Attracting leads is the first step to growing a customer base and generating more revenue. This is likely why generating more leads was the most common goal cited in HubSpot’s 2024 State of Marketing Report, with 34% of respondents saying it’s their top priority for the coming year.
One thing it’s important to remember, though: not all leads have the same potential value. Research from Sales Insights Lab shows that roughly 50% of prospects that sales teams talk to aren’t a good fit for what they sell.
Focusing on qualified leads can increase those figures and help your sales team use their time more efficiently. Let’s take a closer look at what defines a qualified lead and strategies you can use to attract more to your business.
What defines a qualified lead?
In short, a qualified lead is a prospect that matches the profile of your target audience and has a high likelihood of becoming a paying customer. These are often further divided into two categories depending on how they come to your attention.
- Marketing Qualified Leads – Leads who engage with your marketing materials, such as someone who visits your website multiple times, downloads resources like whitepapers or ebooks, or actively likes, shares, or comments on your social media posts.
- Sales Qualified Leads – Leads that your sales team identifies as ready for direct sales efforts based on their evaluation according to a set of defined criteria.
The process of identifying qualified leads can also be automated by using a lead scoring model. This is a system where leads are assigned points based on their behavior and past interactions with your brand or team. The higher their assigned score, the greater the likelihood you’ll be able to convert them into a sale.
However they’re gathered, qualified leads help you to prioritize your follow-up efforts and active engagement of customers to focus on those individuals who are most likely to make a purchase. The exact criteria you use to make these qualifications will vary depending on factors like your marketing strategy and the type of product or service you sell, but often include things like:
- Engagement – The lead has demonstrated a high level of sustained interest in and engagement with your brand
- Alignment – The lead aligns with your ideal customer profile, company values, and/or mission
- Trust – The lead believes in and trusts your organization, increasing the likelihood of developing and maintaining a successful customer relationship
- Awareness of need – The lead has a problem that your company can solve and is aware that they need to address this problem
- Authority – The lead is in a decision-making role and has the ability to buy or commit to buying your product or service
- Budget – The lead can afford to purchase your solution to their problem
- Sense of urgency – The lead is ready to make a purchase to solve their problem or has a time-sensitive need to find a solution, increasing the likelihood they’ll buy sooner rather than later
All of those traits come down to the same basic idea: the customer is ready and able to make a purchase, and has shown some kind of interest in making that purchase specifically from you.
Steps to collect more qualified leads
Now that you know a bit more about what makes someone a qualified lead, you can likely see why they’re so valuable for a business to gather. That naturally leads to the question: how do you attract more leads with a high likelihood of conversion?
The truth is, there is more than one answer to this question. Your sales and marketing teams may each have their own unique strategies to identify, nurture, and qualify leads, and different industries tend to approach this question in different ways. However, here are some broad steps that any business can take to increase the number of high-potential leads that come in to your organization.
1. Identify your target audience.
Before you can adjust your marketing to match your target customer, you need to know exactly who that individual is. Even for organizations with a broad appeal, it isn’t productive to try and market to everyone. You’ll get more return on your marketing efforts if you tailor them to the specific customers who most want or need the products or services you offer.
One popular strategy to do this is to create a buyer persona. This is a profile of your ideal customer based on data pulled from your existing customers and market research into your niche. The persona should go beyond their basic demographic details to also include their motivations, goals, challenges, habits, and behavior patterns, as well as psychographic information like their interests, values, and personality traits.
Once developed, your buyer persona can be a very beneficial tool for garnering more qualified leads from your marketing and sales efforts. Target your marketing materials to address the specific pain points and needs this customer has, and communicate this through the specific channels that will be most likely to reach them, whether that’s via email marketing, SMS marketing, social media posts, display ads, or other channels.
2. Optimize your website.
For an online business, your website functions as your storefront, and is the primary way customers will find and interact with you. Even for organizations with a brick-and-mortar location, many customers today first discover and research businesses online before visiting them in person. This makes your online presence a key piece in your lead generation strategy.
Employing search engine optimization (SEO) techniques is one way to optimize your website and get the attention of more potential leads. This often starts by researching the specific keywords customers will use to search for your site then including those throughout, particularly in page titles, headings, and metadata. Website design and responsiveness can influence SEO, too. A website that is responsive with smooth navigation and fast loading speeds will rank higher than one without these qualities.
Using landing pages is another way to optimize your website for lead capture. These are dedicated pages for specific services, products, or campaigns that include focused content and calls to action. Include a simple and enticing way to capture leads who find your landing pages. This could be a simple email signup, or you could incentivize leads by offering a discount, free trial, or exclusive content like an ebook or webinar for people who sign up.
