Lead generation is one of the top B2B marketing goals. Providing inbound leads to the sales team is an important job, and although the concept seems clear and simple, it’s easier said than done.
What makes it challenging is ensuring that the leads can be converted into customers.
What is a quality lead?
Defining lead quality varies from company to company. For some, it represents the responders that completed the registration process or the leads that are located in a specific demographics. Others define quality as any responders that have at least one valid form of communication, such as email or phone number.
However, how these leads are handled is equally important as their quality. Organizations that don’t have a strategy in place will not be able to distinguish good leads from poor ones.
These guidelines will help you improve the quality of your respondents and ensure that your sales team’s efforts are not in vain.
1. Refine your message
Sometimes, marketers focus their attention on details like the perfect intro that captures attention, a strong message with many actionable verbs and emotions, and catchy CTAs. However, the overall message they’re trying to deliver can end up being overlooked and dilated.
How can you fix this? Take a look at your copy once you’re done and answer these questions:
- Did you clearly capture the idea of the services or products you offer?
- Did you mention the value and benefits of your services or products?
- Can people easily understand what you’re business is about?
- Is your entire message clear and concise?
If any of these questions got a „no”, you need to better refine, clarify, and simplify your message.
2. Forget quantity and improve quality
Stop focusing on driving a lot of traffic to your B2B website just for the sake of traffic. This is an ineffective technique for improving the quality and number of your leads. Instead, you need to continuously refine your marketing strategy and be more specific—in your website copy, ad, search, targeting, email campaigns, and so on.
Being specific ensures that you don’t waste your time targeting certain types of website visitors that will never be interested in your services or products.
3. Focus on Personalization
Whether we’re talking about an email, a blog post, or any other B2B content, you should aim to create your content to address the individual needs of your prospects. If you think this is impossible, take a look at these tactics you can implement to ensure you provide your prospects with the right message and the right time.
- Focus on what matters to your audience: address the pain-points of your customers and highlight how your products or services can help alleviate them. This is the best opportunity for you to capture their attention and educate them about your business.
- Tailor your CTAs: make sure you create calls-to-action centered around the needs of your consumers, based on what their motivations, aspirations, and fears are.
- Practice segmentation: use the information you have on your customers to create a strategy that provides tailored and useful content for them. This will result in higher engagement and conversions.
4. Prioritize lead nurturing
A marketer’s job doesn’t end when leads are captured. Marketing and sales teams must work together and invest time and effort into cultivating a healthy relationship with these prospects. The end result should be for the leads to understand that you can offer them the best solution for their pain-points and needs.
When your prospects feel like you have their best interest in mind (and this is what nurturing is all about) and feel engaged throughout the funnel, they are more likely to convert and become loyal customers.
5. Automation is key for lead generation
Using marketing automation can help you execute your efforts and produce more powerful results. It can take your lead nurturing efforts to the next level—and this is especially true when it comes to trigger email campaigns. These allow you to “strike” when your prospect is most engaged, keeping them moving through the sales funnel and maximizing your ROI.
6. Test, test, test
Analyzing what works and what doesn’t is an important part of lead generation through marketing efforts. Find out what engages your customers and adjust your strategy accordingly. Make sure you test everything you can—but give your testing efforts enough time to deliver true results.
An improvement of 1% every week can add up to massive gains by the end of a year. Also, all the insights you gather from testing different aspects of your strategy will help you discover patterns that can drive higher conversions.
Don’t just drive leads—drive the right leads
For your next lead generation strategy, you need to keep in mind that not all leads are created equal. Investing your time and efforts is only worthwhile if they are the right fit for your business and have a real potential of becoming your customers.
