B2B Articles - April 17, 2018
A sales funnel is unsuccessful without quality leads to fill it. And as many sales organizations know, in order to drive conversions into opportunities, deals, and new business, you must practice marketing strategies that bring in high-quality, relevant leads with a buying interest.
“Bad leads” is a common gripe of sales teams when they review a marketing team’s inbound marketing strategy. So what makes a good lead, at a basic level?
A qualified B2B marketing lead is:
How can you bring in more qualified B2B leads into your marketing funnel? Try these strategies.
Paid campaigns, like LinkedIn lead generation forms and Facebook lead generation forms, are lead drivers that let you get highly targeted for your outreach.
Take advantage of paid campaigns to power lead generation efforts. Depending on the platform, you can upload a sizeable list of target accounts by email, or build a custom audience based on traits such as:
Utilize these targeting criteria to build a list that you can send highly targeted offers to. For one client, Ironpaper generated 100 high-quality leads from Fortune 500 companies in two months — up from zero leads in the months before. We did it by building content offers targeted to CMOs at a specific-size company who faced very particular challenges within their industry, and sent the offer to a custom-build audience including job title + company size specifications.
Take advantage of providing downloadables on your website to gather lead information. But go beyond the typical form (name, email) and ask for information that speaks to the quality of the lead. Make sure to create pre-identified drop-down answers so you can sort leads quickly based on their responses.
Some successful custom fields can separate great leads from unqualified leads:
Keep in mind that high-quality content is critical to driving conversions on these forms.
Often businesses who don’t generate high-quality leads fall into one of two categories: They have all awareness-stage content (like blog posts and general interest downloads), or they have all decision-stage content (like sales one-sheeters.)
But a healthy inbound marketing funnel also provides content downloadables somewhere in the middle — for consideration-stage buyers, who want to learn more about your service before picking up the phone. Case studies, success stories, company-branded thought piece white papers, and product demos are all incredibly critical to driving that sales-qualified conversion.
At Ironpaper, we find that the most successful accounts have a healthy mix of traffic sources, but definitely a high organic search traffic volume.
Why? Because organic search leads are high-intent. They are searching for specific research or to resolve an already identified pain point. This makes them prime candidates to be highly qualified leads if you can deliver what they want.
Make sure you include plenty of SEO pathways on your website, including:
Having trouble generating high-quality leads? You may also consider partnering with an inbound marketing agency to drive better traffic, nurture more leads, and convert sales.
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