How To Develop Marketing Qualified Leads

Marketing Qualified Leads or MQLS is a huge part of any marketing and sales cycle, but often it’s where many businesses and brands focus the least amount of time. Often times a lot of effort and resources are put into building brand awareness and letting people know a product or service exists or there’s an alternate to some other product or service. On the back end a lot of effort and resources are focused on closing/making a sale.Obviously every persona that enters awareness stage isn’t going to make it to decision stage but some conversions rates are abysmal with huge leaks in the middle of the funnel where you should probably be spending a proportionate amount of energy if not more. The importance of developing solid MQL’s is not only to raise the aforementioned conversion rates and make more sales, but it’s also important because buy having resources on those that have been clearly qualified to reach out to you increase the return on your marketing dollar lowering the cost of acquiring a new customer and ultimately keeping more of the money you make. The ways to develop marketing qualified leads can vary but they’re a handful of proven methods like call to action triggered by activity, manual or offline source entry into your CRM. Offers for Resources i.e. webinars Case studies white papers etc.

CTA triggered by activity

The point of having marketing qualified leads in place is to have a list of contacts who are clearly qualified to be marketed to for your product or service. One indication of if a lead fits this criteria is the amount of info the absorb about a topic/product type/service type. Not only the amount absorbed by also the amount of time doing so. If those KPI’s are high a call to action triggered by the prospects activity may be the answer for you. The way this works is that upon reaching a certain point in any content piece you offer primarily in the awareness stage, a cll to action would emerge prompting the prospect to enter their info to receive an offer. It’s up to you to decide what the content is how much should be absorbed before the CTA and what info you need on the from in order for them to receive said CTA. The larger point is if you set that trigger somewhere reasonable perhaps 40% or more common sense dictate that only prospects who are surely seeking a solution to the problem you deal with directly will engage with if not the majority all of the content piece and those are folks whose data you’d like to capture.

Offline source entry into CRM

As great as CTA’s and forms and content pieces that attract traffic organically are, the best qualifier is though the man or woman in the mirror. YOU!.You’re involved in the day to day you may have even built this company from the ground up or have been involved with the company for some time. SO when you meet individuals at networking events or industry related conferences, perhaps connecting on platforms like Linkedin, you yourself can make a determination about what classification to put this new lead in. Especially if you’ve had an in depth conversation about your product or service they expressed interest and asked for a follow up. Depending on your industry if it’s niche or maybe hyperlocal offline source entry may be your biggest pipeline of leads. Just be sure in one or another to get permission to reach out to these people when you’re involved in the offline engagement. You don’t want to become known as a brand who spams completely unsolicited.

Offers for Resources

This was touched open prior in the paragraph on triggered activity. But offering resources such as case studies, white papers invitation to entry level webinars are all good ways to develop marketing qualified leads. The request for these resources from a prospect is a key indicator said prospect may be in the market for your product or service. Especially of you’re offering something that's not mainstream a person isn’t going to request a whitepaper on a topic or product they’re not highly interested in. Also you control “the gate” which in most instances is going to manifest itself in a landing page from and you’ll be able to control what qualifying information the prospect has to give you in order to receive the resource, with the caveat that best practices dictate the length of the form has to correlate with the strength of the resource offer. The other great part about a resource offer is that it can be evergreen on both ends . A resource the prospect can use and share with colleagues and collaborators that may manifest itself in the from of additional MQL’s. On your end the resources has no shelf life once created it can be used time and time again as a tool to help fill your pipeline.

If you’re going to be serious about your marketing efforts and want to close more pieces of business having a laser like focus on developing MQLs is going to be crucial. Offering resources, Calls to action triggered by activity and offline source entry are some key ways to develop marketing qualified leads. Once the holes in this part of the funnel are plugged you’ll begin to see a higher return on your marketing efforts and can continue to build up your efforts. How have you gone about developing MQL’s in the past or currently? Leave an answer in the comment section and we’ll be sure to get back to you .