Are your lead generation efforts falling behind your goals? Lead generation campaigns can struggle due to a range of issues, with results including the collection of too few leads, collecting unqualified leads and passing along insufficiently nurtured leads to sales. If your current campaign isn’t delivering, try the following approaches to get back on track.
When a campaign isn’t collecting your target number of leads, it’s painfully obvious. You can see your metrics falling short of the goal. But how can you fix the problem? Here are three options that may improve your lead collection.
Solution 1: Broaden your targeting
Are you targeting a very specific group of people, such as those with a given job title or in a narrow geographic region? Reevaluate if this tight targeting is necessary. Might there be potential buyers or decision-makers with a different job title? Would your solution be valuable in an expanded geographic area, and would this campaign be relevant there? If the answers to any of these questions are yes, broaden your targeting and you will see a greater flow of leads as a result.
Solution 2: Revise your forms
Potential leads may be deterred by forms that require too much personal information too early in the buyer’s journey. How much of the information you are requesting early on is strictly necessary? What is the most important information to know at each stage of the process? People are particularly hesitant to provide a phone number, as they know it may lead to a sales call. Limit requesting a phone number or particularly personal information before individuals are at a stage in the buyer’s journey where they want to hear from sales.
Solution 3: Adjust your budget
Ultimately, your lack of leads may be simply a question of budget. Are you able to devote more money to this campaign? If you can, you will see your leads increase. If you can’t, you may still be able to reallocate funds across channels to reach more potential leads in the places where they best respond to your outreach.
If you are gathering plenty of leads but they are largely unqualified, your campaign may have gone overboard in the effort to welcome as many leads as possible. It’s time to pull back in two ways.
Solution 1: Improve registration questions
Unlike a campaign that collects too few leads, a campaign that collects unqualified leads can benefit from more detailed form fields. Gather the information you need to know such as job title or company size. To balance collecting enough leads and making sure they are qualified, you may choose to collect this information not in the very first form a lead encounters, but in a subsequent one.
Solution 2: Work with the sales team
It’s possible that this problem goes back further than your campaign and back to a misunderstanding between sales and marketing. If so, it’s time to improve your marketing-sales alignment. Sit down with the sales team and have a conversation about exactly what they’re looking for in a qualified lead. Then, adjust your campaign’s targeting to better reach this type of buyer.
Is the sales team complaining that the leads they reach out to aren’t ready to hear from them and don’t have enough of an understanding of your offering and their need for it? If so, your leads are not being nurtured properly before they move to sales.
Solution 1: Lead scoring
To ensure that leads are moving from marketing to sales at the right point in their development, it’s essential that your team use lead scoring, and lead scoring that is set up appropriately for your sales team’s needs.
Leads need to be educated before they are contacted by sales. If they are contacted too early, they will be taken aback, and the sales representative won’t be able to make any progress. They may even alienate the lead. Proper lead scoring, in contrast, grades leads based on the ways in which they have engaged with your campaign, and marks them as qualified for a sales call only when they have reached a certain threshold. Work with the sales team to establish lead scoring that delivers leads to sales when they are nurtured and ready for a sales call.
Solution 2: Analytics for better content
In order to engage and nurture your leads, you need to understand what content resonates with them. To create more of the types of content that keep leads coming back to your digital presence and drive conversions, use analytics tools to track metrics like time spent on each page of your site, the behavior flow through your site, most share content and more. Then, create more of the most impactful forms of content.
Are you looking to better engage B2B buyers? Read our white paper, Engaging B2B buyers before the buying process: 4 key steps.
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