Generating quality leads is the number one concern of marketing and sales teams, according to several industry studies. The quality of the leads obtained has a direct impact on the number of sales closed. When sales teams focus on leads that are more likely to buy, they close more deals in less time, and therefore the cost of each acquisition decreases.
It seems simple, but the real situation of many companies today is that they cannot find the formula to attract quality leads. Although lead qualification is a vast topic that involves both marketing and sales, today we are going to focus on the attraction and qualification stage. how digital marketing actions and contents can be optimized so that the leads that enter the funnel are of good quality (even though the qualification process will continue with nurturing actions).
How to identify a “qualified” lead?
Before focusing on tactics for attracting quality leads, let’s lay the groundwork for starting from the same point. When is a lead considered “qualified”? There are different criteria, which will have more or less weight depending on the marketing and sales process defined and the type of product or service. But they all come into play when determining the quality of the lead.
Characteristics of a qualified lead:
☑️ Matches the attributes of your Buyer Persona (demographic, work, cultural, etc.).
☑️ Showed interest in any of your content, products or services (in general, by clicking on an advertisement and leaving their data in a web form).
☑️ Knows your brand and has already interacted with some digital assets on social networks or the web.
☑️Meets the necessary conditions to buy (i.e. has the authority to decide to buy, the budget and the need, at the present time, to access your solution)
As we said, each attribute will have a weight when it comes to qualifying the lead. For B2B companies, for example, the role in the company and the industry in which they work are much more relevant characteristics than the level of interaction on social networks. However, for an online clothing store, video or blog consumption and level of brand awareness will have more impact than job title.
Therefore, each company should create its own rating system..
If you already have your system in place, you can apply these techniques to bring the leads that reach marketing and sales closer to those quality criteria.
Techniques to attract more qualified leads
👉In your digital campaigns
Audiences based on your Buyer Personas
As we have already pointed out, designing your Buyer Personas is crucial for your lead generation strategy to work. Get to know your ideal customer in detail, their preferences, interests, motivations, habits, income levels, place of work… Any data you can use to design a message that will really engage them.
Once you define your Buyer Persona, create audiences with these characteristics to target your online campaigns. Search engine and social media campaign tools offer powerful targeting options. Make the most of your budget by targeting your ads to people who really have your customer profile. You may attract less traffic, but they will be users with a much higher propensity to advance in the funnel, right from the first stage of conversion.
Specific keywords
Las keywords o palabras clave son las frases que tus clientes potenciales usan para encontrar tu producto o servicio (o dicho de otra forma, para encontrar tu solución a su problema). En base a tu conocimiento sobre tus Buyer Personas, piensa qué keywords podrían utilizar.
Very generic keywords not only do not achieve a good positioning in search engines, but also generate few clicks. Users want to know exactly what you are going to offer them before they click.
Por eso es una buena práctica tanto para SEO (posicionamiento orgánico) como para SEM (campañas pagas) usar las llamadas “long tail keywords”, que son más competitivas y atraen un tráfico mucho más calificado.
Once you have defined these keywords, optimize the content (articles, landing pages, website) around these keywords..
👉On your landing pages
Forms with filters
Although the main objective of a landing page is to achieve conversion, in reality it is not desirable to have a landing page that everyone converts indiscriminately. The purpose of your landing page is to convert those visitors who are really interested in buying your product. If a lot of unqualified traffic arrives, your marketing and sales team will spend time and resources to serve a large number of leads that are not ready to buy or do not meet the requirements to be customers.
The best practice for filtering low-quality leads is to place filter” fields in the form. This can be the industry you work in, the role in the company or the revenue margin (or whichever is determinant for the sector). This is especially important for long-cycle products (high-priced, such as real estate or automotive) and for B2B companies.
For example, if your target is corporate, you can configure your form so that it only accepts business email addresses. This will prevent you from receiving contacts from students who, no matter how interested they are in your content, are not in a position to be customers.
Example of a form to capture qualified leads
Quality content
Conversion form optimization goes hand in hand with a content strategy designed to attract qualified leads. These are the so-called “lead magnets”, valuable content for your potential customers on their areas of interest (ebooks, guides, videos, infographics). In exchange for these, the user will leave their contact information in the form.
These contents are not only the “magnet” to capture leads, but also act as a “filter” since, being very specialized information, it is only relevant for those visitors with a real interest in the product or service.
Chatbots
A very effective technology for capturing leads and qualifying them at the same time are the chatbots. Instead of an on-page form, a bot is included that uses conversational marketing to extract visitor data and determine the quality of the lead before passing it on to the sales team. What’s more, if the chatbot is transactional, it could complete the sale on its own. But even in the case where the user prefers to talk to an agent, the chatbot has already done the pre-qualification work, and the salesperson ensures that only leads with a high chance of closing are coming in.
👉After acquisition: qualify your leads throughout the sales process
Lead Scoring
Once the lead has entered the funnel, depending on the complexity of the marketing and sales process, you will have to “nurture” it until it reaches the necessary maturity to make a purchase decision. In many cases, even if the lead is considered qualified for marketing, it is still too early to make a concrete offer. This nurturing is done through successive interactions and content delivery.
We will explain it in broad strokes because it is quite an extensive system (which deserves its own article). When implementing a automated lead scoring system, it is possible to assign points to each lead when it interacts with a company’s content, and provides new data that aligns it with the Buyer Persona. Once you arrive at the precise qualification, you move on to a commercial interaction with a higher chance of closing the deal.
Recibe el feedback of the sellers
Although their objective is not to capture leads, sales reps have a lot to contribute to the marketers’ mission. The first feedback is objective: are these leads being converted into customers? What is the value of the sales generated? How long does the sales process take?
If salespeople find the quality of leads unsatisfactory, it opens the way for feedback: What are the real needs and motivations of those who buy? What objections do those who choose not to buy impose? Which lead segments are generating the most revenue? Which ones are a waste of time?
Dialogue between marketing and sales is essential to better understand customers and develop more effective strategies to reach them.
How to connect marketing and sales work in a much more efficient way? With technology that integrates both processes, tracks each contact end-to-end and allows real-time monitoring of metrics. InConcert can help you!
