Marketing qualified leads (MQL) generation is critical to business development and survival, making it the key to any successful marketing strategy. Marketing Qualifying leads and prospects is an important first step in the sales process that allows you to generate leads that are more likely to do business with you.
However, getting marketing qualified leads – those most likely to convert – for your products and converting those good leads into customers is a daunting challenge that requires a lot of research and the development of a complex funnel. You need to know where to find leads, how to generate marketing qualified leads, what to say when you have them, and, finally, how to get them to buy.
In this article, we take a look at the ten ways to generate Marketing qualified leads for your business.
What is a Marketing Qualified Lead (MQL)?
A marketing qualified lead (MQL) is a lead that interacts with your brand’s content or product and therefore is deemed more likely to become a customer compared to other leads. In other words, it is a lead that has demonstrated a certain level of interest or engagement that indicates that it is a good lead to marketing.
This qualification is often based on the actions that this prospect has taken on your website, such as the web pages they have visited, what they have downloaded in exchange for their contact information, which indicates their purchasing potential and their interest in contacting the sales department.
marketing qualified leads (MQLs) are essential to a lead generation marketing strategy of a given business. Using a lead qualification strategy, you can filter out those who are likely to be a customer and those who are not. This system is crucial for increasing sales and marketing effectiveness, converting more leads, and closing deals.
What is a Sales Qualified Lead (SQL)?
A sales qualified lead is a qualified customer who has already engaged with your company through your marketing efforts and is considered suitable to be contacted by your company’s sales team to close a sale. The main difference between a marketing qualified leads (MQLs) and sales qualified leads (SQL) is the stage the lead is at in their buying journey.
Marketing-qualified leads are at the beginning of their journey. They are trying to solve their business problem by accessing a company’s content. They may read your blog posts, visit the same product page multiple times or download a special study.
But not every MQL is a good fit for your company, and that’s where sales qualification comes into play. Marketing qualified leads to become sales-qualified leads (SQL) when they have passed the qualification stages to reach the final stage.
You can qualify SQLs that are further along in their journey and show interest in buying by asking sales qualification questions such as “who is responsible for overseeing the budget?”, “what do you think of our solution?”, “what do you think of our solution?
10 Ways to Generate More Marketing Qualified Leads for Your Business
1- Identify Your Target Audience
Once you have defined your target audience, you need to match the prospects that arrive on your site with the profile of your ideal customer to qualify them. To do this you need to follow some steps as follows:
Find out their problem
One of the most obvious and important parts of qualifying a prospect is to find out their problem and see if you have the products that could solve it. If at any time you get the impression that they don’t, you can immediately classify the prospect as unqualified.
Identify their interest
Once a prospect fits your client profile, it’s important to understand their interest by following their intent and behavior. When those prospects show interest, they can be considered Marketing Qualified Leads (MQLs).
By observing their behavior, you can understand what they are interested in, and how urgent their problem is. Then you can develop criteria to determine which actions qualify a lead. You can even find out more about the prospect who fills out the form to better understand their intentions.
If they are the decision-maker or someone with buying power, it helps you tailor the conversation. With this strategy, you can show prospects exactly how your product can solve their business problem and even create personalized content to get them more engaged.
2. Provide the Solution that Solves Your Customers’ Problems
If you are writing content, you need to focus on the needs of the prospect and provide them with the right content and deliver it in the best format and in their preferred channel. Quality content is one of the most important strategies to generate marketing qualified leads that will attract your audience to your site initially and convince them to give you their information.
Quality content will also help convince your visitors that you are competent in the field in which you operate. Make sure you are constantly on the lookout for trends in your industry to stay on top of issues that may come up.
If you have a solution to a problem your target audience has, show how you can help solve those problems to attract more marketing qualified leads. For example, white papers containing tips that your audience can use are a common way to get your visitors to fill out your forms and become new prospects.
Adapting your content to the user’s intent is fundamental to getting them down the funnel and guiding them through the buying journey.
3. Setting Up a Lead Qualification System
Once you have obtained leads, you will have to qualify them. Setting up a lead qualification system allows you to sort those who are really interested in your product, those who really need it and are also very likely to buy, and those who are not in the right categories.
This process can be as simple as a spreadsheet, or you can use tools. Use basic information, such as name, email address, company name, role, company size, etc. of your prospects in your lead qualification system.
However, there are other questions you can ask on your lead forms that will speed up the lead qualification process. Given the number of marketing qualified leads you to generate in a month, it is virtually impossible to pursue all your leads.
Not only would it be time-consuming, but it would also prove inefficient and exhausting if you have a large volume of leads at the top of the funnel. With the help of software that stores lead journey information, you can find out what their sources were and whether the leads interacted with your content.
From there, you can begin to use their similarities to create a guideline for qualifying leads that best fit your business.
Identify which channel your leads are coming from
You need to analyze the data on where your leads are coming from, then use that information in your lead qualification system to make changes to your strategies if necessary. For example, if you’re getting a lot of traffic but not a lot of qualified leads on one social network, it may be time to change your advertising strategy or focus on other channels.
