The Ultimate Guide To Growing Revenue With Marketing Qualified Leads

Leads are your most valuable resource, but not all leads are equal. Cold leads, warm leads, hot leads, information qualified leads, sales qualified leads, and marketing qualified leads (MQLs) require different conversion strategies.

You can’t generalize but must devise a strategy allowing you to cater to the right leads at the right time with the right set of tools, not to mention you must coordinate your marketing and sales teams so they can smoothly move your leads down the sales funnel.

Before we dig into marketing qualified leads, we’d like to highlight some statistics:

• For 65% of businesses, generating quality leads is the biggest marketing challenge.
• For 68% of B2B professionals, increasing the quality of their leads is the top priority.
• 53% of marketers spend half or more of their budget on lead generation.

Numbers don’t lie: the quality of your lead management, including marketing qualified leads, defines your business. Read on to learn everything you need to effectively generate and convert marketing qualified leads.

Types of Leads in Business

Marketing qualified leads are not the only leads out there, so it would help to put them in context. The table below shows all types of leads you might encounter and the place of marketing qualified leads (MQLs).

Lead Type	Features
Cold Leads: People without connection to your business or product	No interest Fit your general inbound lead qualification criteria
Warm Leads: Blog readers, email subscribers, social media followers, and those who previously decided not to buy from you	Moderate interest Fit your general inbound lead qualification criteria
Hot Leads: Those who requested a product demo, contacted your sales team, etc.	High interest Fit your general inbound lead qualification criteria
Information Qualified Leads (IQL): Newsletter subscribers, those who downloaded your free guide, etc.	Fairly high interest Fit your general inbound lead qualification criteria Actively researching your product
Marketing Qualified Leads (MQL): Your most loyal blog followers, social media ads clickers, etc.	Fairly high interest Fit your marketing qualified lead parameters
Sales Qualified Leads (SQL): Customers waiting for your sales pitch.	Highest interest in your product Fit the qualification criteria of your sales team

What Is a Marketing Qualified Lead?

The definition of a marketing qualified lead may vary depending on the company and how a particular sales funnel is designed. However, it’s essential to make your marketing and sales teams understand when a lead becomes a marketing qualified lead (MQL) and then a sales qualified lead (SQL).

Here’s a reasonably accurate marketing qualified lead definition:

• A marketing qualified lead (MQL) is someone showing interest in your product or services, fitting your marketing team’s specific qualification criteria, and having a relatively high chance of becoming your customer. Notably, marketing qualified leads have yet to decide to buy from you to become sales qualified leads (SQLs).

The qualifying criteria for an MQL vary depending on the company.

The most popular qualifying factors are:

• Website visits
• Submitting contact information
• Demo download
• Adding items to a wishlist or shopping cart
• Any other opt-ins

MQL leads bear high selling potential, but you must go the extra mile to convert them all the same, being ready for a not-too-pleasant 50% bounce.

Source: SAPW Consulting

Marketing Qualified Lead vs. Sales Qualified Lead

The main difference between marketing qualified leads and sales qualified leads is the level of interest in your product.

• An MQL is a potential customer already engaged with your marketing content and may be ready to buy from you. Conversely, an SQL is a customer who is 100% ready for your sales pitch. Transforming MQLs into SQLs without losing too many MQLs down the road is a dream for any business.

The other substantial difference is that different departments process MQLs and SQLs. Simply put, MQLs belong to your marketing team, whereas SQLs are the priority of your sales team, making it crucial to have your sales and marketing teams aligned.

Source: Revboss

How Do You Qualify a Marketing Qualified Lead?

To identify marketing qualified leads fromother leads, you must rely on the qualifying criteria that reflect your business needs and are adopted by your marketing and sales departments.

Marketing Qualified Lead Criteria

Demographics	Gender, age, ethnicity, marital status, employment, and education.
Psychographics	Interests, goals, desires, choices, motivation.
Firmographics	Company’s size, location, revenue, and industry.
Source of leads	Social media, website, blog page, affiliate campaign.
Engagement	On-site activity and responsiveness to promotions.
History of interactions	Previous purchases, website visits, and social media activity.
Feedback	Your leads’ impression of your business.
Trends	Patterns uniting MQLs that convert and bounce.

