10 Actions To Improve The Quality Of Your Leads

Have you heard the catch cry build your list. What is the use of building a list if no one buys from you?

What is the use of providing quality information but all people do is download it and then do nothing.

The value of your list is the quality of the people on your list and the fact that they buy from you. You can’t build a business based upon what you plan to do. Your business can only be built upon definite actions by yourself and your customers.

According to a recent study by Ascend2, 70% of B2B marketers cite improving the quality of leads as the most important objective of a lead generation strategy

Generating leads is wonderful but if they are poor quality, don’t spend money with you and just purely waste your time then that is not good for your business.

As generating leads is the most expensive form of marketing any business will undertake you want to be certain that you are investing your time, energy and money wisely.

The only way to do this is to generate high quality leads that will allow your business to grow.

These 10 Actions will help you improve the quality of your leads:

Website Messaging

The people you attract from your website will only be as good as the messages and communication on your website.

So if you have poor or confusing messaging or you have messaging that is aimed at everyone then you are killing the quality of the leads you attract.

So if your digital messaging and real estate (specifically your website) is full of fluff, generic statements, etc.—you can expect your leads to be fluffy and poorly qualified.

Whether it’s your sales or marketing messaging, you should always start with the problems you solve and not the solutions you sell.

This is why, within your sales messaging and website, you should have a very prominent section that says, “Problems We Solve.” When listing those problems, you should state them exactly as a potential customer would think, search, or state them as well.

Every business says who and what they are on their website. This is also why most businesses end up sounding the same and getting the same results.

But almost no one says what they’re NOT. Start with what you’re not. Make that a major part of your sales messaging, especially with what is on your website

Poor Targeting

If you don’t know who your customer is, then your targeting mistakes are going to affect a lot of the other downstream aspects of your campaign.

That is why having a profile of your ideal client is a necessity for any business.

A good way to build your ideal profile is to look at your top customers. Building a profile based on their characteristics will give you a good start.

You can then use the information you gather to better target your advertising campaign, so that the right people see your ads.

You can use the information to write better copy within your ads and landing pages.     

For example, think about the keywords that these people might type into Google Search, when they’re looking to engage with a business like yours.

Think about the websites that they enjoy visiting.

It will help you improve the performance of your Facebook Ads

It will help with your content marketing as tailor the majority of your content to your ideal client

For most people who are running PPC campaigns, be it B2B or B2C, the main cause of poor leads/sales is improper targeting.

So knowing and having a profile of your ideal client will help with AdWord Search campaigns, Display campaigns, Facebook campaigns. In fact any campaign you run.

It’s also a good idea to think about what kind of companies your ideal customers work in. What is the average size of the company, what is their job title, what sector are they in and what skills do they have?

This will help with LinkedIn campaigns.

The key to any campaign is this 3 step process:

• Message – what problems you solve, solutions you provide.
• Market – who do you solve these problems for, ideal client.
• Medium - where is your market hanging out?

If you use these 3 steps as a basis for any campaign then you will have a good start.

Be aware though that improving lead quality means lowering your volume of leads.

When working on improving lead quality, it’s almost inevitable that you’ll also lower the number of leads you’re generating.

So if you pride yourself on quantity of leads and not quality you will be disappointed.

Ideally, the number of quality leads is going up as overall leads declines. This means you’re avoiding the lower quality leads that are easier to come by, and instead are generating higher quality leads.

This means you are increasing your efficiency. It will also mean that you will achieve increased returns on the back end of your marketing system. Because the more efficient you are on the front end of your system the greater the impact you will have on the backend of your system.

When working on lead quality, it’s important that you expect a number of things to happen with your key measurements:

• Overall lead volume will decrease
• High-quality lead volume should increase
• Cost per lead usually goes up
• Cost per high-quality lead should go down
• Click-through rate typically goes down
• Use qualifying copy in ads

Improve Your Lead Nurturing Sequence

Lead nurturing is the process of building relationships with qualified prospects regardless of when they will buy, with the goal of earning their business when they are ready

At the end of the day, leads are only valuable to your business if they convert into paying customers.

Increasing your conversion rate by as little as a few percentage points can have a drastic impact on your business. For example: If your product sells for $400, and your conversion rate is 2%, your lead value is $8. If you can increase your conversion rate to 4%, your lead value doubles to $16.

Practice Good Hospitality: Nurture Your Leads

Even though everything happens across a computer or smartphone screen, lead nurturing should always be viewed as a human-to-human, one-to-one interaction.

You’ve introduced yourself online, maybe pitched a piece of valuable help, and now you’ve got a new lead: someone who says, ‘ok, I’m interested enough to continue this conversation…sounds like you may be able to help me.’ And now they’re inside your email list, waiting to see what happens next.

What happens next should be a carefully constructed path of communications in which you deliver thoughtfully curated content that delivers value, upon value, upon value – and sprinkles in a few upsells and offers along the way.

