It is pertinent to note that businesses are prone to focus on the number of potential customers or the number of activities they could run with them. This process is also known as lead generation. The trouble, however, is that there is a much better deal these businesses miss. As an exception, generating high-quality leads is a different kind of numbers game.
In this sense, the opportunity represents the chance to build an honest relationship with potential customers, their interests, and ultimately, their needs. In a broader sense, the same opportunity extends the lines between business and personal, generating empathy to a higher degree.
“Opportunity” then becomes something that is no longer leveraged to get more people, but an exclusivity you reserve for only those that truly connect with the solution you’re offering. This is a good thing for markets whose buyers have so many choices.
In this article, we'll look at a few effective ways to acquire high-quality leads. These are all easy and available methods, that will help your business gain a top-of-mind presence and interaction with the right potential buyers, consequently leading to a higher conversion rate.
Attributes of High-Quality Leads
High-quality leads, also called “hot leads,” are to lead generation what loyal customers are to customer retention. They are people who are passionate about your solution and are enthusiastic about trying it.
Even if they have made no financial commitment to you yet, they care just enough about what you do and want to know what you’re doing to improve it. In other words, they are your ideal customers if they are to become one — and they mostly do.
High-Quality Lead Acquisition Strategies
Use focused target keywords
Lead acquisition campaigns orbit around keywords. No matter the medium, from organic content marketing efforts to running paid ads, advertisers research and target keywords where their potential audience is likely to hang out. There are two primary aspects of finding highly relevant keywords:
1. Identify the language users communicate with: This covers a lot of the basics, from acronyms and inside jokes these people are likely to use, to how they structure their wordings. If you find that to be complex, it is because people are.
2. Take out the language that they tend to ignore: Equally critical, you’ll need to analyze and remove any keyword that doesn’t fit with the culture you want to deliver to.
These two methods can set you well on the way to increasing keyword relevance. It’s imperative to remember that you aren’t just acquiring any leads, but high-quality ones.
Improve collection form
We’re sure you’re aware that lead generation ends with collecting people’s contact information. The last piece requires setting up an online form. While it is tempting to only have a first name and email address input fields, requesting more information will help you lose mildly interested prospects.
Beyond the basic contact details, additional fields a B2B brand could add include the user's company name, website, industry, and job title. The trick is to balance between asking too many questions that’ll scare everyone off and asking too few questions that will end up getting you mediocre leads.
Exclude previous leads
Essentially, if you have hundreds or even thousands of past leads that haven’t converted yet, they just weren’t a match for your product or service. Reaching them with your campaigns would simply be spam, depending on how long your industry's decision window is.
Use CRM tools to track and exclude previous leads in your campaigns. For many businesses, maintaining a high-quality pipeline is more significant than maximizing one-time customers. This is due to the gap between the probability of a sale and the frequency of purchase.
Create highly tailored magnets
People naturally get bored, which can be a good thing, but it also means that your lead magnets cannot possibly interest everyone in your targeted prospects. A solution would be to create highly tailored magnets suited to each customer segment you're targeting.
When you run a B2B marketing campaign, it helps to think about the audience you’re targeting as distinct personas. The next step is to figure out how your product addresses each of them. Even in the same organization, everyone faces distinct problems.
If you want high-quality leads, avoid targeting “c-level executives” with your magnet. Try CEOs or CMOs, instead. While you are at it, how about the CMOs of brands in a particular industry, from a particular location? What’s that? You want to get further down the hole? Cool. Go there.
Understand the motives of your audience, and offer different magnets to different prospects. That is how you get the bland title of a short ebook from “How to be a better executive” to “How to shine as the marketing chief of a beauty brand.”
Study customer feedback
What your customers say can provide you with a lot of insight into what drives them to adopt and keep using your product. What were you offering at that time that attracted them to you? Through which medium? What about your solution do they cherish now? What do they despise and what are you doing to improve upon it?
The coolest part about this is that you can ask them these questions directly. If you’re worried about any friction your survey might cause, offer an incentive: discounts on a few deals that won’t hurt your business, or early access to your next upgrade will do.
Conclusion
One way to determine if your generation strategy is acquiring hot leads is to monitor how many of the leads are turning into paying customers. Only those who see your offer as an opportunity to grow, expand, and be better will jump through the hoops. Faster, higher conversions suggest you’re getting the right leads and that you should double down on your efforts.
Typically, this conversion rate is between 5-10% for most industries. If you plan to increase this rate by taking measures to acquire higher quality leads, however, expect a drop in the total number of leads you normally capture using the same campaign. A trade-off many marketers will accept.