Detailed lead criteria can help you differentiate between different types of leads and establish which leads fit your buyer persona. At the same time, marketing qualified leads are only there for a short time — either you spark their interest, convert them into sales qualified leads, or they bounce.

SQL Leads Qualification Process

A typical qualification process for SQL leads is called BANT, an acronym for four key lead qualification criteria:

• Budget: How much is the lead expected to spend?
• Authority: Who will make a purchase decision?
• Need: Does the lead genuinely need the product in question?
• Timeline: How long will it take for the lead to make the purchase decision?

The BANT framework continues to be extremely popular with sales teams for its simplicity and practicality, allowing marketers to measure marketing qualified leads, but it’s not optimal. Click to read more about efficient lead qualification frameworks.

How Can You Generate More Marketing Qualified Leads?

1. Learn Your Marketing Qualified Leads Through and Through

Understanding your leads is crucial to finding the most effective conversion pathways. Knowing your MQL’s demographics, psychographics, and history of interactions may help you optimize engagement and budget allocation.

With the idea of what content resonates best with your marketing qualified leads, you can tailor your marketing content more effectively. Whether you sell insurance, real estate, or clothing, there’s only one king in the town: segmentation.

2. Leverage AI-driven Data Analysis

Technologies such as AI-driven data analysis platforms will allow you to pinpoint MQLs by uncovering patterns in customer behavior that you would likely have missed otherwise. Likewise, AI-powered analytics will help you create tailored messaging to address your audiences’ needs and wants (not just marketing qualified leads), drawing a full lead management picture for your business.

Source: Gartner

3. SEO-optimize Your Marketing Content

Qualified marketing leads don’t require special SEO optimization – you don’t have to do what you always do:

1. Definite your target audience and goals for each marketing campaign.
2. Periodically conduct competitor research and organic content audit.
3. Conduct keyword research while keeping in mind the search intent.
4. Keep it clean: stick to the white-hat SEO practices.
5. Create your unique data-driven SEO strategy that drives leads.

SEO-optimized marketing content must be semantic and keyword-based while not sacrificing the quality of content in favor of keyword stuffing and other tricks that you think may appeal to Google. They likely won’t — Google goes the extra mile to highlight quality content while banishing dirty practices.

Source: Launchsiteboost

4. Use Paid Ads

Paid ads will allow you to target specific demographics, interest groups, and geographic regions with tailored content through search ads and display ads:

• Search ads appear at the top of search engine results when users enter relevant keywords, aiming at potentially high-intent leads searching for a product or service like yours.
• Display ads appear on websites, blogs, and social media to target individuals who have visited your site before or shown an interest in similar products or services.

To maximize the efficiency of paid advertising, analyze your ads’ click-through rate (CTR), conversion rate (CVR), cost per click (CPC), and other marketing metrics. Likewise, you can test different versions of ads (for example, A/B testing) to identify which one resonates with your target audience.

5. Embrace Social Media

With around five billion users up for grabs, social media has become the most popular and effective digital marketing channel, ahead of website, blog, and email marketing. Not only can you use it to promote your products and services, but you can also build relationships and trust with potential customers.

From Facebook to Twitter to YouTube to Tiktok, you can use various marketing tools to generate marketing qualified leads, including:

• Interactive content: Not only is interactive content engaging on its own, but it enables cross-channel marketing by transferring your leads from, for example, your social media page to your landing page or YouTube channel.
• Freebies: Providing value for free and with no or few strings attached is a great way to generate marketing qualified leads and increase customer loyalty. Freebies go viral quickly, enabling ever-increasing exposure and brand recognition.
• Influencers: Leveraging influencers means creating content that resonates with their audience and – most importantly – they use themselves. Influencer marketing largely appeals to social proof, a psychological phenomenon where people follow authorities from peers who, in their opinion, conform to the social norm.
• Instant response: Addressing your customers’ needs and wants via one-on-one interaction is a surefire way to generate marketing qualified leads. Proactively answer questions, engage in relevant conversations, and provide value to your customers whenever possible to make your leads love you.

Source: LongKiat

How Is Generating Marketing Qualified Leads Different From Generating Leads?

Before we move on to converting marketing qualified leads, it’s worth clarifying that generating marketing qualified leads (MQLs) and generating leads are two closely related processes that pursue the same goal of identifying potential customers for a business.

