It’s a priority for every business to be aware of their target market. Since there are many factors to consider, from age and gender to lifestyle, one way of simplifying is to devise a customer persona. This is a fictional character that represents your ideal customer. By keeping the persona in mind, you can come up with a product or launch a marketing campaign that’s strategic and tailor-fitted, catering exactly to the desires and pain points of your target market.
In the process of attracting sales, businesses scout for leads, which are contacts that can possibly become buyers. The more aligned a lead is with your persona or target market, the more likely it’ll result in a sale. Leads are obtained through all sorts of channels, including subscribers to website content, attendees during events, and using social media profiles that match typical customer demographics.
However, not all leads are of the same quality. Although having a lot of leads is desirable in general, bad leads can end up wasting your resources and muddling your marketing, so it’s important to be able to distinguish which leads have the highest potential. These are the leads that you can pour more of your attention to — and get significant results.
Detecting a Good Lead.
The definition of a good lead is simple: the person with high potential to turn into a customer. However, detecting a good lead is another matter altogether.
A basic way to weed out bad leads is to check if the data given by the lead is valid. For example, leads with sensitive information such as phone numbers, company names, a company domain business email address are a good sign, while leads that give invalid values or only blanks for these would become lower priority.
Lead Scoring.
Checking for valid data can work as an initial filter, but a more thorough method would be lead scoring. You literally assign each lead a score based on a set of criteria that your team decides on, and the leads with the highest scores are the best. The criteria generally revolve around two basic questions: how similar is the lead to past customers, and how engaged is the person with your product or service?
To gauge similarity, you can list down characteristics of the customer persona or those that consistently appear among your customers. If your clients are individuals, these can involve age, gender, and location, or number of employees and industry for companies. On the other hand, you can track engagement by observing the lead’s activity pattern. How do they interact with your business? Instead of characteristics, think about actions that indicate interest, such as opening emails, responding to phone calls, nor booking product demos.
Once you’ve gathered factors for both of these, assign weights to them, with the assumption that the highest total score for a lead would be 100. You can even boost the accuracy of your system by adding negative factors. These signal that a lead is less likely to buy, indicating disinterest or dissimilarity—for example, never opening any email from your business. To get a lead’s score, look at the factors that it checks off and add up their weights. No need to worry too about trading off efficiency for precision—with marketing tools such as Hubspot and ScopeLeads, the process is already automated, even to the point that you’ll receive notifications for high-scoring leads.
When you determine the quality of each lead, you can systematize your efforts and tweak your campaigns to appeal to the best. This will bring in more sales for less effort, taking your business to new levels if consistently applied.
