All brands know they need leads. Leads are how you grow your customer base and your business. And lead generation is usually the goal of most marketing campaigns, from SEO and Paid Search to Email Blasts and Social Media campaigns to Tradeshows and beyond. But the meaning of the word “leads” can be a little nebulous. And some leads may not be as valuable to your business as others. Let’s take a look at how we define leads and examine how not all are created equal.
Defining Leads
Leads may come in all shapes and sizes, but at their core, they can be defined as a point of contact. Someone is attempting to get in touch with your brand or business, and when that happens, we refer to those instances as leads. Also, as said earlier, lead generation is typical the goal of marketing campaigns, and is also valuable in determining the success of a campaign. More leads means more successful, right? Maybe not.
Types of Leads
The way that leads can occur, though, may be diverse depending on your business. Here’s a list of the typical types of leads brands and businesses rely on:
While these are the most common, there are many more lead types that may be valuable to your business. And on top of each type of lead, these all can be sorted into different qualifying buckets, such as:
Determining the qualification level of a lead is based on the level of interaction your business received from leads after their initial contact, usually tracked in a business’s CRM (Customer Relationship Management) tool, like Salesforce or Microsoft Dynamics. This qualifying can be done in many ways, and for more in depth information on this, check out this article from simplilearn.com.
Quality Lead Generation
We’ve already mentioned that not all leads are equal, and that leads can be sorted into different qualification buckets. But there are ways to predetermine the quality of a lead as well, with some insight into your business. This will be different for all businesses, but with knowledge of your customer base and some historical data on past lead generation campaigns, brands can ascertain which types of leads are more likely to lead to quality future interactions, i.e., sales, etc.
For example, you may know from past data that your brand’s website generates a lot of phone calls. This may be because your customers need to contact you immediately for your services, which would mean that phone call leads are of high quality for you. Or it may be that these phone calls are coming from current customers with support questions for your services, and therefore phone call leads are of low quality for you.
Similarly, you may know that you can predetermine the lead quality based on the source/platform of that lead. For example, lead generation from Paid Search campaigns may be of high quality to you because you know they come from bottom of funnel searches where the customer is very close to making a purchase. Conversely, you may know that leads from Social Media campaigns are not of high value to your business, because they are coming form people just beginning to research your products or services, who are still a far way away from making a purchasing decision.
Lead quality can also be predetermined by the associated demographics and targeting that each contact falls into. Those demoes and targets can be based on geographical location, age, gender, marital status, household income, job title, affinities and interests, and more. Again, for example, if your brand’s product is very expensive, then leads from contacts that fall into high household income demoes are more valuable then those that don’t. Or if your business is located in Florida and services people in the Miami-Dade County, then leads from contacts located in California are not at all valuable.
And finally, lead quality can also be based on the cost it took to receive that lead. If two marketing campaigns with similar targeting and lead generation goals both resulted in 100 leads generated, but one cost $5,000 and the other cost $50,000, then you’d be safe to say the first campaign produced higher quality leads, because they came in at 1/10th the price.
In the End, Lead Generation Quality is Based on the Needs of the Business
In conclusion, lead generation campaigns are only as good as the quality, not necessarily the quantity, of the leads they generate. A strong, strategic marketing agency understands this, and works closely with their clients to know the type of leads that they need to gain ground in their verticals. In the end, successful lead generation campaigns, and the quality of the leads that come from them, are reliant on a foundational, healthy partnership between agency and client.