How to Identify Good Quality Marketing Leads – Lead Generation Tips

Let’s get persona(l)

Regardless of your business type, your main objective is to sell your product or service. You need to have an ideal customer in mind in order to tailor your offerings and marketing strategy to drive sales, otherwise known as a persona. A persona is not so much a segment of your marketing data but more of a fictitious representation of a desirable customer. When you create a persona, take into account real data, such as demographics and behavior patterns. Oftentimes, you can collect this information from Google Analytics and social media insight.

Why are personas important?

You most likely talk to your boss and best friend differently, right? The same applies to your your personas. Different personas require different types of communication. A well-crafted persona allows you to tap into your customers’ minds to further understand their goals and desires, which makes your product and marketing more valuable to the customer and then attracts higher quality leads. Higher quality leads lead to higher customer lifetime value, which translates into more revenue in your company’s pocket.

All leads are not created equal

A lead is a lead, right? Wrong. 61 percent of B2Bs send all leads to the sales team even though only 27 percent of the leads are high quality leads. Stop wasting time trying to talk to everyone. Focus your time and budget on leads who are more likely to say “yes” to your product or service. Your marketing and sales team will thank you for avoiding the frustration of chasing down leads who have no intention to do business with you. At first it may seem difficult to weed the good from the bad, but we promise implementing the following strategies will make your job a lot easier.

How to Identify Good Quality Leads

• Produce great content: That’s inbound marketing 101. By doing so, you’re educating your audience on problems they might be experiencing and gently leading them to their solution (which, of course, is you). Great content establishes your expertise in the field and attracts the right crowd to your site.
• Design with leads in mind: Nothing scares off a qualified lead more than a poorly designed website. What do you want your audience to do? Put yourself in your persona’s shoes to plan out your site’s design, color scheme, and message. Don’t forget to make your site mobile-friendly. You never know which medium they could be using to access your site.
• Use relevant keywords: Take some time to plan out your keyword strategy, especially for blog posts. Even if you write awesome content, if no one is searching on the topics/terms you’ve selected, your content might as well not exist. If you’re looking to lock down high-quality leads, be sure to include long-tail keywords. There’s a huge difference between someone Googling “running shoes” versus “Nike running shoes for men”.
• Create a scoring system: While this may not be possible for every organization, developing a scoring system using data collected with your CRM system is invaluable. Salesforce suggests qualifying leads using two scores: fit score (how similar a lead is compared to a buyer likely to pull the trigger) and activity score (how often a lead is interacting with your company via the web, your app, etc.).

Maintaining lead quality

Your database is essential to your marketing strategy. Don’t bog it down with unqualified leads. Here are a few tricks you can use to make sure that you’re sifting leads that are sales team-ready:

• Filter with forms: Use filters to sift out leads who are an ill match to your business, as well as those who are trying to spam your CRM or sales team. If you notice a pattern, we recommend blocking certain email domains. Another tactic is to add fields that appear generic to people filling out the form but speak volumes about whether the lead is qualified. For example, add a field for the number of employees that work at the lead’s company or the lead’s business location.
• Create a smart list: Do you fear leads might be slipping through the cracks? Create a smart list with certain rules that can qualify leads. For example, if you’re only looking to do business domestically, you can filter out foreign IP addresses. You can also comb through your database by hand, deleting people with obvious fake names or phone numbers.
• Keep an eye on actions: You worked hard to create your content, but keep an eye out for a potential lead that’s downloading all of your content in one sitting (especially if they’re not closely related topics). This might flag someone who is doing competitive research on your company. Also, check to someone marks your email as spam or unsubscribed. If they aren’t interested in receiving your marketing messages, they’re most likely not looking to do business with you.

Generating qualified leads is hard work. You don’t have to do it alone. Contact New Perspective today to request a free consultation and gain insight on lead generation.