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Does your marketing team need more leads or better leads? This is kind of a trick question, because “more” doesn’t always mean “better.” After all, it’s value, not volume that spurs marketing success. You can have a ton of leads, but if sales can’t convert them to customers, they are essentially useless.
In this post, we offer guidance on how to improve lead quality so you can see a better return on your investment (ROI) in generating and pursuing those leads. We’ll look at how improving lead quality can help reduce costs for your marketing operation. And you’ll get concrete examples of ways to improve lead quality, like conducting more efficient lead tracking by using call tracking software.
First, let’s explore what we mean by “lead quality” and what metrics you can use to assess it.
Lead quality has a direct impact on the success or failure of your sales and marketing strategies. Higher-quality leads deliver more conversions, which means higher sales and overall business success.
Leads are targets who already know about your company or product and want to know more. We’ll dig into this more later, but high-quality leads come from digital sources such as online searches and website visits, and from face-to-face and phone interactions. The key for marketers is to be able to track all valuable leads from every source.
How do you assess the quality of a lead? Here are some measures you can use to gain a deeper understanding of your lead:
Of course, you want to focus your resources on cultivating leads that can help you boost sales and revenue and generate greater CLV. This four-step process can help you weed out low-quality leads so you can do just that.
Not all leads are equal. You must establish clear criteria for what constitutes a high-quality lead based on demographics, firmographics, and behavior and use that data to guide your marketing outreach.
Develop a lead scoring model based on lead behavior and demographics to objectively evaluate and prioritize leads based on their fit and readiness to purchase. Use this model to measure lead quality.
Once you’ve measured lead quality, you can divide the leads into segments. Start with the highest-quality leads — the ones that most closely align with your ideal customer profile.
After you complete the first three steps, you should be left with a pile of obvious bad leads — the ones that waste your resources and don’t deliver. Once you’ve isolated them, toss them out!
To make the most of good leads, you need to develop them. This is where lead qualifying and lead nurturing come into play.
Lead qualification is a process that involves lead scoring and grading. It helps you determine how valuable your leads really are. And it provides your team with the intelligence to marshal the resources needed to make outreach more effective.
Lead qualification can be based on demographic, psychographic, and behavioral data. You can supplement this data by asking your leads basic questions such as, “Are you looking to purchase something in particular?” and “When are you planning to make a purchase?”
Once you’ve qualified your leads, you’ll want to cultivate them. Building relationships with qualified leads at every stage of their customer journey helps guide them toward a transaction.
This process involves engaging with customers through various channels and providing relevant information, resources, and support to guide them toward making a purchase decision. Your aim is to foster trust, maintain communication, and ultimately, turn leads into loyal customers.
Lead tracking is an effective tool to aid in your lead nurturing efforts. You need to know where a lead originated from and how close that potential customer may be to purchasing. This information can be easy to determine when you’re following a lead’s digital data trail online. But what if your business conducts sales over the phone? Not a problem. You can tie customers’ digital journeys to phone calls if you use the right call tracking software.
If you’re looking for specific tactics to improve lead quality, we have some suggestions. Here are five straightforward strategies to consider using.
You can attract better leads to your website through search engine optimization (SEO) practices that ensure you employ compelling meta descriptions and relevant, targeted keywords. SEO will help you attract better organic traffic and improve the visibility of your brand on search engines.
As part of a search engine marketing (SEM) campaign, you can launch targeted pay-per-click (PPC) advertising campaigns using platforms like Google Ads to capture leads actively searching for your products or services.
Make sure to include artificial intelligence (AI) in your PPC strategy, such as Google Ads Smart Bidding. The use of AI in PPC ad campaigns makes targeting and deploying campaigns easier and much more effective.
Social media can provide you with a wealth of quality leads, provided you’re using the best platforms to reach your target audiences with organic and paid social media campaigns.
If your primary demographic is younger women, for example, you will want to make sure that YouTube is a prominent channel for your social media outreach since 83% of women and 93% of 18 to 29-year-olds frequent the platform.
Relevant, informative, and engaging blog content can be a highly effective tool for nurturing leads. Optimize blog posts for search engines with relevant keywords, internal links, and structured data markup to improve discoverability and organic traffic.
Email marketing campaigns with personalized content, engaging subject lines, and compelling calls to action (CTAs) will draw in and help you retain better leads. Use lead data such as name, location, past interactions, and purchase history to increase engagement and conversions.
Making sure that marketing and sales fully align across every channel in the customer journey can enhance lead quality, reduce costs, and drive revenue.
Platforms like Invoca can close the gap between a customer’s digital (online) and offline (phone) journeys, enabling marketing and sales to optimize their efforts and focus attention on high-value leads with the best chance of generating revenue. This helps your teams collaborate more effectively around the shared goal of driving revenue and CLV.
In addition to driving revenue execution and growth, you’ll see several other benefits from improving the quality of your leads. They include:
Higher-quality leads mean less work for your sales teams by reducing inside sales workforce needs. That leads to cost savings and resource optimization.
When you use a revenue execution platform like Invoca, you can track the quality of phone leads using AI to analyze every conversation. This ensures you’re tracking, qualifying, and nurturing only the highest-value, highest-quality leads.
Higher-quality leads are more reliable as purchasers than lower-quality leads. They are also more likely to deliver repeat business. So, taking care to qualify and nurture quality leads can positively impact the company’s bottom line and overall financial stability.
Improved lead quality allows your marketing and sales teams to focus on fewer — but better — leads. The results are more effective efforts to acquire and retain customers. High-quality leads are more likely to convert to customers. And because they receive more personalized attention, they are also likely to become satisfied and repeat customers.
Happy and loyal customers are more likely to become your long-term customers. Less churn means higher CLV, which can give you a competitive advantage in the marketplace and help you drive growth and achieve long-term profitability.
Attracting and keeping high-value customers can help improve brand reputation and image, too. Having a strong brand identity boosts industry credibility and attracts more high-quality leads.
By prioritizing lead quality and investing in strategies to attract, nurture, and retain high-value customers, your business can achieve sustainable growth while creating lasting value for your customers and stakeholders. You also need the right tools.
Solutions like Invoca can provide marketing and sales teams with acute insight into the quality of phone leads driven by marketing campaigns. The technology also helps you gauge how well your sales agents are closing leads over the phone. In short, it serves as a revenue execution platform that helps keep your marketing and sales teams aligned and making the most of high-quality leads.
Invoca can show marketing and sales teams how to improve lead quality in the sales funnel, close more deals, and increase revenues. Forrester recognized Invoca among notable vendors in The Real-Time Revenue Execution Platforms Landscape, Q1 2024. Check out the report, which outlines the value of real-time revenue execution platforms, use cases, and what to look for when choosing a vendor.
Want more tips on how to improve lead quality and drive revenue? See these resources:
Reach out to us today to schedule a customized demo so you can see for yourself how Invoca can give you insight into the quality of the phone leads your marketing efforts drive.
