Quality Over Quantity: How to Attract Relevant Leads

Knowing how to attract relevant leads for your business is a key element for success.  But while many marketers may think they know how to effectively do this, they are missing out on a few essential details that could improve the results of their lead generating activities and drive high-quality potential customers to their business’ doorsteps. 

Many businesses try to get as many leads as possible, which isn’t necessarily the right mindset.  The main goal should be quality over quantity; Attract as many relevant leads as possible – those who have a pain point or a challenge that your business can help them overcome - and work to turn them into paying customers.

So, what are these key elements that can help you attract relevant leads and increase your conversion rates? Let’s look at six of the top tactics you can use to help grow your business right now.

1. Define your buyer personas

One of the first things you, as a marketer, need to do—before addressing branding or designing a marketing strategy—is define your buyer personas.

A buyer persona is a detailed representation of your ideal customer. Your buyer personas will be a critical tool you’ll refer to again and again. They’ll help you align your campaigns and ensure they’re designed to best accommodate your target audience. They’ll also help you understand the best ways to nurture the leads you’ve attracted.

Need help creating your buyer personas? Here are some questions that will help you:

• Who are you professionally? What role are you in, and at what type of company? What is your industry?
• What are your professional challenges and goals? What problem are you looking to solve?
• What are your main concerns? Are you concerned about cost? Speed of integration? Security?

You don’t need to come up with answers to these questions from thin air. You can gain quality information for your buyer personas from:

• Your existing customers. This is one of the most direct ways to discover what drives your target audience and what they like about your product or service. Consider interviewing some customers—including those who are less happy with your product—to learn about their drives and challenges.
• Your sales team. Your sales people are the ones who are interacting most with your leads. Learn from them about the types of leads who end up becoming customers and those that don’t.
• The forms on your website. If your forms aren’t already asking for information that’s pertinent to your buyer persona, such as company size, rework them so they can help you generate better personas.

2. Create valuable content that is geared toward the challenges and goals of your buyer personas

Your buyer personas represent your target audience. If you want to attract relevant leads that will turn into customers, you need to make sure the content you’re creating is meeting the needs of this audience.

Creating content that resonates well with your target audience will go a long way to generating the right leads. Part of the reason for this is that quality content keeps working for you long after it’s been published.

Source: JeffBullas.com

To make sure the content you’re creating will help attract relevant leads, keep the two points in mind:

• Focus on the reader. Don’t use your content as an opportunity to shine a spotlight on your product. Instead, use it as an opportunity to educate your reader on a topic of concern to them. Provide insightful, practical information that will truly be of use to them.
• Make it relevant. You’ll be using different pieces of content throughout your lead nurturing process. Make sure the content you’re providing is relevant to the specific stage the lead is at in the buyer journey when they consume it.

Source: HubSpot

3. Clearly define your positioning

While attracting relevant leads has a lot to do with knowing your target audience, it also has a lot to do with understanding who you are and communicating your offering clearly. If potential leads reach your site and they’re not entirely sure about what services you provide, you’ll lose them instantly.

By having a clearly defined positioning, you ensure that the people who find you online will understand how you can help them, and how what you’re offering differs from what your competition is selling.

If you’re having trouble clarifying your positioning and making it consistent across your site and content, take a step back and start with crafting a single positioning statement. Ask yourself “What am I selling?” and “How is my product unique?”

Then, when you have a positioning statement in hand, test it with your target audience. When you find one that works, make sure you use it every time you’re communicating with potential customers.

4. Create content campaigns

You should create content offers (like webinars, ebooks, whitepapers, etc.) that your buyer personas will be drawn to. And those offers need to be supported by landing pages that work. That means landing pages that include:

• Information about the offer
• A simple form that still includes some fields to help you understand the audience that’s engaging with you
• A clear call to action

For example, we created a campaign around our free ebook “The 30 Greatest Lead Generation Tips, Tricks & Ideas”, which you can download here, and our landing page contains all of the key elements it needs to be successful:

Also, don’t forget about your blog. Blog posts are a powerful tool for attracting relevant leads and a great place to promote your content offers. Make it a point to maintain a blog that offers useful, interesting information on a regular basis. It’ll not only help you get in front of more eyes more often, but you’ll also be positioning yourself as a thought leader along the way.

Read more advice on how to write engaging blog posts.

5. Nurture your leads

Lead nurturing, or marketing automation, helps your sales team determine the quality of the leads you’re attracting and understand their interests, which is valuable information for you as you design your content marketing campaigns.

Another benefit of lead nurturing is that it allows you to maintain an ongoing conversation with a potential customer that’s based on their needs at the time. This gives you an opportunity to turn a cold lead into a warmer one, and to remind a warm lead about your offering if they stop visiting your site or engaging with your company for a while.

Also, if you’re doing a good job of providing your leads with valuable content, there’s a good chance they’ll share it with their colleagues or network, essentially expanding your reach and doing the work of helping you attract more quality leads for you!

Check out more of our tips on how to run effective lead nurturing campaigns.

6. Be where your target audience is

A strong presence on social media can go a long way toward helping attract relevant leads.

Being social on the networks where your target audience hangs out can give you a great opportunity to create meaningful relationships with prospects and customers, while also increasing brand awareness. At the same time, social media is also an easy way to learn about your audience, and even get feedback from your customers.

But keep in mind that getting social online in order to help attract relevant leads doesn’t just mean setting up a Facebook account and posting from time to time. In order to do social media right, you need to figure out which networks your target audience uses most and how to best take advantage of those networks (i.e., the best times of day to post).  

Read more about our tips on how to build a thriving social community.

Source: CJG Digital Marketing

Do you want to learn more about generating qualified B2B leads?  Download our free ebook, “The 30 Greatest Lead Generation Tips, Tricks and Ideas”, today!