Leads are the lifeblood of countless business.
The most common leads issue we see with clients and prospects is low lead quality.
In other words, their providers (often PPL providers who have their own dark side) are sending them a good volume for their team to work with, but the conversion rates are far lower than they were hoping.
Whether you’re generating leads in-house or working with a provider, here are 4 tips that businesses like yours can use to audit and ultimately increase your lead quality.
1 – Define Your Target Audience(s) and Use a Persona
Let’s start with a big one. Not every business has the same target audience.
True, there will be overlap between people who buy shoes and book hotels in your area, but a common mistake is pointing that your product or service offers to a wider audience than necessary.
Ideally before launching any campaigns (although it’s never too late), you’ll want to have a good idea of who the people most likely to become your clients are and then focus on them.
Start by asking yourself some general questions like:
- What is their approximate age range?
- What are their backgrounds (industry, education)
- What are their interests?
- Are they married? Have children?
Then, depending on your industry, there might be further ways to refine it.
For instance, if you’re an SaaS provider, consider what app your prospective clients might also be using.
Remember: often your best way of understanding your audience is by looking at your own data. If you have a detailed CRM, there’s likely a treasure trove of information in there to help you refine your campaigns.
2 – Segment Your Audiences and Messaging
It’s very common for businesses like yours to have multiple customer personas, each with slightly different wants and expectations.
In cases like this, it’s often best to segment your audiences into different campaigns that could include:
- Separate messaging and USPs.
- Different creatives (images, videos, that resonate with them).
- Multiple landing pages catering to different needs.
Splitting your audiences will make campaign management more complex, but ultimately higher performance as your ads will better align with each group.
For instance, if you run a website that takes bookings and your audience includes parents with kids and single people, you may want to split up your images to better resonate with each.
3 – Score or Categorize Leads to Quickly Identify Higher Quality Prospects
As I’m sure you’ve realized with your own marketing efforts, even among your target audiences that not all leads are created equal.
Certain characteristics of your prospect personas might have a higher chance of converting than others, and they should be quickly identified and focused on as quickly as possible.
Most modern CRMs have systems that allow you to either score or categorize (or at the very least, tag) leads based on the information they submitted.
For instance, depending on your business, you might notice that your highest quality leads:
- Have a particular job function or position more likely to close a deal?
- Select a question or service from your form that converts at a higher rate?
- Are part of one persona and not necessarily the others?
For example, if clients with a job function like “product manager” are the most ideal leads for your SaaS platform, you will want to score them higher than someone who puts in some vague IT position and potentially even have a separate nurture campaign for them.
You may even notice that your ideal lead has a number of separate elements that, once all added up, make for an ideal lead. In such cases like these, a more rigorous scoring process may be needed to really hone in on these high value prospects.
4 – A/B Test Advertising Assets and Creatives
After you’ve gotten most of the groundwork and foundations in place for identifying who your top quality leads are and where they come from, you can start to test and further optimize.
Consider running A/B tests on your creatives and assets to determine if specific tweaks to your formula drives even stronger leads.
Some good test ideas include:
- Split testing your email nurture campaigns or follow-ups.
- Testing different landing page copy and USPs.
- Adjusting forms to have more or fewer fields (or even different fields).
- Run ads targeting new audience variations.
For example, you may notice that by adding a field about job title that you receive 2% fewer form submissions but it becomes easier to isolate the high value leads.
Testing isn’t something you finish in a single afternoon, but giving each test a few days to a few weeks (depending on your lead volume) is sure to help you further isolate your best leads.
Next Steps?
Working internally to improve your lead quality isn’t always easy. Fortunately, lead gen is one of our bread and butter services – including helping ensure that the leads you get for your business are workable, high quality leads (and not fluff).
If you’re interested in learning more, we offer free 30-minute consultation calls. Just contact us and we’ll schedule something.
