Few things are as frustrating as generating a high volume of leads only to end up with a paltry number of conversions or a wealth of rejections. These issues can be the by-product of having lower quality leads. Marketers are always eager to generate plenty of leads, but if the quality of the leads are low it can undermine the effectiveness of your lead generation strategy. Worse still, it means you could be wasting resources generating leads that you can’t convert.
Figuring out how to get quality leads turns many marketers into mad scientists—tinkering away with experiments to find the perfect “formula” for leads that are most likely to convert. Fortunately, there are plenty of useful tools and dependable methods that can help you get the leads that are most interested in your offerings.
Why You Should Focus on Lead Quality
Even the best marketers may get caught up in the excitement of “more.” They want more leads, greater volume, bigger numbers… but the reality is that getting a boatload of leads is only half the battle.
If you generated 100 leads and converted 25, you might feel good about those 25 sales. But if you then discovered a competitor had 25 conversions out of 40 leads generated, you’d lose your swagger. You’d want to know how they got such quality leads.
There’s a reason that 70% of B2B marketers want more quality leads. When you are able to increase your lead quality, you are generally able to spend less per lead and improve your return on investment. It means you’re dedicating less time and energy towards generating too many leads that don’t convert. Simply put: when you focus attention on improving the quality of your inbound leads, it’s time well spent.
6 Ways to Get Better Quality Leads
1. Know Your Target Audience
As mentioned, a quality lead is a lead that is more likely to convert. In order to effectively reach out to your potential customers, you should have an idea of who your typical customer is. To accomplish this, you can construct a buyer persona. When you put together a buyer persona, it is an example of what your customers look like in terms of demographics, interests, geographic location, and more.
Buy & Sell Leads with a Ping Tree Service
Depending on how broad your marketing reach is, you may end up creating multiple buyer personas. Creating a buyer persona is an invaluable step in getting better quality leads because it will help you focus your marketing efforts. You may realize that you only need to market to certain age groups or be able to pull back on campaigns in specific geographic areas. It also gives you a roadmap for all your marketing decisions, creating conditions for campaigns that bring in quality leads.
2. Get Specific with Nurturing Content
Content will always be important in the quest for more quality leads. The majority of customers today are dedicated to researching products and services before they hand over their hard-earned money. As a result, they crave content that will help them make their decisions. For quality leads—the people most likely to convert—it’s probable that they will be especially interested in doing research so that they can feel good about their decision.
It is up to marketers to utilize this interest in learning more to their advantage. You should be asking: What kind of specific content will help to 1) educate prospects and 2) move them further down the sales funnel?
Investing in quality content is well-worn pathway to getting better quality leads. If you provide prospects with helpful videos, blog articles, brochures, and more they will see your brand as an industry thought leader. Once you are established as an expert source, it will become so much easier to attract more quality leads.
3. Use Filtering Tools
Filters are essential when using lead management software to track, manage, and distribute your inbound leads. As you receive leads via calls or web forms, filters will help block spam or other fraudulent leads. You can also utilize filters to winnow your incoming leads so that you only have prospects that meet your specific criteria.
How you put together any web forms or IVR questionnaires plays a key role in how you filter leads. You want to tread carefully to not overwhelm prospects with lengthy forms or endless questions, but determine a few specific fields that can make a great difference. You can set up filters that directly work with your forms, so you can block any low-quality or fraudulent leads from entering your sales funnel.
4. Test Campaigns for Quality over Quantity
There is a lot of trial and error when it comes to figuring out the best way to get quality leads—but there doesn’t have to be. Advanced features like predictive modeling can help you test how changing certain variables can impact the success of your campaigns.
Predictive modeling creates models using data from your past campaigns. When you adjust specific variables, like the hours you are accepting calls or where you are running your campaigns, you can see the outcomes that are most likely to occur. This becomes an invaluable guidepost for allocating resources for your next campaign to target higher quality leads.
5. Identify Duplicate Leads
Fraudulent leads are a persistent threat to marketers looking to improve their lead quality, so it is crucial to know the different forms that fraud can take. Duplicate leads are a common avenue for fraud—this occurs when leads keep appearing with the same identifying information. It may be the same phone number, email address, or other form fields.
These duplicate leads can slip through the cracks unless you have a lead management system that is capable of highlighting them. If you are able to sort through the lead details, you can spot leads that may have been in your system before—this is integral to identifying a duplicate lead. By cutting back on the number of duplicates, you can improve your overall lead quality.
6. Implement Lead Management Software
There are a number of strategies you can follow to get more quality leads—both in how you approach your campaign and the tools you use to manage your leads. In order to get a 360° view of your lead strategy and the steps to improving your lead quality, there is no better investment than lead management software.
By using lead management software, marketers get to employ a dual approach to improving their lead quality. First, they can use the tools from lead management software—like filtering and spotting duplicate leads—to stop low quality leads from entering the sales funnel. This ensures that sales professionals do not have to waste their time on leads that are unlikely to convert.
Secondly, marketers can use lead management software to refine their marketing campaigns with tools like predictive modeling and lead analytics. You can use data to better target audience segments that align with your buyer personas. By using lead management software to track where your leads are coming from, you can redouble your efforts in areas where you’re already getting the most quality leads. For marketers who want to stop playing “mad scientist” in order to get higher quality leads, we encourage you to learn more about LMS SYNC—Phonexa’s lead management software platform.
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