depending on your business.
High-quality leads are leads with a high propensity to convert into paying customers. The higher the quality of your leads, the more likely they will purchase your product or service.
How To Identify Ideal Buyers
There are a couple of demographics and background questions to consider when determining if someone is an ideal buyer or not.
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Profile Fit Demographic: Information about an individual such as job level, experience, and purchase authority.
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Firmographic: Information about the company such as revenue, location, and existing customers.
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Technographic: Information about a company’s technological maturity, such as technology and decisional authority with their IT department.
Cost of High-Quality Leads
High-quality leads come with a higher acquisition cost, and quickly deplete a marketing budget.
Here’s the thing: capturing quality leads begins with attracting enough leads to sift through in the first place. This is where focusing on lead quantity comes in.
Qualified leads are likely to be using one of your competitor’s products or services, making it harder to turn them into customers because you will also need to overcome their switching costs.
The increased costs for quality are why most marketing teams will focus on generating high, and medium-quality leads for their sales pipeline.
Like playing any numbers game, more opportunities to play means more opportunities to win.
That’s the basis of most sales and marketing efforts that focus on the volume of leads, and it’s a hard point to argue with.
Some circumstances may require companies to prioritize lead quantity over lead quality, especially in the initial stages when businesses have less brand awareness and find it challenging to gather enough target audience data.
Lead Scoring
How do you improve lead quality?
Lead scoring allows you to rank your leads by their interest levels and readiness to buy. You assign points to leads based on their actions and behavior on your website.
Classifying leads as ‘high quality’ should be determined using lead scoring techniques that systematically attribute values to your leads based on lead behavior, lead source, product fit, and persona match.
Lead scoring considers both positive and negative actions your leads take and attributes higher scores to actions that indicate they are more likely to convert.
How To Score Your Leads
There are a few methods to determine whether a prospect is right for your business:
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People download your lead magnet that is part of your marketing or sales funnel. You can offer these lead magnets to your website visitors in exchange for their email addresses.
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Visitors contact your sales team to ask pre-sale questions.
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Leads browse through various product pages or pricing pages, meaning they could be thinking of doing business with you.
Sales Qualified Leads
Sales qualified leads are contacts who’ve taken actions that expressly indicate their interest in becoming a paying customer.
An example of SQL is a contact who fills out a form to ask a question about your product or service.
Sales-Ready Leads
Drive Web Traffic
Improving the quality of traffic to your website comes down to the marketing campaigns you use to drive visitors there.
To optimize traffic, you need visibility into the quality of leads and traffic from each of your marketing campaigns—from content marketing to email marketing to SEO.
Marketing & Sales Alignment
With well-defined buyer characteristics and lead scoring strategies, B2B marketers can struggle with poor conversion rates if they don’t align with sales.
Over 60% of B2B sales reps are more likely to follow up on MQLs if teams agree on the qualification criteria.
In most cases, these two teams don’t see eye to eye because sales tend to care about conversion rates while marketing teams are looking to generate more leads in the first place.
It’s time to shift this mindset and look at both metrics as critical to success.
Examining the shared attributes of leads in these two groups and applying that knowledge to your existing leads will help you identify those most likely to convert.
It could also help you improve your overall conversion rates by understanding why some leads are falling by the wayside.
Is There An Easy Way To Get In Touch With Potential Leads?
You can leverage contact databases to connect with the right people from your targeted companies.
For example, UpLead provides essential information about potential leads, such as their name, job title, email, phone number, location, and more.
Databases like these can be helpful tools that can make it easier for you to approach, attract, engage and convert qualified prospects.
B2B claim that they generate leads from the following social networks:
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Thirty-nine percent of B2B marketers say they generated leads from Facebook
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Thirty percent of B2B marketers say they generated leads from Twitter
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Fifty-five percent of B2B marketers say they generated leads from LinkedIn
LinkedIn is the social network that generates the most B2B leads.
