As marketers, we are all shooting to get marketing qualified leads and to turn those leads into conversions. What if I were to tell you that, for the most part, a big majority of those leads will never engage with your content nor actually convert into a sale— they just sit there on your leads list collecting dust? Marketing Qualified Leads (MQL) are the leads you’re striving for — the leads who have demonstrated any level of interest through engagement that tells you that they’re a real, genuine lead.
Nearly 61% of B2B Marketers struggle with generating a positive ROI from Marketing Qualified Leads. While the facts we’ve been hitting you with can seem very daunting, with the right marketing plan, and this guide of 9 tips to get those high-converting MQL’s you’ll be able to utilize ALL of those leads on your lists.
1. Leveraging Your Buyer Persona
70% of companies are missing the ball when it comes to getting more revenue because of not using buyer persona to their advantage.
Buyer personas are incredibly helpful to any marketing team because they are based on real data, gathered from the market itself. By identifying your audience and understanding their needs, you can tailor every aspect of your marketing plan to speak directly to them.
2. Building a Powerful Content Marketing Strategy
You’re probably wondering what a content marketing strategy has to do with generating high-converting Marketing Qualified Lead.
Well, it’s simple: You want to reach your goals, and one of the best ways to do that is by setting up a content marketing strategy.
The goal of this strategy is to get your prospective buyers from the awareness stage to the delight stage—which means that you need to build trust with them. One way to do that is through blogging, as 77% of consumers actively read blogs. Your marketing team creates content specifically tailored to their needs, shares it on social media, and tracks its progress so they can see how well it works. Then they make adjustments based on what they learn in order to attract even more MQL’s!
As you can see, this process isn’t complicated at all; it’s just about finding out what works best for your target market and then honing your approach until it becomes second nature!
3. Use Video-Based Campaigns to Attract Leads
Video is the most popular and effective way to connect with your audience.
While the majority of consumers do like reading, 86% still love watching videos. In fact, the level of interest in this communication mode may even surprise you!
It isn’t a coincidence that TikTok became the biggest social media platform (in what seems like) overnight.
TikTok took advantage of the present-day human attention span, which is extremely minimal, and forced content creators to make videos that fit these narrow time parameters. The result? People consuming and easily digesting a huge amount of content in such little time. Now, every social media platform is trending towards the TikTok short video stylem, which means so are social media marketing campaigns.
4. Create Lead Magnets To Increase Subscription
A.K.A Beating the 15 seconds.
There have been countless studies done that all conclude that a user will spend 15 seconds on your website AT MOST. The trick is turning that 15 seconds to 30 seconds to two minutes to a conversion. How is it done? By having content on your landing page that keeps the consumer interested and wanting more (kind of like a magnet).
Examples of those magnets can be:
- Videos: calling back to a quick video that can grab the users attention while giving good, digestible information
- Engaging Graphics: Infographics are a great way to get your message out. They’re compact, engaging, and easy to understand—they’re a great way to quickly communicate a lot of information. Infographics are a great way to capture your audience’s attention and engage them on your platform.
- Free Trials: Everyone loves a free trial. If a consumer is on your website, they have some interest in what you’re doing. Having an offer for a free trial as one of the first things they see on your homepage is an immediate, easy way to get an already engaged MQL.
- Quizzes: A crazy stat about online quizzes is that nearly 96% of users don’t leave without finishing them. Another incredibly easy way to get someone engaging with your website and turning them into an automatic Marketing Qualified Lead.
5. Make Sure to Stay On One Boat
Have you ever heard the story of the tortoise and the hare?
It’s a classic tale of two animals who race who, on the service seem like very uneven competitors, and the underestimated tortoise ends up winning by being slow and steady.
It’s a cute story, but it actually has a lot of truth in it.
With fast growth for companies can sometimes bring lofty goals.
And sometimes things happen so fast and you’re reaching for too many goals that things start slipping through the cracks and mishaps happen (to everyone) which are harder to come back from if you’re in too deep.
Trusting the process, becoming that well-oiled machine is how a company grows as it goes.
Setting clear and measurable goals, it’s important to track your efforts and make sure they’re working.
There are a few different ways you can do this:
Google Analytics and social media insight are great tools for auditing, but online applications may also help you get a more specific result of where users are spending time. Crazy Egg or Hotjar use a heat map to let you know which information your visitors found interesting.
6. Smartly Wield PPC Marketing Campaigns
Pay-Per-Clicks are great for generating high-converting Marketing Qualified Lead.
You probably also know that PPC campaigns are expensive, time-consuming, and really mess with your ROI. But when done correctly, they become one of the best marketing strategies to generate high-converting MQL’s (and eventually customers).
Google receives 3.5 billion searches every day, making it a hotspot for Marketing Qualified Lead
Even though PPC is a veritable antonym of SEO, you still need high-intent commercial keywords to reduce cost per click. SEO filters out unrelated leads, bringing only MQL’s to your AD.
Add-ons like the Sitelink extension facilitate your Marketing Qualified Lead navigation. It’s a worthy option to consider.
FOMO is a clever tactic to trigger your Marketing Qualified Lead emotions. Using a limited deadline may spur them to click on your AD.
Finally, retargeting pushes Marketing Qualified Lead’s to buy by reminding them of their purchase decision while they browse other websites or apps!
7. Go For Referral Marketing
Do you know how many people are looking for a product or service like yours? Well, if you don’t ask them, you’ll never know!
Word of mouth is one of the oldest and most effective strategies to generate high-converting Marketing Qualified Leads. According to research, 83% show interest in a product if a friend, family member, coworker, really any social acquaintance refers to them, and online reviews trigger a similar response. Generating high quality referral marketing leads is tricky, but there are many resources to help you figure out the best one for your business.
You can run persuasive (and very expensive) ads until the cows come home, but nothing creates conversions quite like good old fashioned word of mouth.
Low Hanging Fruit for Referral Marketing?
GIVEAWAYS!
Exchanging products or discounts for reviews really kills two birds with one stone; you get reviews and you create a loyal customer who is very likely to tell everyone they know how easy and great that exchange was for them!
8. Use a Repetitive Marketing Strategy
When it comes to marketing strategies, we all want to reinvent the wheel. We’ll try anything to get our audience’s attention—and that’s great! But sometimes, you need to look at things from a different angle.
When it comes to marketing campaigns, we believe in doing the same thing.
We know how stressful it can be when your marketing department hits an idea gap and runs out of ideas for campaigns.
Our goal is to make sure that your business stays afloat through the ups and downs of the market by providing a reliable source of income—a safety net, if you will—so that when things get tough, you have something to fall back on.
9. Humor Always Wins
Humor is like a magnet (remember lead magnets?). It attracts people and makes them pay attention to what you have to say.
Whether it’s a funny video or a witty remark, humor can be the key that opens the door to your audience’s hearts.
It works exceptionally well in advertising because it touches the emotions of your target audience and makes them feel connected to your brand.
Humor is also great for generating leads because it allows viewers to connect with your brand on an emotional level and remember you when they’re ready to buy.
When used wisely, humor is one of the most powerful tools in marketing. However, like every great joke, you need to read the room — or the joke bombs. A.K.A… know your audience.
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Marketing is such a powerful tool. It’s what drives conversions, what makes consumers connect with your company, and overall introduces people to who and what your company is. Though it’s 2022 and technology is at the most advanced place it’s ever been, marketing still comes down to human connection. Marketing Qualified Leads are the leads that aren’t just blank faces behind a screen, they’re the real people who feel connected to your brand, and they’re the people you get conversions from.