How to Generate More Marketing Qualified Leads

Anyone is able to go out and get leads, it’s a relatively simple process for businesses. Anyone can go buy an email list or a service that gives them people to reach out to. The difficult part is getting a marketing qualified list of leads. A list of people or companies that are more likely to purchase your offering. This is a far more difficult and complex task as everyone qualifies leads differently. 

We all know that everyone who visits your site can’t purchase your offering. It might be someone doing research for a school project, your own company visits, someone applying for a job, or someone just browsing. Your marketing qualified leads are supposed to define a person when they go from the information gathering stage to establishing a need or interest in converting. However, the criteria that make someone a qualified lead will vary depending on the business and average sales cycle. 

Marketing Qualified Lead Vs Sales Qualified Lead

A marketing-qualified lead is someone who shows a higher likelihood of becoming a paying customer in the future. These leads are vetted to some extent by the marketing team and have been designated as a person of interest. Whereas a sales-qualified lead demonstrates that they are not only interested in becoming a customer, but also a good fit for your offering. This is when the sales team would jump in and perform 1:1 demos and sales calls. 

Identifying Marketing Qualified Leads

Most teams will have their criteria set to what a qualified lead is for them. As most teams have set personas, the marketing team knows who they should be targeting and what attributes they are searching for. For example, if someone was to visit your blog and read 2 or 3 posts, then return to read your case studies and possibly your pricing or features page. There is a high likelihood that they would be a good marketing qualified lead. This visitor would be ranked as a higher priority than someone who reads one blog and leaves. 

However, the criteria for a marketing-qualified lead can vary drastically between companies. Here are a few ways you can drive more marketing-qualified leads. 

Create Engaging Content

You can’t be surprised that you aren’t generating qualified leads for your marketing team if your marketing team isn’t generating engaging content. How do you expect your marketing team to qualify their leads if your visitors don’t have content they can visit. If you focus efforts on creating high-quality content, prospects will continue to engage and are more likely to navigate through your website. When your prospects are researching a problem they may have, your content should be there with an answer. This way your ideal customer profile will not only be on your site, but if they find the answer they need, they will have a better opinion of your brand and may want to learn more. 

Incentivize Your Prospects At The Start

From the beginning of your prospect’s journey on your site, your prospects should know where to go if they would like to opt in. They should see a clear call to action on your site and blog. This does not mean bombarding them with popups and other calls to action. If you had a call to action along the side of your blog, maybe one in the middle of the content, and a popup on exit intent. Your prospect will know where they should go if they feel inclined to do so. However, this does not apply to all blogs. For short blogs, this may be too much. You need to find what works best for you. 

Use a Calculator or Quiz

Using a calculator or quiz on your website as a pop up or webpage or even in advertisements is a great way to generate highly qualified marketing leads. For example, at Visitor Queue, we use both a quiz and calculator to help our website visitors get an idea of how many leads we will be able to identify for them. An image of our calculator is shown below. With two clicks, the users will see how our company will benefit theirs. To learn more about using a quiz or calculator, check out this step-by-step guide.

Leverage Your Success

Start by connecting with your successful clients. Perhaps ask them to fill out a case study or interview. Or, if you have a particularly great relationship with them. Maybe you can have an in-person video case study (outside of the COVID era). This not only gives you a great resource to use to draw in new customers, but it also helps you further understand where you are doing well and where you’re lacking. When someone reads about a similar struggle another company had there is a higher chance that they will want to explore the same solution they discovered. This is why leveraging your customer’s success stories is so important.

Intercept Leads

If you are worried about your leads leaving your site and you want to help navigate them down the path to conversion, you can always intercept from the beginning. By using a service like a chatbot, you can intercept leads from the moment they begin their journey on your site. You can then eliminate some of the barriers they may experience and help them along the path to conversion. 

Use More Video

Why read when you can watch? You can convey a lot more information in a 30-60 second video than you can through a text box. Think about how much information you can say through a 30-second video vs. having all that information written down? If you saw that much text on a homepage, would you read it? I didn’t think so. Videos on landing pages can increase conversions by up to 80 percent! And, making videos for your website, blog, social, youtube, and other platforms isn’t as difficult as it seems.

Revamp Your Funnel

Go back and examine your funnel at each stage and ensure that it matches what you are trying to achieve at each stage of the buyer’s journey. Analyze the data you have received from previous prospects and determine which content events are most likely to cause a conversion. Then ensure that at each stage of your funnel, you are achieving this level of success. Look for items that correlate with the highest conversion rate and steer your prospects along that same journey to success. 

What Are Your Competitors Doing?

What are your competitors doing and how can you do it better? It’s good to stand out from the crowd, but if you know for a fact that your competitors are doing much better than you in terms of lead generation, maybe you can learn a thing or two from them. Of course, you don’t want to copy them, but you can get inspiration from their lead generation tactics and improve them for your own use.

Update Your Forms

As we all know, reducing the number of fields required can increase conversion rates. As no one likes to fill out an endless form and will likely abandon it if it’s too long. Although, there is a way you can increase the fields required without reducing your conversion rate as long as the required fields are of value to your visitors. Ideally, your forms should be able to be filled out in 20 seconds or less. Thankfully, those of us using search engines such as Google allow for auto-filling which assists with this. 

Visitor Queue

A great way to identify marketing qualified leads that have visited your site but have not left a way to contact them is through a tool like Visitor Queue. With Visitor Queue you are able to see the companies that visit your site, their visit details, company information, and public contacts at that company. This way you can see what companies are visiting your site regularly and visiting the pages you deem to be high quality. Visitor Queue offers a wide range of integrations and features to get your data where you need it for your team. From there you can add those companies to your funnel and reach out to them. 

Wrap Up

As you can see, there are many ways to generate marketing-qualified leads. Many of these methods are initiatives you should be utilizing currently. In most cases, you can revamp or revisit your current initiatives and modify and improve them in order to generate more leads. This is important as you should always be optimizing your marketing initiatives. But now with the mindset of qualified leads in place, you can adapt accordingly.