Generating online sales leads is the easiest and, at the same time, the most challenging part of doing business online. Online lead generation is easy because there are lots of ways to generate leads, such as emails, social media, content marketing, and SEO, to name just a few.
The hard part of lead generation is finding leads that result in more conversions. It is possible to pour a lot of money and time into your lead generation process and still end up with numerous bad leads. These are leads with a low to zero likelihood of buying from you now or ever.
The team of Upkeep Media marketing agency says the reason this happens is because of your lead qualification process, how you predict the likelihood that a prospect will become a customer. A lead qualification process that clearly defines the key characteristics of your potential customer will lead to more quality leads.
To improve the quality of online leads, you must improve lead qualification. That’s because, out of the thousands of people who visit your website within a given period, only one out of five promises to become a customer. Suitable lead qualification is about finding that one person.
To improve lead qualification, your business has to do the following four things well:
- Identify the key traits or qualities of your ideal customer or target audience
- Compare each new lead against the representation of your target customer
- Disqualify those leads that do not match the qualities of your ideal customer
- Focus your time, energy, and money on pursuing leads that qualify
To improve lead qualification and the quality of online leads, here are eight steps you can implement today:
How to improve the quality of your online leads
1. Understand that not everybody is your customer
It begins with knowing what problems you are in the market to solve and who needs those solutions. Can you depict that person in terms of their demographic and psychographic qualities? Based on the profile of this ideal customer, what are the most effective marketing channels for finding them? What is the typical process this person goes through before buying from you?
2. Determine your most effective marketing channels
To determine the best platforms for reaching your target audience, you must know their needs, preferences, and online behavior (especially how they search for information). The characteristics of your product or services also play a role. Consider looking at the channels your competitors are using.
3. Select your keywords
Keywords help search engines and online platforms match your content to the best prospects. Keyword research will help you find words and phrases that align with your audience and brand. Data from keyword research enables you to choose the right content to create and enables you to craft the proper offers.
4. Create useful content
Focus on content that answers the questions of your target audience. This content should identify the common issues your potential customers face and resolve them in ways that resonate with that customer. There are many ways to do this, but they should all focus on the needs of your audience and on getting a specific response from them.
5. Always ask for referrals
Your current customers offer an easier route to reach new potential customers. If these current customers like you and your brand, they will often be happy to connect you to the people in their circle or even reach out on your behalf. To incentivize such customers, you should look for ways to reward them through discounts and other benefits.
6. Automate the process, where possible
A significant reason for low-quality leads is the sheer number of those leads. The amount of leads generated by your marketing efforts can overwhelm you and make evaluating those leads harder. Automation tools and software will help you simplify these processes. The cost of acquiring those tools is quickly recouped.
7. Track your data
To improve success, you must measure performance. That means collecting and analyzing different kinds of data. For instance, tracking email and social media engagement makes it easier to identify and focus on prospects with higher lead scores. Other data that will show you the effectiveness of your lead qualification process are initial sales conversions and repeat sales conversions.
8. Constantly improve your processes
Tracking your data helps you to identify your best and worst-performing campaigns. You can see what worked, what didn’t, and what you should do more or less of. For instance, if you got more conversions from leads who clicked on links within an email versus leads who signed up for your email, you know you should redirect focus to leads with high click-through rates.
Finally, improved lead quality is about how well you know your target audience and how fine-tuned your marketing efforts are to the needs of that audience.
But sometimes, businesses are so involved in their internal processes that they need help to look at their market objectively.
That is why you need an external pair of eyes to look at your business and help you identify those things you cannot see because you are too close to the action.
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