This is where the terms ‘content marketing’ and ‘customer journey’ truly come into play.

You’ll need to demonstrate an awareness of who you’re talking to & what they need, as well as an ability to meet that need in the form of free content. You found a stranger, captured a prospect, and are now converting that prospect into a customer (for life).

Why? Because this is what it takes to be in business: a consistent dedication to improving your conversion rate and boosting the value of your leads.

Here’s what we recommend:

• Nurture New Subscribers: Check on the email series you send to new subscribers. Are your messages relevant to their initial request, or are you dumping them into a generic newsletter series?
• Play the Long Game: Don’t go straight in for the sales pitch. Instead, spend a little bit of time optimizing your email sequence with a focus on delivering free content in order to gain value and establish trust. Thoughtfully bridge the gap between what your lead has downloaded for free and the product or service that you’re hoping to sell to him or her in the future.

A 2010 Forrester Research study found that companies that excelled at lead nurturing were able to generate 50% more sales-ready leads at a 33% lower cost per lead than other companies. (salesartillery.com)

Automating the nurturing and scoring of leads in your funnel is fairly simple to understand. And if your sales funnel only has a handful of leads in it, you could do it yourself, manually. But scaling your sales is nearly impossible without automation.      

Lead Scoring

Lead scoring is a process of ranking a lead’s interest level and sales readiness based on a methodology agreed upon by marketing and sales.

Companies can score leads in a variety of ways by assigning points and implementing rankings like “hot,” “warm,” or “cold.” Or A, B, C, or D.  

The actual scoring should incorporate a combination of explicit data and implicit data.

Explicit data is information the prospect provides such as title, industry, company, etc.

Implicit data is what is revealed by the prospect’s online behaviour such as pages visited, and recency or frequency of visits

In an Eloqua study of 10 B2B companies using lead scoring systems, on average, deal close rates increased by 30 percent; company revenue increased by 18%; and revenue per deal increased by 17% (salesartillery.com)

Landing Pages

For some B2B companies, the issue is that they have a solution/product that will obviously benefit the end customer. But, they’re not taking the time to educate the customer as to why they need the solution in the first place

In some cases, your ideal customer isn’t yet aware of the benefits that your product provides or how your offer can be implemented into their business

If you’re using lead generating landing pages, you probably already know that they can also have a massive impact on the quality of your leads

When optimizing your landing page to improve the quality of your leads, you might not necessarily improve the quantity of your leads

The reason for this is simple. When optimizing for quality, you want to make sure that the right people are entering the details into your landing pages – as opposed to just attempting to get more people to enter their details.

Additionally, make sure that you build custom landing pages for each ad that you create.       

This will help improve conversions, as those clicking on your ads will each be given a customized experience.

It also will allow you to track where your leads are coming from.

One of the best ways to accomplish this is to use UTM Parameters and ValueTrack Parameters. These tags are data that you append to the end of your landing page URLs, and you've probably seen them when you clicked a link or ad.

Always write landing pages for target customers, not all customers

A great sales pages has several leverage points for higher conversions. Optimizing for each one can pay off big dividends.

Here’s what to do:

Write a Killer Headline: Does your headline scream, “I’ve got to have that!” or does it come up (sadly) short? Your headline should focus on the ultimate benefit/results that your target audience is seeking and should entice your audience to click and learn more.

Be Clear About the Benefits: Throughout your sales page, are you showcasing the features of your product through the lens of “what’s in this for me?” For each primary element of your product or service, be sure to fully answer the “so what?” question that your prospects are thinking to themselves.

Provide Proof: Are you able to illustrate testimonials and case studies from previous customers that are relatable to your prospects? Adding 3-5 authentic testimonials to your page will boost your conversions, especially if those testimonials address common objections and fears that your target prospects have at the time of purchase.

Reverse the Risk: Can you offer a guarantee to make your product or service risk-free? This can take the form of a money-back policy (30-60 days is typically ideal), or a “we won’t stop until you’re excited about your results” type of promise. Adding in language that relieves the pressure of the buying decision in this way will boost your conversions.

Create a Sense of Urgency: The enemy of good business marketing is indecision. Use language on your sales page to compel a decision. Use a countdown timer before your offer expires or the price changes. Add extra value (in the form of bonuses for example) to your offer within a certain time frame.

Landing page copy is yet another tool to further qualify the users on the page. Use your landing page copy to outline what your ideal customers would be.

Video Marketing

Studies have shown that by the year 2020, 80% of the content online reviewed by consumers during the buying process will be video-based content.

With this being such a significant trend, every sales person literally needs to see themselves, and their company, as a media organization.

This means they must teach using the power of video, often, and then integrate these videos throughout the entire sales and marketing process.

