Building and improving your leads: 4 Hacks to incorporate.

Improve lead quality by focusing on what customers need

9 min read

✓ Use Searchlighting — identify real search intent to create content that attracts higher-quality leads
✓ Personalise customer experiences — tailor messaging, offers, and content based on user behaviour and buying stage
✓ Add conversational marketing — use live chat and chatbots to engage visitors and increase conversions
✓ Leverage data intelligently — analyse customer insights to optimise future campaigns and marketing decisions
✓ Align content with the buyer journey — deliver the right information at the right time to nurture prospects effectively
✓ Adapt to changing behaviour — continuously refine your lead generation strategy as customer expectations evolve

Try this statistic on for size. In a report released by Outfunnel earlier this year, approximately 3 in 5 marketers and sales leaders stated that the quality of leads generated was the most important metric for ongoing business success. It’s not really surprising though is it? After all, if the leads are crap, then the revenue you can expect from them is going to be similar.  So why is it that lead generation strategies in so many businesses seem to miss the mark?

After all, wanting quality leads is nothing new, but what is, is the media consumption, influencing factors, and purchase behaviour that defines customers. This has been accelerated through the COVID-19 pandemic where consumers (both B2B and B2C) were forced into isolation. Where customers once preferred customer sales interaction with a company, now, according to a McKinsey survey, the ease and efficiency of digital self-service and remote engagement means close to 80% of B2B buyers say they prefer an omni-channel approach over interpersonal interaction – a trend that is not abating even as people come out of lockdown.  The flow on effect is that the once linear progression between sales and marketing is being challenged and changed forcing both business functions to change the way they work together.

And these are just two of the changes afoot; there are plenty of others – perhaps smaller in scale – which may require you to change your marketing and business generation approach.

So, what can you – the forward-thinking marketer that you are – do in the face of this shift? First, get on the front foot, and secondly, potentially embrace new ways of going to market, approaching customers, and engaging them with a view to turning them into leads.  We’ve compiled a list of 4 key initiatives for you to pick and choose from as is appropriate to your business – so read on.

Use Searchlighting to identify what your customers are actually after.

To paraphrase John Batelle (some of you may know him as co-founder of Wired magazine, and others may know him as an eminent author), Google (and all search engines really) is the “world’s largest database of human intent”. What does this mean? In short, search engines, social platforms and review platforms foreshadow human intent, as customers use these platforms to find answers to questions.

By way of example, a whopping 76% of people who do a local search on their phone (XXX near me) will visit a corresponding business within a day. That is, they use search engines to ask a question, receive a recommendation and then act upon it. This is but one example where people act immediately, but as often as not, people are higher up the purchase funnel and doing research to inform a decision. Searches such as “What is the best computer under $2000” or “Hotels in Melbourne” indicate searches by people who are early in the purchase journey. They are not likely to act quickly and are looking for arguments that steer them in a direction. Compare this to a search for “xps 15 vs macbook pro 16” which is much more specific and which would indicate a user who is almost ready to purchase. The content each group wants is going to be very different.

The traditional paradigm has worked on the premise that if you use keywords, or develop content that portrays your key messages strongly, people will find you. However, this works on a model where you assume what they want to know, then speak to that. You are not communicating with them for them.

Now, with the various tools which exist, tapping into these queries is a must for businesses looking to short circuit the traditional model and capture people earlier than they may otherwise, and to then provide them with the right information – information they are hungry for and which speaks to them – so as to guide them in a way which benefits their own business.

In other words, listening to, and using the search signals (the “searchlights”) people actually utilise, will enable you to develop meaningful content that actually speaks to your audience (and that is what customers want – to be heard and communicated with) in a way which boosts your search relevancy, which thus builds your search performance, which thus will build your site traffic and thus, build more engaged customers.

Furthermore, Searchlighting identifies long-tail keyterms which you can incorporate into your site. Not only will this help people undertaking traditional keyboard-based typing, but as long-tail searches more accurately represent voice search, the improvements

Searchlighting is going to be big moving forward for those customers ready to build richer content, so the sooner you get in on it, the better you will do.

Personalized Outreach with User Data

So, if customers want to be communicated with, not spoken to, it makes sense that consumers will come to expect personalised content. So much sense really, that Grow found that 71% of people report feeling frustrated when their shopping experience is not tailored to them.

Whether it is a B2C or B2B communication, when sales prospects and customers provide their personal details and other information with a business, they have come to expect that information will be used to improve and thus personalise their experience with the brand. In other words, personalisation is essential for lead generation and nurturing processes.

If you are sending outbound communications to your customer-base, have log-in sections on your website or are not communicating in a way which speaks to the customer’s point in the buying cycle, you are failing to tailor content to them in a meaningful way.

Personalisation does not need to focus purely on using their name, or referring to what they bought last time though. Make sure you consider things such as:

• Tailoring your landing page, incentives, rewards, offers, and recommendations to foster a personalized experience based on the prospect’s industry, browsing history, online behavior, and stage of purchase.
• Showing specific retargeted ads which show the product they were most interested in rather than generic brand ads
• You remind them of previous purchase which may be more seasonal in nature.

At the end of the day, personalisation does more than make people feel like they matter, it enhances the prospect’s experience which will likely lead to more leads through word of mouth, which will also lead to positive impacts on your conversion rate.

Leverage Live Chat for a Personalized Experience

As an extension to the concept of personalisation, make sure you consider (if you are not already using it) the power of conversational marketing, or more specifically in this case – live chat. According to CrazyEgg, 38% of consumers stated they are more likely to buy online from a business which offers live chat support. When you stop and think about it, nearly 2 in 5 extra customers who are ALREADY on your site will feel more inclined to convert just because they can chat to you. Your marketing spend hasn’t gone up, but what has increased is the quality lead data you have and how this can then be used.

If nothing else, the act of deploying a chatbot to your site adds to your outreach strategy and improves the brand experience a lead has. For more information on chatbots, check out what we had to say in our piece “Marketing Has changed forever”.

Leverage Data Insights for Future Campaigns

The recent WARC media awards were all announced recently. One burgeoning category is the “Best use of Data” field. This year, SpecSavers COVID booking engine was the Grand Prix winner, and for good reason. They showed how taking baseline data and layering in new data points could show trends. More powerfully though, they could pull out real-time data and use the historical data to make real-time advertising and bidding adjustments. The result was a 68% uptick in eye tests – which is huge.

What we are saying is with advancements in artificial intelligence, data interrogation and analysis tools, businesses can gather data, extract insights from it, and most importantly, use these insights to better inform campaigns moving forward.

Through 2020, Microstrategy found that up to 57% of companies had started or were already using data-driven analytics to inform their lead generation strategy. The results will be three-fold:

1. Businesses will be able to make better, smarter decisions on lead-generating activities;
2. Businesses can feed insights into CRM and marketing automation systems to ensure ongoing communications are tailored, relevant and timely, which as we already discussed is essential moving forward;
3. Analytics will inform ongoing search marketing, content development and other activities.

What it all means

It may have been said thousands of years ago by Heraclitus, but it – unlike marketing activities – still holds true: The only constant is change itself. If you know this and are willing to evolve with this change, rather than holding fast to what you have always done, then the benefits you stand to derive are huge.

Taking the time to review your marketing strategy, where your communication sits within it, and what platforms you have which can support any change in approach is the first pivotal step. We can help with this of course, but even if we don’t, we are on hand to assist with all your digital implementation needs. And as you know, our aim is to cost you less, so you spend more on sourcing your leads, and less on production. Drop us a note if we can help you.