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Generate Higher Marketing Qualified Leads With These 10 Tips

Lead generation is a critical aspect for businesses and identifying Marketing Qualified Leads (MQLs) is key. It explains what MQLs are, how to identify them, and provides ten tips to generate more MQLs. The guide emphasizes the importance of identifying and focusing on MQLs to improve ROI. The tips include knowing your MQLs, shaking your existing customers, creating a killer landing page, engaging with your leads on social media, using lead magnets, leveraging content marketing, investing in PPC campaigns, personalizing your email marketing, nurturing your leads, and tracking your results.

Introduction

Lead generation is every business’s end goal. So enterprises invest loads of money in marketing to generate high-quality leads and turn them into paying customers.
But lead generation is not a small topic. It starts from the person landing on your website and goes to the point where they purchase your portal. And during this whole process, your lead moves through different stages, and some even leak from your sales pipeline.
A study shows that the average time to convert a real estate lead is 6-24 months. Yes, that’s too long, especially in this digital age, where competition is tighter than your Thanksgiving pants.
Jokes aside, you need to narrow down your lead generation process today so you can only focus on hot leads. In short, you have to just focus on Marketing Qualified Leads. The leads have higher chances of turning into your potential customers.
But How To Do It?
It’s pretty simple–just identify your MQLs and focus on nurturing them into your sales pipeline. Okay, so it is not that simple.
But don’t you worry, as this guide will help you churn more MQLs in 2022. You will find 10 easy tips to target hot leads and make them your loyal customers in no time. So, let’s start the ride.

How to Identify MQLs In Your Pipeline?

marketing qualified lead (MQL) is a lead that the marketing team has distinguished as people who are more likely to purchase from your brand. MQLs are defined based on the lead measurement criteria preset by the marketers, like someone who subscribed to a newsletter or downloaded an ebook.
Here you can check the lead to MQL conversion rate based on the industry:
Industry Based MQLs
Image Source – firstpagesage
As you can see, there are not many leads that turn into MQLs in most industries. That means, if you are generating 50 leads in a day, not even half of them are your potential customers.
So, you are unnecessarily wasting your resources on leads that never will be your customers. On the contrary, you could just channel all your resources to limited but impactful MQLs and get a higher ROI.
Sounds like a solid plan! But, there is a tiny-winy problem here–you have to first identify those MQLs in your pipeline.
And here’s how you can do that;

Set the Specific Lead Goals

Do you have a specified lead goal? No, you need to define your lead goals today if you want to determine how many marketing qualified leads you require to achieve your business goals.
For most businesses, revenue is the main parameter to determine the lead goal. Businesses set a certain revenue target and then calculate how many MQLs they need to reach that target.
For example, if you have set a yearly revenue target of $10 million, and you generate every $50,000 from a lead. In that case, you at least need 400 new leads to achieve your revenue target.
If we further elaborate on the example and assume that your average lead conversion rate is 25%, you need 1600 new opportunities. Moreover, if only 20% of your leads turn into MQLs, you require 800 leads to meet your revenue goal.

Pay Attention to Your Web Traffic

Web traffic is one of the simplest ways to identify your marketing qualified leads. According to a study, 81% of shoppers visit a brand’s website before making a purchase. This means your potential customers will likely explore your website before coming to a decision.
Here, you can use different web traffic indications to pinpoint your MQLs:
  • Increase in page views
  • Decrease in bounce rates
  • Search engine ranking
  • Average web traffic
  • Increased traffic on price, add to cart and other sales-related pages

Map Out Your Individual Lead Journey

This is one of the longest yet powerful strategies to identify MQLs in your sales funnel. If you keep an eye on your individual lead’s position in your sales pipeline, you can better understand how ready they are to become your customers.
We know it is not easy to keep tabs on hundreds of leads. But that’s why you need automatic lead monitoring tools to segment and evaluate the real-time position of leads.
For example, if you find a lead enquiring about your product prices or making direct sales calls to know more about your product, this is a person who is already aware of and interested in your product. So, all you need is to push them enough to make a purchase.

