Lately, I've been hearing more businesses struggling with the quality of their leads. They're challenged with measuring lead quality as well as figuring out how to improve the quality of their leads. Below are a few ideas to help you better measure the quality of your leads and how to improve overall lead quality.
Measure funnel conversion rates
You cannot improve what you don't measure. The first step in measuring and improving lead quality is to begin tracking relevant conversion rates in your marketing and sales funnels. Below are some ideas of important conversion rates to track:
- Visit-to-lead
- Lead-to-sale
- Visit-to-lead by channel
- Lead-to-sale by channel
Essentially, you want to know how each step of your funnel converts. This means tracking top-of-funnel, middle and bottom-of-funnel conversion rates.
In order to ensure you're not only tracking but letting the data drive your marketing decisions, save time by creating analytic dashboards. You can set them up in tools such as Google Analytics and HubSpot. Spend a little time setting up your dashboards, feel confident in your tracking and create weekly automated reports to help remind you to look at them. Get in the habit of reviewing these KPI's every week. The more conscious you are, the more you'll learn and spot what's working and what's not.
Improve visitor targeting
The more you can control your traffic, the better your lead quality will be. For example, your SEO, content marketing, online advertising, email lists, are all controllable to some extent giving you the opportunity to optimize for your specific target market. Research their goals, challenges, pain points, common objections and potential keywords they would use to search for information related to the solutions you offer.
Build a funnel
Not having a marketing funnel means you likely:
- Only have one conversion path
- Have lower visit-to-lead conversion rates
- May be missing opportunities to educate, nurture and convert more website visitors
Marketing funnels will give you the opportunity to increase overall lead flow and increase the quality of your leads. Once you have your marketing funnel built, you can begin to measure the quality of your leads and optimize each phase of your funnel, helping you squeeze more high quality leads from your marketing efforts.
Strategic prospect education
Content marketing is popular because it works. It helps you generate more targeted traffic and educate your prospects. Create content for each phase of the buyers journey to use in your marketing funnels. Create content your prospects would find helpful when researching, considering and deciding on solutions you offer. Providing this content helps prospects move themselves through the buyers journey and bubble-up when they're ready to talk. You can also use premium content such as eBooks and whitepapers to use for top-of-funnel conversions to fill your marketing funnel.
Leverage MQL's
Following the strategies above can give you the processes needed to generate marketing qualified leads. This means your prospects have already been exposed to your brand, see you as a potential solution and are ready to talk to a sales person. Lean on your marketing funnel and automations to nurture and convert prospects to marketing qualified leads for your sales team.
Remember, improving lead quality means measuring, better targeting, educating, creating strategic conversion paths and optimizing based on the data you build. Follow these tips to improve the quality of your leads and generate more sales.
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