Simply stated, most sales pros spend way too much time when meeting with a prospect answering the same 80% of questions over and over again. But what would happen if they eliminated those questions?

What would happen if every prospect knew, before the first sales appointment, your company’s philosophy and thoughts on those 80% of questions that everyone wants to know?

A great way to overcome this is to use videos to answer the questions or use Facebook Live to conduct a Q&A session that can be shared across all your digital assets and real estate.

Take your FAQ and turn them into an informative video series that helps customers understand your business.

Content

This first option might seem obvious, but it’s easy to neglect.

Your content is responsible for the majority of your inbound traffic and early interested leads—it attracts people from Search engines and social media, and forms visitors’ impressions of your site when they start poking around.

The type of topics you pick can have a drastic impact on the people who eventually choose to convert.

For example, if you write about basic, general topics in your industry, you’ll tend to attract leads who are nearly unfamiliar with your type of company and industry best practices.

Conversion Optimization

Conversions mean more total revenue for your site, as long as you’re closing leads, but when most people (myself included) talk about “conversion optimization,” we’re talking about increasing the quantity of leads you receive.

There is another type of optimization—one that increases the quality of leads you receive, which is just as important if your bottom line goal is more revenue

If you’ve ever been in a sales position, you know why lead quality matters. Low quality leads are people who aren’t interested in your product or brand, or those who are just interested in finding out more details without really buying anything (tire-kickers).

They may even be people who fall outside your demographics if you’re generating leads automatically. All this is a problem because every “weak” lead you spend time on is wasted time you could have spent on a high quality lead. You might get fewer leads overall, but your sales ratio will be much better

If your content and social adjustments don’t help, you can consider directing people to different landing pages based on their intentions (and possibly behaviour).

For example, let’s say you offer three different levels of service: one for beginners, one for experts, and one as a white-label service for other businesses.

Here, you can create three different landing pages with specific copy that only appeals to one of these demographics (each). If you funnel lots of traffic to each of these pages, they’ll naturally filter out any leads who aren’t qualified for each specific service.

Marketers who say quality of leads are the most important are those who have connected their lead generation efforts to their sales pipeline metrics.

This kind of marketing and sales alignment has become more common with the shifts that digital marketing has caused in this relationship. It doesn’t take long to discover that as lead quality increases, so does its impact on the sales pipeline.

Email Marketing

Instead of attempting to get leads right away, turn your main site of conversion into a “prospective lead” generator.

When you get someone to fill out your form, subscribe them to an ongoing email campaign (or similar marketing strategy that keeps your brand top-of-mind).

A portion of these subscribers—only the most interested—will open your emails regularly, and might even reach out directly to you.

With every email, your pool of prospective leads will grow warmer toward your brand, and uninterested parties will naturally unsubscribe, allowing your lead pool to filter itself.

This is where your lead scoring really kicks in as you score every action that a client or prospect takes.

Lead generation leaves the door open for anyone to convert on the initial lead conversion stage, regardless of their actual ability to buy the end product. Because of this, we need to develop strategies to target higher quality leads and deter unqualified users from filling out our forms.   

Always review your email list to see which prospects are opening and reading your emails. If you find clients who are not reading your emails then you should start a reactivation campaign to try and get them back on track

At the end of this campaign you can cull leads that have shown no interest in you or your business.  

Increase Form Fields

Qualify Your Leads through Form Fields

A surefire way to scare off folks who are only window shopping is to ask them for more information.

It’s the highest price anyone can pay to a lead generation company. If you’re noticing a large number of forms filled by lower quality leads, try increasing the amount of information you ask for

By adding in questions about industry, job title, and company name, our sales teams were able to better speak to the lead’s individual needs simply by doing a little research before the follow up call. The sales team felt prepared and the lead felt heard. A win-win.

And finally, weed out your weaker leads by using offer form fields.      

Once your inbound leads show an interest in your top funnel offer, they are given the option to download the useful content in exchange for basic information (usually just an email address).

In the middle funnel offer, they may be asked for their job title, marketing budget. In this way, your leads gain access to increasingly valuable offers in exchange for more specific information that enables you to qualify them as quality leads.

B2B marketing is all about generating leads. Because many B2B sales cycles can be lengthy, leads are the best indicator of future sales success.

Whether you call it a funnel, a journey, or a loop, prospects that become leads have raised their hands and expressed some interest in what your B2B company does, makes, or provides.

As you can see these actions are a very powerful way for you to improve the quality of your leads. They are again:

• Website Messaging
• Improved Targeting
• Improved Lead Nurturing
• Lead Scoring
• Landing Pages
• Video Marketing
• Content
• Conversion Optimization
• Email
• Increase Form Fields

Now don’t try and do everything at once. If you spend part of each day improving one aspect then over time you will see substantial results.

Continuous improvement every day will bring you outstanding results. Just like compound interest but that is a topic for another day.