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How to increase the quality of your leads in 10 simple steps

4 mins read

The marketing landscape is always changing. What worked one year for successful leads might be completely outdated by the next. Can you believe there was a time when cold calling was king? You might not want more leads, instead you want better-quality leads.

You’re in the right place.

business stats laptop

As an inbound marketing agency, we specialise in creating engaging inbound strategies for businesses which improve high-quality leads. Here are 10 of the best (and simplest) steps you should incorporate into your own marketing to gain the best leads for your business. 

  1. Make form fields required
  2. Ask for their work email
  3. Identify and target the key decision-makers
  4. Focus on your ideal buyer persona
  5. Engaging CTAs
  6. Remove time-wasters
  7. Follow the buyer’s journey 
  8. Don’t make it all about you
  9. Use workflows and marketing automation
  10.  Utilise lead scoring

1. Make form fields required

Creating a contact form on your website is one of the easiest ways to get leads. You can improve the quality of those leads by adding 'required' fields that a prospect has to fill in, giving you valuable data about them to use later down the line. 

Getting a person's full name and their occupation are two important pieces of information that can improve the quality of your leads. All you have to do to make your form fields required is to enter some coding into your form CSS. Or just rope your development team in to help. 

class=”required” 

For example:

<label for="occupation">Occupation:</label> <input type="text" name="occupation" id="occupation" class="required" /></li>

Remember to use this sparingly though. Long contact forms are time-consuming and deter potential leads from parting with their precious information. Just make sure the required fields are only limited to the ones that actually help you improve the quality of your leads and you’re good to go.

Do you use HubSpot?

If you use HubSpot, you can easily make form fields required in the CRM when you create a contact form. With just the click of a button, a field can be made required or optional.

required form field hubspot

2. Ask for their work email

Getting a person's work email can be more beneficial than asking for their personal email address. Especially if you're a B2B company. 

A business email address gives you a company name. And this means you can create marketing strategies that engage with the needs of that business to show you're the right agency for them.

We spend most of our day at work, so you're more likely to get a response from a work email than a personal one.

3. Identify and target the key decision-makers

target man playing dartsImage Credit

It seems obvious that you don’t want to waste time with people that can’t make the actual decisions. However, it’s often easier said than done when it comes to connecting with the right people.

If the lead came through your website and filled out a form, that’s a strong indicator that the individual who signed up could be your decision-maker, but not always. What role does your usual decision-maker typically hold? Take a look at the trends to identify who your target is and create emails they’ll actually open.

4. Focus on your ideal buyer persona

If you regularly get leads from your website, that's great news. Congrats! But how many of those leads are your actual ideal customers? The best way to get high-quality leads is to create marketing strategies that focus on your ideal persona. So, what’s an ideal buyer persona? 

These personas are your target market. You don't want to waste time marketing to people who aren't interested in your business. You should focus all your marketing efforts towards the people who are.

Create your own buyer persona profiles to help you get a better understanding of your target audience so you can tailor your marketing towards them. In return, you’ll receive higher quality leads because you know they’re your ideal customer.

You can even use our free template to help you get started.

5. Engaging CTAs

Your call-to-actions need to be relevant to your target market.

All your content should be written to engage with your ideal buyer personas. This is the same with your CTAs. You don't want every Tom, Dick and Harry signing up for your free eBook or weekly emails, you only want your ideal customers. The rest can buzz off. 

Create content and CTAs that will engage with the pain points of your ideal personas. Once you've created your own profiles of your different buyer personas, you can create content that resonates with them.

Pssst! Now seems like a good time to mention, if you do in fact want more leads, we have something for you that’ll help. Click here to get your hands on it but make sure you share it if you found it valuable.

6. Remove time-wasters

spy camera

You should regularly go through your list of new leads and sift out the time-wasters. It's a snipe hunt (I had to Google that. It’s just a fancy way of saying wild goose chase) to market to people who will never be interested in what you have to offer.

You'll likely get competitors signing up for your emails so they can snoop on your amazing marketing. You can manually remove the impostors from your email database or CRM, don’t worry.

7. Follow the buyer's journey

Consider the buyer's journey when creating your marketing strategies. The buyer's journey describes the process most buyers go through before making that all-important purchase.

buyer journey

Awareness: the buyer is aware they have a problem and is searching for more information. 

Consideration: the buyer is considering their options and looking for the best solution.

Decision: the buyer is ready to part with their cash. 

Understanding the buyer's journey helps you determine what stage your leads are at. Buyers today don't want to be nagged or hassled. They want the freedom to flit between the stages before making their decision.

In each CTA you create along the journey, you should ask for more information in your contact forms. As people move further along in their buyer journey, they’re likely to give more information because they've almost decided to buy.

The more information you have on a lead, the higher quality the lead is.

8. Don’t make it all about you

By making your inbound content all contact us, call today, speak to our team blah blah blah - you leave out the most important part of lead generation. The actual lead you are trying to attract. 

Focus on those in particular and how you can make their lives easier. For example, if you’re an inbound marketing agency like us, you want to make sure your content gives the reader value and offers solutions. 

This type of customer-centred content is going to impress readers (are you dazzled yet?) and attract quality leads who are ready to give your company the opportunity to make their lives easier.

9. Use workflows and marketing automation

workflow

If you're trying to improve lead quality without using marketing automation software, you may be working hard but you’re certainly not working smart. When a lead receives helpful and relevant emails from your workflow, they’ll naturally have a greater awareness and understanding of your business.

You can do amazing things like personalise emails based on data you’ve collected from forms, carefully plan your strategy and most importantly, nurture your leads. 

Email workflows nurture your leads by following up a lead’s interest with other helpful resources. When these emails are relevant and engaging, the contact will learn more about your business and they’ll be a higher quality lead when approached by your sales team further down the line.

10. Utilise lead scoring

In 12 months’ time, you could get absolutely loads of leads in if you’ve successfully implemented inbound marketing. However, you might want to improve them. Lead scoring ranks your leads on certain factors so you’ll know when they're a marketing qualified lead and a sales qualified lead.

In HubSpot, you can determine what these certain factors are. You can create a criteria of what you expect a lead to have, rank them and then you’ll know when they're ready to be approached by your eager sales team.

When you've got a large database of leads, it can take time to find which leads are ripe enough to become customers. A CRM like HubSpot does the work for you, saving time for your sales team and giving them higher quality leads to crack on with.

Increase the quality of your leads with inbound marketing

Inbound marketing helps your ideal customers find you and makes your marketing engaging. Today, the power has shifted and it’s in the customers’ hands. They want businesses to understand their needs and inbound does a really good job of doing just that. 

In our ‘Year of Inbound’ guide, you’ll see all the strategy involved, discover how long it takes to start seeing results and how the inbound methodology unfolds in the space of 12 months.

Download it now.