Your marketing and sales teams are most likely driven by the data collected from potential leads, building your database on the research and feedback you’ve painstakingly collected over the years.
The data collection and review process has probably changed several times over the last five years due to new technology, digital engagement developments, and expertise growth.
However, it’s time to take a step back and look at your lead generation metrics - has the way you’ve used this data changed just as often? If it hasn’t, it’s time to update your views and take another glance over your metrics.
Whether you’re looking at rebuilding your company website for a more efficient buyer’s journey or you’re researching backlink opportunities to establish yourself as an industry leader, your team will need to have some continuous focus on your lead generation metrics.
Why You Need to Track Lead Generation Metrics
Your lead generation metrics aren’t just to provide a more accurate database to your marketing and sales teams. It has the potential to improve both your lead quality and conversion rates.
In this ever-expanding digital era, your processes must keep up with your consumer needs and expectations.
Quality Over Quantity
It’s important to develop processes that will cater to high-value and recurring clients, prioritizing the potential leads that will pass the trial period of the buyer's journey.
Instead of doing your best to funnel through as many interested parties as possible, focus on enhancing a system that filters each lead through the proper channels to gauge interest, audience, and realistic expectations.
Building a comprehensive buyer's journey isn’t just about gathering as much visitor data as possible. Instead, by ensuring lead generation is aligned with your sales funnel, you’ve cut off a significant portion of unqualified leads before wasting both your team's and the client's time.
Especially for B2B companies, it’s important to continuously develop the early stages of your buyer’s journey through the help of lead generation metrics.
Improving Conversion Rates
As with most successful business models, doing one thing right can lead to the success of multiple channels and processes.
Similar to how utilizing the proper tools for tracking and researching your metrics can improve the quality of your leads, it can also lead to more successful conversion rates.
The main difference will be in what metrics you use for various department needs.
Tracking qualified leads and the visit-to-lead ratio throughout your funnel can allow you to focus on bringing in high-value clients.
Whether you’re looking to continuously upsell, attract high-profile clientele, or find consumers that are looking for long-term service, the right lead generation metrics will provide you a deeper look into where you’re capable of bringing in what you need.
5 Ways to Prioritize the Best Lead Generation Metrics
- Sales vs. Marketing Qualified Leads
- Time in the Marketing Funnel
- Lead Costs
- Visit-to-leads Rates Throughout Funnel
- Overall Growth and Goals
1. Sales vs. Marketing Qualified Leads
It’s important to remember when looking through leads that you have several teams benefitting from lead conversions. Reviewing your qualifiers for each team can give you insight into funnel optimization.
One of the most common lead generation problems is ignoring data and neglecting potential leads because they don’t meet your team’s idea of being qualified.
2. Time in the Marketing Funnel
Time to conversion, time on page, and time in each channel are a few of the metrics that can provide a closer look at where you’re losing potential clients.
Are they converting more often after a swift walkthrough or from pages that hold more information and attention? Finding where they spend the most time can tell you a lot about the quality of your content and the chances of conversion.
3. Lead Costs
Keeping your cost per lead (CPL) low is a major goal for marketing teams, especially when it comes to arguing for adjusted budgets and successful initiatives.
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Your team won’t be able to track return on investment on things like new initiatives, campaigns, or advertisements without paying close attention to the cost of leads.
Tracking cost metrics like cost per click or recurring costs can tell you where you’re driving traffic and how to adjust future numbers.
4. Visit-to-Lead Rates Throughout Funnel
There are several steps in your marketing funnel and the client’s buyer’s journey. As such, a visit-to-lead metric isn’t just about how many leads you converted from website visits.
Instead, it’s also about looking deeper at your website design, advertisement pool, and outreach campaigns.
In other words, broaden your field of vision to see where you’re bringing in the most lead conversion.
For example, if social media updates give you a new way to engage with your customer base, invest in analytics and promoted content to expand your reach even further.
Similarly, several website builders can improve your UI, lead flow, and SEO tools to bring in your target audience.
According to Sydney-based online marketer and web developer, Nathaniel Finch of Best Web Hosting Australia, drag-and-drop website builders offer a cheaper and more convenient choice for improving your website design versus hiring a developer.
“There are a number of reasons why people might decide to bootstrap their own site from their imagination rather than using a developer,” says Finch. “For starters, hiring a developer can be significantly more expensive than many of the affordable website builder options described above. (Also, there is an option to hire a remote dedicated development team, which will cost you less than developing a website in-house.) For another, website builders are incredibly easy to use, even for beginners. You don’t need any coding knowledge to use many of the best website builders on the market. This allows you to create your website exactly as you imagine it without needing to go through years of schooling first.”
5. Overall Growth and Goals
Finally, it may seem obvious, but tracking your overall growth and goals in your lead generation system is crucial. Keeping tabs on these numbers isn’t just showing the board positive income.
Instead, it can give you insight into what incentives are performing well, when your company constantly drops off throughout the year, and even what user interface changes potentially drive traffic.
Just like each year will have different growth to track, each channel will have various changes to monitor. Your team needs to be ready to compile and review the information to use for future development.
Making Constant Improvements to Lead Generation and Quality
Repeatedly, we’ve discussed the need to track your lead generation metrics continuously. This is because having a yearly or even semi-annual review of your metric data isn’t always an efficient way to track progress.
Each company will need to treat its metrics differently - variables like company size, customer base size, and even annual budget will all affect your ability to act on the data. Instead, your tracking system must cater to your marketing and sales capabilities.
Utilize digital advancements to the benefit of both your team and your customers. Developing effective metric tracking gives you the opportunity to find and prioritize new channels of visitors based on the feedback and experience of previous potential clients.
Conclusion
Prioritizing lead generation metrics is about more than just reviewing your current content for general growth. Instead, your team needs to use the information in developing processes across the board actively.
Each department can use this information, and it’s up to the marketing and sales teams to develop a comprehensive list of pain points, successful channels, and possible connections between data fields.
Now that you have enough information to generate more leads for your lead nurturing program, it’s important to continue checking your metrics through the advancements of technology and your digital engagement.
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Author Bio:
Shanice Jones is a techy nerd and copywriter from Chicago. For the last five years, she has helped over 20 startups build B2C and B2B content strategies that have allowed them to scale their business and help users around the world.