Top 10 Tips to Generate MQLs in 2022

As you know how to identify MQLs, generating more of those leads is the next step. And that’s easier to say than to do.
Marketing qualified leads are your potential customers. Thus, you have to use a direct and engaging approach to walk them through their buyers’ journey. 10 simple tips can help you attract more MQLs your way:

#1. Know Your MQLs

Do you want to attract more marketing qualified leads your way? If so, you have to first understand your MQLs from the beginning. If you don’t know what your targeted leads need, you cannot approach them with the right marketing message.
The first step for generating MQLs is capturing the relevant leads’ attention. And for that, you need information about leads like their pain points, interests, etc.
The better you understand your leads, the quicker you can convert them into MQL.
Data is a very important tool to convert and capture more leads. In fact, 88% of B2B marketers are more focused on generating relevant information about their customers rather than creating marketing content.

#2. Shake Your Existing Customers

Before diving into your sales pipeline to look for qualified leads, you should first connect with your existing customers. That’s because repeat customers are golden tickets for your business.
They are already familiar with your brand and services. So, you need minimum efforts to convert them again. In addition, a Bain & Company report states that repeat customers spend more than new customers.
Therefore, you should first reach out to your existing customers and offer something valuable to motivate them. For example, you can create personalized email marketing campaigns for your existing customers and offer them discounts or deals based on their previous purchases.
Here look at this FlexJobs email—
Customer Retargeting
The company has sent this mother’s day special offers to their existing customers via email to motivate them to subscribe to membership plans.

#3. Understand Where Your MQLs Hang Out

Today, you have multiple options to connect with your potential leads. From social media to your blog site, you have several opportunities to interact with your MQLs. But, there is no purpose in finding your marketing qualified leads everywhere.
You will be lost in this dark world of the web without proper knowledge of your MQL address. Yeah, if you don’t know where your leads reside on the internet, you cannot reach them. Therefore, you should evaluate your leads’ information to know where you can easily connect with them.
Suppose you are a B2B SaaS brand looking for potential leads on Facebook with zero presence on LinkedIn. Now, that’s the wrong place to find your MQLs. That’s because more than 55 million businesses worldwide are listed on LinkedIn.
So, no matter how much effort you put into marketing your brand on different channels, all your efforts are useless if you are not on the platform where your potential customers hang out.

#4. Create Content For MQLs

Content marketing is the most powerful marketing technique to generate high-quality leads. But, generic content marketing will not help you in attracting MQLs.
You have to create content specific for MQLs to move them forward in your sales cycle. At the beginning of the sales pipeline, leads have different mindsets and requirements.
They are still looking for a potential solution to their problems. So, they engage more with content that solves their problem directly with limited promotion.
But, MQLs are already in your pipeline and familiar with your brand. There is no need to be indirect with them. You can directly come to the point and show them how your product is better than others.
The content for MQLs needs to be educational and forward. You just tell them what they can gain after using your solution. Here leveraging statistics, case studies and research papers can help you better educate MQLs.

#5. Revisit Your Sales Funnel

Analyzing your sales funnel is another simple yet impactful strategy to generate more qualified leads. You should track every action taken by your lead in the different stages. Also, check which marketing efforts have helped generate more responses from your leads.
Retracing your sales funnel will help you understand where your lead stands right now. However, as we have already mentioned in the beginning, lead generation is a very long process. Thus, there is a big fat chance that some of your potential leads might leak from the funnel due to your negligence or other external factors.
With this method, you can determine the reason behind your low lead conversion rate. In addition, you can know which one of your marketing strategies has helped to convert more leads. This knowledge will come in handy while converting more leads to MQLs.

