Believe it or not, Marketing can have a profound effect on the success of Sales. Marketers are responsible for generating leads for Sales to close into paying customers. They are also responsible for the types of leads they send over to Sales and when they decide to send them. Marketers should not only be focused on generating leads, but they should also be focused on the quality of the leads they produce.
When marketers focus time on lead nurturing to make regular leads more qualified before handing them off to Sales, Sales can spend more time closing deals instead of prospecting.
Lead quality varies from business to business. A high quality lead, or Marketing Qualified Lead (MQL), is one that is more likely to convert into a customer based on certain activities. For example, a lead that fills out a form to request a custom demo of your product is probably more qualified (likely to become a customer) than a lead that fills out a form to download a piece of educational content. Below are 3 simple steps to get you generating more, higher quality leads to help your sales team work more efficiently and close more deals.
Step 1: Create Content that Converts
It’s important to create content that attracts leads to your site, but it’s just as important to also create content that later helps those leads to convert into customers. This “converting” content, or middle of the funnel content, specifically ties in information about your industry or topic to your product or service. An example of this could be an ebook on how your product or service can be a solution to a common obstacle in the industry.
It’s important not to forget about this type of information when thinking about lead generation and lead management. You should always strive for a balance between the two in order to push leads through the marketing funnel.
Step 2: Determine which Events Close Customers
After creating middle of the funnel content that converts, you should focus your efforts on analyzing what offers and events are converting the most leads into customers. With closed-loop marketing, you can easily trace the origins of your leads and their actions on your site before they convert into customers. Events such as requesting a custom demo or free trials typically have high close rates, since they indicate that a lead is sales-ready.
Step 3: Create Calls-to-Action to Promote High Closing Events
Once you’ve determined the events and offers that convert most of your high-quality leads, you can promote these individual events on both your website and within your sales organization.
On your website, you can promote these events with calls-to-action, or CTAs. Typically, CTAs are located in your email messages, thank you landing pages, blog posts, or website pages. The goal is to make these CTAS very prominent in all of your marketing communications. You should also promote these events with the help of your sales team. Be sure to communicate and alert your sales reps as to which events create high closing leads.
By creating content that drives high-quality leads, analyzing which of your offers yield the best leads, and promoting them with effective calls-to-action, you can strengthen your pipeline and send your sales team some great leads to convert into customers. This will also allow them to focus their time and attention on these leads above and before anything else, enabling them to close more deals and drive better results for your business.
Neil April 3, 2012 at 11:42 pm
A lot of people get really hung up on getting lots of traffic to their site but then have no call to action to try to convert them into customers. I think creating good CTA’s is a real art however once you have one that works you can transform your business.
Nishadha April 3, 2012 at 11:18 pm
The first point alone is worth the visit to read this article. I think this is something that is overlooked by most businesses or something they can do but don’t think that is important.
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Dean Saliba April 3, 2012 at 10:31 am
I have never had much luck with making my content convert, I just keep ploughing away and hope that I stumble on the right result eventually.
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doug April 2, 2012 at 11:34 pm
Alison, you point out specifically why Hubspot is providing more than just lead nurturing. It’s this sort of inbound advice that sets it apart from its competitors.
Alex Hub April 2, 2012 at 5:32 pm
I absolutely sure that we need to try all the techniques and methods to reach out target audience. I like the website called Triberr it helps to define your audience so called tribe.
Bishwajeet April 2, 2012 at 4:30 pm
There should be call to action for each and every marketing strategy you use.
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Steven Papas April 2, 2012 at 1:30 pm
I think I really like the call to action (CTA) marketing strategy. I think if someone is with you cause enough to join hands with you in a sense you have thus created a long term relationship with the traffic you are drawing in.
Mariella Lombardi April 2, 2012 at 9:56 am
Alison, I loved your term: Marketing Qualified Lead (MQL) and your definition. A qualified lead is one that is more likely to convert into a customer. On that basis, certain marketing activities on platforms like Twitter are not targeted. One should focus their resources on identifying the areas that have the highest percentage of qualified leads and market in these areas mostly. I know of people who were getting thousands of views on their YouTube videos, just because they had interesting images on them. However their conversion rate was miserable. Obviously, their YouTube videos were attracting clicks by the wrong audience. MQL, as you explain it, is key! Thanks Hesham for this guest post.
Jacko April 2, 2012 at 8:42 am
Good article. Capturing leads has to be the #1 priority of any business. No pun intended but its no accident the lawyers are all over the phone books and billboards all over the place.
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Sara April 2, 2012 at 7:53 am
I will agree with you.Marketing is all over and sometimes leads the whole market. It’s very important not to have only one way to attract costumers to our blogs and those 3 steps are something extra and also helpful.
Samuel April 2, 2012 at 7:52 am
I agree with you. The content has to be very important in order to convert. The right content as well.
You have to figure out your audience on what they are looking for and most of the time it is a solution to a problem.
Awesome article!
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saha April 2, 2012 at 6:45 am
Great advice. Create content that converts people to your customers. But it’s little hard and take some time.
Thanks for this wonderful post.
Trung Nguyen April 2, 2012 at 4:18 am
It’s not easy to create content that converts, actually most of us can’t do that, so we should practice many times to improve conversion.
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Shamelle April 2, 2012 at 3:52 am
Most people, once they know the rules, can create content that will theoretically drive traffic to a web site. However, the real trick to create content that converts traffic
It’s also important to make sure you cater to your audience.
You might even literally ask them what they would like to know. Keep your web site or blog updated consistently.
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Ryan Biddulph April 1, 2012 at 11:27 pm
Step 1 is about finding the right content formula Alison. Certain posts or articles – like 7 Simple Tips, for example – convert better for me. 1 thing to attract prospects, another thing to sign someone up for your list or your team. Thanks for sharing.
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