You’ll also want to integrate calls to action and lead capture forms throughout your website. Keep the forms simple, asking for the minimum amount of information required to increase the chances that visitors will sign up. Combine these with low-pressure calls to action that provide value through those strategies mentioned in the last paragraph. Interactive features like chatbots can be beneficial, too. Not only do chatbots give visitors more ways to engage with your site, but the bot can also ask questions that help to qualify leads as they come in.
3. Implement lead scoring, qualification, and nurturing strategies.
The software and technology available today expands the options for engaging with and nurturing leads. It is now very easy to deploy dynamic content that’s personalized to individual leads based on their behavior, interests, and preferences.
Qualifying and scoring your leads is the first step to deciding which type of messages to send to a given individual to best increase their odds of conversion. This starts with going back to your buyer persona and identifying the key criteria you’ll use to score leads. From there, assign each criteria a point value based on its relative importance. You can then rank your leads based on their total score.
One thing to keep in mind is that the criteria you use won’t necessarily stay static across the life of your business. Periodically review your existing customers and use that data to refine your qualification criteria, matching it to the traits that are the most consistent indicator of a ready buyer. You may also need to adjust these parameters to match new products or services you’re offering, or other changes in your business that may impact the type of customer you’re seeking.
4. Be strategic with your paid advertising.
Search, display, and social media ads can all be effective ways to increase your brand visibility. Like with other lead generation strategies, though, you’ll see the most return on your investment if you’re able to get those ads in front of the right people.
This starts by choosing the right ad platforms. Know where your target audience spends most of their time and what style or format of ad will be most likely to appeal to them. When creating ads, make sure they’re both visually appealing and clearly convey the right message, with a strong call to action that guides potential leads to the right pages or products.
Something else to keep in mind: ads aren’t just to bring in new customers. Retargeting campaigns can re-engage visitors who have interacted with your brand before, helping encourage them to return to your site and ultimately make a purchase.
5. Employ content and social media marketing.
Like with ads, the first rule of using online content to generate leads is to create posts, images, and videos that your audience will want to engage with. Make sure the content provides some kind of value, whether that’s education, entertainment, or a combination of the two.
It also helps to approach your online content strategically. Determine which channels will be most likely to reach your customers, which kind of content will be the best for each channel, and an overall content schedule or calendar. This is another area where providing something for free can help convert interested visitors into paying customers. Posting free masterclasses, how-to guides and videos, checklists and templates, and other useful content establishes you as an authority while building audience trust and encouraging more visitors to actively engage with your brand.
6. Make smart use of your email list.
When someone gives an organization their contact information, that’s a sign of trust that shouldn’t be taken lightly. You should see this as getting the green light to send that individual more information through targeted email marketing campaigns.
The personalized nature of email marketing is its greatest strength, and something you should definitely capitalize on when using it to attract qualified leads. Use strategies like A/B testing and market segmentation to home in on the best outreach strategy to engage leads at different stages and levels of qualification. This is one place where marketing automation tools can be a huge help, allowing you to set up drip campaigns and other automatic outreach that can engage more leads with less active involvement from your team.
7. Take advantage of your network and partnerships.
A lot of the steps mentioned so far have been to attract qualified leads from a broad pool of potential customers. You don’t always need to take that broad of a scope, though. Shrinking your focus down to a smaller, more targeted pool can be a more efficient way to find qualified leads because the people you’re talking to will already have a greater chance of belonging to your target audience.
There are multiple ways you can draw on your network. One is to make use of employee advocacy, giving you access to their networks as a potential audience. A customer referral program is a similar strategy to expand your reach through targeted networking. You can also engage in online forums and communities focused on your niche, follow other thought leaders and influencers in your industry, join professional organizations, or attend industry events like trade shows and conferences.
Partnerships are an adjacent strategy that can grow your reach to include new audiences with a high potential for conversion. To start, identify some complimentary businesses in your area. Then, you can arrange for mutually beneficial cross-marketing, like offering package deals or discounts on each other’s services.
8. Use data to improve over time.
By following the above steps, you should start seeing a steady stream of qualified leads coming into your business. That doesn’t mean your work is finished, though. After you’ve implemented some of these strategies, taking time to analyze their effectiveness allows you to further optimize your efforts.
There are a wide variety of both free and paid tools you can use to gather and analyze this data. Many marketing automation tools and customer relationship manager (CRM) platforms have analytics features built right in. You can also use sites like Google Analytics to analyze your website performance and identify which channels are driving the most traffic, engagement, and conversions.
Doing this kind of analysis tells you which platforms and strategies tend to work the best to attract your ideal customer. This will help you focus your time and money on the right things moving forward, reducing the average cost per lead and helping you to land even more qualified leads in the future.
