As far as B2B marketing is concerned, leads are essential. Leads form the basis for your source of revenue. However, merely having thousands of potential clients is not enough.
Converting these leads into customers ready to pay for your product or services is much more critical. When it comes to this metric, i.e., lead conversion, a significant majority of businesses seem to struggle.
There’s no doubt about the fact that converting leads is tough. Multiple businesses are scrambling over the same limited user base in a free market, and you may share these prospects over two or more companies.
So how do you ensure that a lead goes your way and not the way of a competitor? Here are ten ways in which you can do so.
Once a lead has impacted your website or app, the lead’s follow-up time should be as low as possible. Several businesses will make the mistake of waiting a whole week and gathering leads before touching base with them all at the same time.
A competitor who is doing so at the end of every day, or even twice a day, will by then have not just contacted your leads but converted the prospect into a customer. This is an opportunity loss that could easily have been averted simply by being more agile.
In any business, it is crucial to put yourself in the shoes of a prospective customer. You need to understand what your lead was looking for when it made an impact on your website.
This will allow you to alter your content so that the leads realize that your business is best suited for them. Only posting random content about your industry is unlikely to get you prospects who will be converted. You need to target your lead surgically.
Lead scoring is a method used by marketers to predict whether a particular lead is likely to be converted and decide which representative or team the lead needs to be routed to. A significant problem with the most popular lead scoring methods has been that they seem to be inaccurate at precisely what they are meant for, i.e., predicting conversions.
Your lead scoring method must be tested on publicly available data or previous data your company has long before implemented. Even after it is, your approach must continue to learn from the data that is being generated. It is only such a method, based on continuous learning, that can genuinely predict lead conversion in a continuously changing market.
As harsh as it might sound, not every lead deserves your time. Experienced marketers will inform you that a significant number of prospects don’t seem like they will be converted at any time during the process. Still, companies choose to spend their time of resources trying to convince them.
To ensure that your best resources are assigned only to the most likely converts, set the lead quality threshold to a high value on your scoring chart. This way, the leads that you spend your resources on are more likely to be converted.
Even before you search for leads, it is essential to research where your leads are. Always target only the communication or social media platforms where most of your leads are present. Targetting the wrong platforms can lead to significant revenue and resource losses since far from converting leads, you don’t even come across leads.
Understanding your leads’ habits is an essential part of getting leads and then converting them. Merely waiting for leads seldom works well, and using targeted advertising or marketing has a much better success rate.
Getting the right data from leads is essential and often the most challenging part of communicating with them. Many companies have issues with lead data from wrong emails to phone numbers and often end up spending resources on leads that never were.
Even before you allocate resources to leads, you must check all the data you have received and filter out the information that seems faulty or incorrect. After that, allocate resources only to the verified leads. Alternatively, you can set up certain checks even when you ask a prospective lead to enter contact data.
The era of textual content is long gone, and video is the new text. Several companies opt to use video for sales pitches since this format can better express a company’s values and ethos apart from informing prospective customers about the product.
You can also use social media and hubspot video to put the word out about your product or service to procure leads.
Converting leads isn’t just about searching a saturated market for new customers. At the time, what can be even more critical is upgrading your product and reaching out to previously unconverted leads about whether these upgrades might interest them and cause them to give you a severe relook.
Leads who have not found a better product since they communicated with you might opt for you the second time.
The content you create must have some justification behind it. Straightforward creative content posted on social media no longer cuts it. You must always target the content you put out at your prospective customers.
Your content must exhibit variation according to the age, business, or geographic group that you are targeting. Content meant for all groups fails to generate excitement or familiarity among prospective customers, making them unlikely leads.
Testimonials from previous customers are a sure-shot way of ensuring trust in your company.
These testimonials also help you showcase your user base’s diversity and the fact that your product or service works well. These testimonials can be in the form of a video or, as is generally observed, as text snippets on social media or your official website.
Converting leads in a competitive market is never easy. However, having in place robust systems for lead conversion and a strategy to procure leads always works. The above tips will certainly help you with improving your conversion rate and increasing sales.