#6. Leverage Videos

Video marketing is booming right now. Many marketers are today leveraging videos to capture and nurture leads.
According to a HubSpot and Wyzowl research–
  • 81% of marketers admit that videos have a direct impact on sales
  • 94% of marketers said that videos had helped them to make people better understand their products or services
  • For 62% of marketers, video engagement is the top performance metrics
So, you can also use video content to target more marketing qualified leads. There are several ways to include videos in your lead generation cycle, such as:

#7. Offer Multiple Touchpoints

Having multiple touchpoints means your MQLs can reach out to you faster. Every lead prefers to interact with a business in different ways. For some, emails might be an easy way to connect, and for others, live chat might be better.
Therefore, when you provide multiple touchpoints to your leads, they can approach you easily and become your customers quicker. Also, if leads cannot connect with your team through one channel, they can switch to another. This way, you will not lose a lead because your email handler is on holiday or your call servers are down at the moment.
There are several contact points that you can provide to leads, but the commonly used ones are:
  • Call service
  • Live chat
  • Video call
  • Contact form
  • Physical office address
  • Email address, etc
For example, HubSpot offers multiple touchpoints to their leads like the contact us form, chatbot, email address, contact salesperson, etc.
HubSpot MQLs
Image Source – Hubspot

#8. Put a Strong Call-To-Action Button

If you have spent a great amount of time creating your marketing funnel but haven’t added a clear CTA, everything is useless by far.
It’s like you have invited leads and nurtured them to MQL or SQL, and then you left them clueless. Yes, without a CTA, your MQLs will have no idea what they should do next.
And when your qualified leads have nowhere else to go, they simply hit the back button and leave you for someone else. If you don’t want something like this to happen to you, just add clear, bold and multiple CTAs for your leads.
CTAs will nudge your leads to take action and enter your funnel without much thinking. Here are some easy tips for creating strong CTAs:
  • Use the urgency by creating words like “Try our free trial now” or “Book a free demo today”.
  • Highlight your CTA buttons with contrasting colors that can easily grab viewers’ attention.
  • Choose the different button shapes like rounded buttons, square-edged buttons, etc.
  • Keep the CTA content short and to the point, not more than 3-5 words.
  • Use first-person narrative like ‘you’, ‘your’, ‘my’, etc.

#9. Redefine Your SEO Strategy

Search engine optimization is the most important yet overlooked strategy to generate more MQLs. How?
The informative content that you are producing for your leads will only reach them when search engines index it and show it on the first page results. That will only happen when your content is search engine optimized.
Now, selecting a blog topic relevant to your lead’s interest is not sufficient to feature on the first page. You need to work on some other SEO facts also while writing content for MQLs, such as:

Proper Keywords Research

Keywords are vital to improving your search engine ranking. You need to use the keyword analytical tools to find primary keywords in your industry along with secondary keywords and maintain their proper consistency in your content. Tools like Google Keywords Planner, Uber suggest, and others can help you.

Internal and External Linking

Backlinking is important to direct search engine crawlers to other pages on your site. External links from high domain authority sites can help to establish your brand credibility among search engines and targeted leads.

Monitor Your Ranking

You should monitor your SEO ranking like a hawk. That’s because one wrong move from your end or the right move from your competitors’ sides can plummet your search engine ranking. So, always stay informed when it comes to your SEO.

#10. Use Hyper-Personalization

Usually, MQLs stay in the middle of the marketing funnel. So, your entire focus should be here to push them to the end of the funnel.
To do so, simple personalization is not effective. Instead, you have to use hyper-personalization that taps into leads’ wants and needs individually.
It combines data, artificial intelligence, machine learning and other automation technologies to create unique solutions for individual leads. You have to practice data-driven marketing to target your MQLs with hyper-personalization.

Are You Targeting MQLs Yet?

So, are you targeted marketing qualified leads or still chasing behind cold leads?
If you want to improve your ROI, lead conversion rate and revenue, start working on your MQLs. They will help you stay ahead of your competitors.
You can start with the 10 MQL generation strategies mentioned above and see a huge improvement in your lead quality. However, if you need further assistance or details, you can connect with the UnboundB2B team anytime.
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Gaurav Roy

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