However, the difference between generating leads and generating MQLs is the focus of the efforts:

• Generating leads focuses on increasing the number of potential customers, whereas generating MQLs involves more specific targeting of prospects who have already indicated an interest in the product or service (for example, attended a webinar or signed up for a newsletter).

But then again, although leads and marketing qualified leads are different, you can generate them using similar marketing tools and techniques (while tailoring your content individually for each segmented group).

How Do You Convert an MQL?

Now that you know how to generate an MQL, let’s move on to converting the latter to a sales qualified lead (SQL), paying customer, and – ideally – brand advocate.

You can do it in three steps:

1. Defining a marketing qualified lead.
2. Synergizing your marketing and sales teams.
3. Analyzing the result for timely updates and necessary tweaks.

 

Step 1. Clearly Define a Marketing Qualified Lead

Finding a uniform definition of a qualified lead, whether an MQL or a SQL, will allow your marketing and sales departments to unmistakably define conversion-prone leads and apply appropriate marketing and sales strategies.

For better results, you can introduce a lead scoring system.

What Is Lead Scoring, and Why Do You Need It?

 

Lead scoring is assigning points to your leads so you can know the value of marketing leads. Among other things, lead scoring can give insights into the sales funnel, revealing your most and least valuable touchpoints.

Lead scoring can be effective if:

• You have enough lead data to score your leads. You need data to create a sophisticated lead scoring system; the more, the better. If you aren’t getting enough data from your leads, consider adjusting your lead forms or upgrading your lead management system.
• You need to know which leads are your priority. You may need to align the lead qualification process to your lead processing capabilities and the number of leads you generate. On the other hand, if you have little success with the leads you are bringing in, you might need to reevaluate your lead generation.

Step 2. Synergize Your Marketing and Sales Teams

No matter how strong your sales techniques are, you must generate interest first. For that, you need a comprehensive plan specifying the roles of your marketing and sales departments and ensuring open communication between the two.

• To move your leads effectively down the sales funnel – warming them to marketing qualified leads first, then to sales qualified leads, and ultimately convert – you must keep the right balance between your sales and marketing efforts.

The synergy of your marketing and sales efforts involves devising:

• Lead routing criteria: When do marketing qualified leads become sales qualified leads? Devising failproof lead routing criteria will allow you to contact sales-ready leads unmistakably.

Here’s a lead routing logic for the financial sector:

Source: The Definitive Guide to Call Tracking

• Follow-up deadlines: When must your sales team contact the lead after the latter becomes a sales qualified lead? More often than not, you must contact sales-ready leads right away not to lose their purchasing power. Calling a lead within the first five minutes is 20 times more effective than calling them in half an hour.
• Accountability criteria: What are the benchmarks for assessing your marketing and sales teams’ performance and cross-department cooperation? At the same time, you must transfer customer data in real-time to your sales reps so they can get a head start in the conversion.

Step 3. Analyze for Timely Updates

As your business evolves, you need constant adjustments to reflect the changes. Even if everything works like clockwork now, there’s no guarantee it will work tomorrow just as well unless adapted to the current marketing realities.

The good news is that you don’t have to resort to manual work in your lead management cycle. Automated lead qualification and management software, such as Phonexa’s LMS Sync, can do all routine work for you while channeling your energy to things that a human can only handle.

Generate and Convert More Marketing Qualified Leads With Phonexa

In today’s over-competitive online sales, automation is king. As many as 80% of marketers use automation in lead generation to save time, increase customer engagement, and enable timely communication and upselling opportunities.

Phonexa’s LMS Sync, an all-encompassing lead management system, will automate your lead management while handling every click and call. Phonexa’s turkey software bundle covers lead management through and through, uniting three proprietary software suites:

• Automated lead tracking software
• Automated lead distribution software
• Automated lead analytics

With Phonexa, you will be able to generate qualified leads and get full insight into the customer journey while dissecting every touchpoint of your leads.

Schedule a consultation to learn more about LMS Sync and how it can help you optimize your marketing campaigns and streamline lead capturing, nurturing, and scoring.

Frequently Asked Questions

Lead vs. qualified lead in marketing

Lead	Qualified Lead
Have some interest in your company	Have some interest in your company
Not qualified as a potential customer	Qualified as a potential customer
Not a part of your sales process	A part of your sales process