How to Generate Quality Leads and Turn Them Into Customers

Someone hand drawing with texta a lead funnel, showing leads at the top then prospects and customers.

Are you struggling with generating enough leads or are your leads low quality? Follow the five steps below to improve your lead generation and sales conversion efforts.

1. Identify your value proposition

Take a step back from your product or service and consider what you’re offering your prospective customer when asking for their details. What do they receive in exchange for providing their information? How are you incentivising them to engage?

A “Contact Us For A Quote” form will only convert those in the pointy end of the funnel, and often only those who have had some previous exposure to your brand.

This highlights the importance of attracting people at the beginning and middle of their buyer journey with quality content and then converting them to leads with a strong value proposition.

That value may be in the form of a white paper or guide, a free consultation, discount code, special offer or a chance at winning something. This is an essential – but often forgotten – step that will help you increase the quantity of leads.

2. Seeding and amplification is critical

Once you have your value proposition in place, seeding and amplification is essential to ensure it reaches your prospective customers.

First ensure all relevant content funnels people to your value exchange. That content will also help build trust and authority meaning your target market will be more likely to share their information.

Then embrace seeding and amplification through relevant paid channels appropriate to the content and what part of the buyer journey it delivers on. Influencers, organic social media – including groups and forums – and traditional PR should all be considerations when driving your value proposition.

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3. Analyse the user experience from the beginning

Bring it back to the customer and run-through your lead generation campaign as though you were a prospect. Give attention both to the initial point of contact, and the experience downstream.

Key considerations include ease of filling in the form, load time and what follows form submission. What is the next contact people have with your organisation? Following up a top of funnel lead with a heavy hitting sales pitch is unlikely to yield results. But following up that lead with additional, unexpected value will likely see them open the sales dialogue first.

Having a seamless and enjoyable user experience from start to finish will result in higher conversion rates, both from impressions to leads, and leads to customers.

Embracing sales automation will help drive this process and ensure more meaningful conversations with customers and prospects.

4. Track cost-per-acquisition, not just cost-per-lead

Both your cost-per-lead (CPL) and cost-per-acquisition (CPA) are vital to track and it’s important to recognise the different insights they provide.

CPL tells you about the performance of your marketing campaign, and can be influenced by your targeting, spend pacing and content quality. CPA, on the other hand, tells you how good your sales team are at converting leads into customers, and whether you’re providing them with quality leads. It also tells you the specific ROI on your various marketing platforms and campaigns.

We recommend using sales and marketing automation software such as Hubspot which is specifically designed to provide end-to-end tracking of leads from the campaign to the final sale and beyond, delivering detailed ROI and KPI reports.

5. Take action based on your data

What’s the point in data unless you’re improving based on your insights? Once you have access to the right data you can start to build benchmarks and take action if you’re seeing inconsistent or lacklustre results.

For example, if you have a sales rep who closes one in ten leads, compared to a team average of one in five leads, it may indicate that rep needs extra training. Alternatively, low close rates linked back to leads generated from a particular platform would indicate that platform is less effective, and you can either ditch it or optimise your approach.

Interested in learning more about effective lead generation, or choosing the right sales and marketing software for your business? Get in touch.

Download our Complete Content Marketing Guide

The Complete Content Marketing Guide is a 30-page white paper detailing all aspects of developing, refining and implementing a content marketing and marketing automation strategy.

Content Marketing Guide

Content Marketing Strategy Development
Establishing Content Marketing Goals
Audience Analysis
Marketing Automation
Content Metrics and ROI
   – Digital Content Distribution:
   – Social Media
   – SEO
   – Video
   – E-Newsletters
   – Content Seeding and Amplification
Print Content Considerations
Legal considerations

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