More than 60% of B2B marketers send random leads to their sales team out of which only 27% turn out to be qualified for sales. Thus, it’s a no-brainer that your sales will improve by a huge margin if you get better-qualified leads.
A business heavily depends on its sales team to generate revenue and the sales team, in turn, depends on the marketing team for qualified sales leads. A qualified lead (be it sales or marketing) is a prospect who is ready for a product pitch in order to get closed as a sale.
If you are a new business or your niche is too unexploited, you’ll first have to generate demand for your product(s) or service(s). Once you generate the demand, the lead generation process becomes comparatively easy.
A brief overview for getting good qualified sales leads and converting them would be:
- Attracting relevant traffic to your website
- Engaging web visitors with your content
- Get lead magnets in place to collect lead information like name, email ids, phone numbers, etc.
- And lastly, convert these leads and generate revenue.
- Engaging surveys which you can create via survey maker tool
If you want to amp up your inbound lead generation game, then have a look at these 5 proven techniques for getting qualified leads:
1. Get your Content Strategy right
Having a good content strategy in place is the first stepping stone to your entire inbound strategy. In order to attract highly relevant traffic to your website, you will have to create rich content related to your niche. But, creating random in-depth content won’t take you anywhere unless you get the context right. Remember, if the content is king then context is queen.
Ideally, your content strategy should have 2 major points addressed:
- The ideation and editorial part
- The channels via which you will distribute the content.
Start out by creating buyer personas and map them to the buying funnel. By forming buyer personas, half of your “ideation” part of the first step will be taken care of. Especially, if you are in a very narrow niche – creating buyer personas will make it easier for you to decide what kind of content to generate.
Your plan should address questions like “Who are your customers?” and “What are their pain points?” Better yet, map your buyer personas to the simple buying funnel to create different content silos.
The buying funnel will typically be of 3 simple stages:
- Awareness
- Consideration
- Decision
The different stages of the buyer funnel will not only guide you into creating different forms of content but also will help you in adjusting the “sales pitch” tone. For example, you can publish e-books or “How-To” articles targeting the awareness stage of the funnel. For the consideration stage, you can publish in-depth case studies.
To nail the content marketing strategy for generating qualified leads, you will have to ensure that your content is top-notch. When a web visitor lands on your site and browses through your content, it should not only keep them engaged but also move the visitor down the funnel.
The end goal is to establish yourself as an authoritarian site in your niche and convince the visitor to submit his details in the lead form. Thus, ensure a good content plan to generate qualified sales leads.
2. Optimize your website for Search
Now that you have a good content strategy in place, make sure you get your website properly optimized for search. Your primary focus should be to get ranking for search queries relevant to your business and niche – thus attracting relevant visitors to your site. Engage these visitors and convert them to sales leads with content they are looking for.
As far as SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is concerned, well it has evolved a lot over the years. So much so that, now it is often interchanged with UXO or User Experience Optimization. You would want to make sure that your website is fast, snappy, secure with HTTPS, has a good mobile UX, etc.
With SEO, you would be primarily looking to rank high up in the search engine’s results page. Thus when a user is searching for anything related to your niche, your website should pop up at the top and attract the user to your site. Don’t indulge in shady practices like duping a web visitor by serving some different content than what he was expecting to see. Follow a neat and clean SEO strategy and you will be good to go.
Also do keep in mind that even with SEO, your end goal is to get web visitors to convert into qualified leads. To achieve that, not only will you have to serve top-notch engaging content but also implement proper CTAs (Call To Actions) in your pages. Amp up your SEO game with these simple tips and get more qualified leads in no time.
3. Use proper Lead Magnets
Lead magnets are any form of incentive that you can offer your website visitors in exchange for their email ids or other contact information. Lead magnets are a boon in capturing qualified sales leads. Typically, a lead magnet can be any of the following:
- Fun quizzes which you can create by using online quiz makers
- Informational PDFs
- E-books
- Whitepapers
- Case Studies
- Videos
Now, how do you place these lead magnets in front of your website visitors?
There are 2-3 ways which you can implement:
- Insert relevant lead magnets like e-books or PDFs inside your articles.
- Use desktop notifications to drive users to the lead magnet pages.
- Strategically place these lead magnets throughout your site for grabbing the attention of the web surfers.
While creating lead magnets, ensure that the information you are providing is unique and is of great value. You can easily create e-books and PDFs by tying together 2-3 similar articles or by repurposing old content. Once you have your lead magnets in place, you’d see a huge increase in the number of lead information submissions on your site.
4. Ease the Lead Submission Process
A user dropping off in between a lead form submission is the worst thing that can happen to your lead generation efforts. It is imperative to have a smooth lead submission process. For starters, collect only basic information like name and email id. However, if your business requires several other information like contact number, job title, etc. – break down the info submission process into multiple steps.
For example: first, ask for the name and email id. Right after they hit enter, another field pops up asking for the contact number, so and so forth. This approach towards qualified lead generation will grow your contact information collection by manifolds.
5. Distribute your content via different channels
Generating content is of no use if you don’t know how to amplify it. Content amplification is basically how you distribute a piece of content via various channels to amplify its potential. Two major channels that you can exploit for amplifying your content are Social Media and E-mail.
Social Media platforms can be extensively used for generating well qualified leads. From Facebook to Twitter to Instagram to LinkedIn, the majority of your audience will be on these platforms. The idea is to repurpose your existing content in a way that is suitable for posting on each of these platforms.
Another way to generate traffic, thus leads, from your content is via distribution on Product Hunt. Product Hunt is a website that lets you discover and share new products – from utility apps to templates to tech products.
We, at Ampliz, have used Product Hunt quite a lot of times to gain a considerable amount of leads. To have a successful launch on PH (Product Hunt launch checklist), all you need to do is create a free valuable resource and drive traffic to a landing page. We have a checklist on how to launch on product hunt, do check it out for an in-depth guide.
You can also make use of paid lead generation campaigns on Facebook & LinkedIn for accelerating the process. If optimized properly, lead generation campaigns can provide a great ROAS (Return On Ad Spend) for your business. Typically, these Ads open up a lead form, which is pre-filled with basic information, when clicked – this ensures a seamless lead generation process from a user’s perspective.
Emails are a great way to generate quality sales leads if you do it right. A good lead generation email should have a nice & clear email subject and an attractive email body. Again, even with emails – the idea is to provide enough value to the end-user so that it convinces them enough to submit their personal details.
How Do You Increase Qualified Leads?
To grow your business, you need conversions and to get conversions, you need good qualified leads. To accelerate your lead generation process, you can follow the simple steps discussed above. You may also consider talking to a marketing advisor to help you out with generating high-quality leads.
So, the 5 key takeaways are:
- Get your content strategy right
- Optimize your website for search
- Use proper lead magnets
- Ease the lead submission process
- Distribute your content via different channels
If you successfully implement these 5 simple techniques, you would definitely see a considerable amount of growth in your qualified sales leads.