It makes sense to start here as business owners and professionals who wish to connect, use the platform.
Social media offers many customization options for businesses on their pages and groups.
However, most companies don’t make full use of these options; instead, they just post content related to their products.
Pay careful attention to the layout of your Facebook page and treat it like a sales page or a landing page for your website.
Constantly update the page with engaging content and ensure a clear call to action for leads.
Pay attention to:
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The types of pages they visit
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Times spent on each page
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How they found the page
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Whether or not you got their buy-in with a sign-up form on your landing page
Balancing Your Lead Generation
Even if your marketing team can acquire twice as many leads by increasing spending, the quality of these leads will vary, and you’ll overwhelm your sales team – resulting in a lower conversion rate and lower ROI.
The best way to scale successfully is to maintain a balanced lead generation ecosystem and focus on driving a mix of quality leads from various channels.
To run a successful lead generation strategy, you need to treat your sales funnel as an ecosystem with everyone working towards the same results.
This means structuring your team to nurture a diversified lead pool effectively and having a mix of both short-term and long-term strategies to maintain your sales funnel’s overall health.
Brand Loyalty
Companies can build larger communities of like-minded customers, which can, in turn, improve customer loyalty.
Most marketing departments measure lead quantity when determining a successful lead generation campaign. Sales teams, on the other hand, focus on lead quality.
Leads with a clear intent to purchase your product, who have the finances and means to do so, and who meet the parameters set by you are quality leads.
Contests And Giveaways
Running contests and giveaways is an excellent way of generating leads—contestants exchange emails for a chance to win a prize.
If you select a prize that your ideal leads are interested in, then they would possibly enter your contest. Contests and giveaways are viral and held over a short period.
Creating Content On A Disruptive Level
Creating content on a disruptive idea that teaches buyers about their industry or business will likely attract attention.
When a prospect engages with content that questions current practices and presents a solution, it indicates buyers’ openness to change.
Optimize Conversion Rates
High-quality data collection and analysis make it easier to take advantage of tools like targeted content that help influence the buyer’s journey to improve the likelihood of conversion.
Use features like discount offerings, chat boxes, online prompts, or exit-intent popups to provide visitors with what they need to make a purchase as easy as possible.
The Bottom Line
You need to find a balance that works specifically within your own operations at the end of the day.
There is always room for improvement so remember to keep testing, implementing, evaluating, and evolving your tactics to maximize the efficiency and ROI from your lead generation efforts.
The more you tweak and test every step of your inbound lead generation process, the more you’ll improve lead quality and increase revenue.
If your company needs help boosting organic traffic as part of your lead generation efforts, check out our SEO blog post.
Blogs and whitepapers are an important part of any marketing strategy, and can turn suspects into prospects, and prospects into genuine leads.
Hop-On The Kennected Train
According to HubSpot, 61% of companies name their top marketing challenge is generating traffic and leads.
If you’re part of that 61%, keep reading because what you’re about to discover could be a game-changer for you and your business (like it has for thousands of people before you).
So many business owners & sales professionals that come to us are struggling to get ahead because they’re stuck relying on referrals, lead lists, or manual prospecting.
This is taking up too much of their time and isn’t creating the consistent income they’re looking for to fund the lifestyle they want for themselves and their families.
Four years ago, the founders of Kennected had the same struggles. They found that lead generation was way too complicated, expensive, and time-consuming, knowing there had to be a better way.
So they developed a new way of getting qualified leads that turn into new customers on the #1 platform for B2B lead generation… LinkedIn.
In the four years since we developed this lead gen strategy, we’ve earned a spot on the Inc. 5,000 list of Fastest Growing Companies in America.
And more importantly, it helped over 17,000 businesses get new leads and sales for THEIR businesses.
Want to see how it works?
Click here to see how you can use Kennected to fill your sales pipeline with qualified leads in less than 10 minutes per day.
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source https://kennected.org/quality-lead-generation/
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