Make a list of metrics for qualifying your leads:
You can include metrics like:
– Who are your highest budget customers to take advantage of your services?
– Who are the clients you want to work with?
– How did they find such value through your services?
4. Build a Relationship for Lead Qualification
Once you get marketing qualified leads through forms, referrals, etc., building a positive relationship is the most important part of qualifying your prospects and closing a sale. Consumers tend to buy from someone they trust.
In this step, you must get your customer to trust you and make the purchase. Better classify the customers with whom you manage to establish a positive relationship from the first contact in your lead qualification system.
The answer your prospect gives when you ask them about how you can help make decisions helps you qualify prospects. You need to find the obstacle that is preventing your prospect from closing the sale. If the customer is hesitant to buy, you can show them a demo.
If there seem to be breakpoints in the requirements, for example, if the customer doesn’t have the budget to buy your product there is no point in moving forward and you can consider the lead unqualified.
Know what attracted them to your brand
If you understand what attracted your customer to your brand, you can determine your strengths in that particular customer relationship. Knowing what they like about your values or features will give you pillars to focus on during conversations. It will also help you understand your customer better.
Know your prospects’ main need
Knowing the challenges your prospects face and the problems they are looking to solve not only helps you evaluate whether your product really meets their needs but also makes them more aware of their problems and encourages them to make a purchase. Asking them for specific details about their needs can also help you understand what customizations they will need.
Know your prospects’ goals
If you know what exactly your prospects need, you can better propose what your company can provide them, and even tailor your features to integrate with your solution with those considerations in mind.
5. Monitor Your Competitors
Thinking about where your competitors are doing better can help you understand what solutions you need to implement to achieve the same success, or better yet, design a more advanced solution that can help your customers understand your competitors’ shortcomings and move beyond them.
6. Improve Your Landing Pages to Get More Marketing Qualified Leads
If you’re not converting enough marketing qualified leads, it may be because your landing pages aren’t well thought out. The copy on your landing pages should show how your content, whitepaper, or service can help prospects.
To keep your prospects moving through the funnel, you need to make sure they arrive at the right pages, get the content they’re looking for, and can easily buy, subscribe, request a quote, or sign up. Optimize your landing pages and make sure to show what people expect to see when they arrive. Attract marketing qualified leads by testing different landing page design elements.
Related Article:
Landing Page 10 Essential Elements that make it convert
Sales Funnel a Complete Beginner’s Guide
7. Optimize Your Website for Users
To get marketing qualified leads, you must first land them on your site by optimizing its navigation and layout for SEO in search engines such as Google, Yahoo, and Bing. Make it easy for your users to navigate your site so they can find exactly what they are looking for.
Make your site responsive by resizing content for all screens. Use mobile-friendly forms that take into account how they appear on small screens. Make sure your forms are easy to fill out without users having to pinch and enlarge them.
Also, avoid asking for something you don’t really need, as they’ll wonder why you’re asking for that information and may question your credibility.
8. Leverage Social Media to Generate Marketing Qualified Leads
Social media is a great source of quality leads. You can share posts or videos or run social ads that boost your visibility. Social media such as LinkedIn and Facebook offer lead ads that simplify forms for individuals and make them more useful for businesses.
9. Improve Your Email to Generate Marketing Qualified Leads
Email is the primary and most effective channel to generate marketing qualified leads and leads nurturing. Double subscriptions allow you to access the user’s inbox and keep your email database free of bots and bad actors.
When your visitors become email subscribers, send a welcome email to thank prospects for signing up. You’ll have a better opportunity to introduce yourself and explain how you can help them.
Since these prospects aren’t quite ready to buy, you need to send them emails with useful content and attach them to your brand. Studies have shown that email list segmentation is the most effective way to personalize lead nurturing.
You can segment your visitors by data such as page views, data you capture through your forms, sectors, buying cycle, etc. to target prospects with personalized content. There are many automation tools that you can use to create audience segments.
Using these tools an email will be sent automatically after a person visits a product page, with a case study to help them go further down the funnel. Offer a useful resource through your emails for your audience with education and promotion.
Related Article: Email Marketing Beginner’s Ultimate Guide
10. Embed Resources in Your Content
You can get more marketing qualified leads by adding more resources to your blog posts or web pages. These resources are a less impactful lead magnet that is proven to skyrocket email sign-up rates. Invite your visitors who are consuming your content to get the most valuable information related to the content you are talking about by showing them a link. Once they click on the link, they get a pop-up asking for their email address.
Your message should be obvious to them. Incorporate your suggestion boxes several times on your content page.
Conclusion
I hope these ways to generate more marketing qualified leads have helped you learn more about your leads and how you can implement a lead qualification process for your business to get a better ROI. Of course, when it comes to marketing qualified leads, there are other variables at play, such as your industry, the size of your company, your ideal target audience, and many more.
But the bottom line is to develop and generate as many marketing qualified leads as possible from different sources, track and evaluate your results to see which channels are producing the highest quality leads, and then devote more resources to amplifying your results.
