If you struggle to generate leads for your business, you’re not alone. More than 91% of marketers struggle with their lead generation efforts.
In today’s ever-competitive world, despite implementing dozens of lead generation strategies and tactics, marketers and businesses find it extremely hard to generate leads. And even if you do generate a good amount of leads, what’s even more complicated is generating high-quality leads.
We get it—it’s tough out there.
Data from a report indicates that the primary goal of more than 79% of marketers worldwide is to generate as many quality business leads as they possibly can. If lead generation is your primary goal as well but you don’t know how to build a lead generation strategy that helps you capture quality leads, allow us to help you out.
3 Proven Tips Businesses Should Consider to Generate High-Quality Leads
We’ve put together a list of three tips businesses should take into consideration to improve lead quality in 2022 and beyond.
Without further ado, let’s dive in.
1- Understand Your Target Audience and Build Customer Personas
Let’s say you are the CEO of a SaaS business looking forward to generating high-quality leads for your new business this year. You head over to LinkedIn and see other CEOs or marketing executives in your space talking about how creating an ebook helped them increase their leads by a staggering 1000%. You’re impressed—and you want to replicate the formula in hopes of producing similar results.
You reach out to your in-house marketing team and ask them to produce an ebook. Despite having very little background information on the why and having done no research to confirm the demand for an ebook, they follow your direction and produce an ebook.
Now, let’s fast forward three months and as you’re monitoring the quarterly reports, you see that only a handful of prospects filled and submitted your lead capture form to access the ebook. And the worst part? Despite rolling out lead-nurturing or follow-up emails, you weren’t able to turn your leads into paying customers.
So, you end up asking yourself, “Why weren’t we able to convert leads despite applying the same strategy that other CEOs in our space had success with?”
The answer is simple—you blindly created a piece of content without verifying the demand for it. Your audience didn’t care about the ebook because it didn’t really target their pain points and problems.
To build a fool-proof lead generation strategy, you need to first understand your ideal customer. If you don’t put in the effort to do so, you’ll never be able to figure out their pain points and problems. And if you aren’t really aware of their problems, you’ll have a hard time building relevant content pieces that they actually care about, resulting in you being unable to position your business as an industry leader.
If you run a B2B business, it’s also important to take into consideration the needs and wants of the different people involved in the decision-making process. Your target audience doesn’t just involve the end-users or managers, but also the C-level executives and other decision-makers.
While you work on defining your ideal customer, it’s important to keep in mind that not all your customers are the same—they may be at different stages of the customer journey and may have different interests. Because of this, we’d advise you to categorize your audience into different buyer personas. Try to categorize your audience based on factors like age, location, job role, experience, etc. Put yourself in each of these personas’ shoes and take note of their pain points, problems, needs, and wants. Doing this will help you create valuable content and implement strategies that fit different people’s needs, allowing you to generate more quality marketing leads.
2- Fill Lead Capture Forms with Relevant Questions
74% of marketers use lead capture forms for the purpose of generating leads, and 49.7% of marketers have reported that these forms are their highest converting lead generation tool.
Using lead capture forms to generate leads is an effective lead generation strategy. However, when it comes to lead capture forms, many businesses face a hard time filtering low-quality leads from high-quality ones because they’re not asking the right questions to help them understand why a user filled out a form.
For instance, let’s say you recently rolled out an ebook titled “5 Brilliant Growth Strategies to Implement in 2022.” To access this ebook, your website visitors are required to fill and submit a lead capture form with the following fields:
- Name
- Phone Number
Those fields are a good start, but at the end of the day, you’re left knowing nothing about each lead’s intentions. Some leads may be C-level executives looking forward to outsourcing their marketing operations. Whereas others may be bloggers seeking some valuable information on how to grow a blog.
This brings us back to our big question—how do you distinguish between low-quality leads and high-quality ones?
Lead capture forms can help you understand the intent of each lead—as long as you ask the right questions. In the example above, the lead capture form could have included fields such as:
- Job Title
- A drop-down menu that allows users to select which topic they’re most interested in
Knowing what your leads are most interested in will help you understand whether a particular lead is worth nurturing or not.
3- Make it Simple for Customers to Connect with You
Connecting with the modern customer is all about making communication simple and convenient. Our research shows that 64% of consumers say they like to receive text messages with incentives (coupons, discounts, promo codes) from local businesses. Furthermore, 95% of texts are opened within 3 minutes—texting is one of the quickest, most convenient forms of communication out there.
These days, people are looking for instant answers. Consumers would much rather text you than call you only to be put on hold, or send you an email, only to be left waiting for a response for 1-2 business days. By using tools like Podium’s Webchat, you can generate leads and stay connected with them long after they have left your website.
As soon as your website visitors submit their information via Webchat, you’ll have qualified them as business leads. Not only will you be able to quickly answer any questions they have, but you’ll have opened a two-way line of communication, increasing the likelihood of long-term relationships.
Get Started Gathering High-Quality Leads
Generating quality leads for your business can be complicated, especially if you don’t have the right tools at your disposal. With Podium’s wide range of marketing and communication tools, you can not only simplify the lead generation process but also deliver a great customer experience.
