ShivaniA marketing qualified lead means when a lead shows interest in your products or services by
- Visiting your company’s website or
- Signing up for your newsletter or
- Downloading free eBooks/whitepapers or
- Using software demos
It usually happens when people interact with the company’s content. This type of content is designed specifically to attract people who need or show interest in your products.
But keep in mind, according to the company pipeline, marketing qualified leads can’t be identified as customers or sales qualified leads.
So, let’s move ahead in this guide and learn more about marketing qualified leads.
What are the characteristics of marketing qualified leads?
We have compiled different features to identify a marketing qualified lead.
1. Download content
Whenever people download e-books or guides from your website and provide their email addresses in return, they are considered interested in your products.
2. Fill out forms
Most websites offer sign-up forms that collect email addresses for nurturing purposes. For instance, if a visitor comes to your website and fills out the form, that means they are interested in what you offer making him a marketing qualified lead.
3. Try product demos
If you offer software products and people are requesting the demo, it indicates they want to try your products. This makes them an MQL.
4. Spend time on your website
A marketing qualified lead checks out your products and contents and spends time on your website then it indicates they are interested in your business and can become customers soon.
5. Repeated visits
When you witness a number of repeated visits to your website, it shows they are interested in your offerings and want to get to know and trust you more. This is another feature of a marketing qualified lead.
How to qualify marketing leads
Every business owner must understand how to qualify marketing leads. A study by MarketingSherpa showed that 61% of b2b marketers send all their leads to sales, even though just 27% are qualified. Because they did not have a defined process for qualifying marketing leads?
Here are a few parameters that will allow you to qualify leads that are worthy of your time.
1. Track and qualify content consumption patterns
First of all, to qualify marketing leads you have to track and understand their content consumption patterns. For instance, website visitors and users always leave digital footprints that guide them to what they like and want. By tracking their content consumption patterns, you will learn the actions that help to qualify a lead. For instance, a visitor who downloads an e-book attends a webinar, spends a considerable amount of time on a pricing page, and returns to check the page a day later has shown their interest in your business and can be considered as a marketing qualified lead.
2. Track trends of successful marketing qualified leads
If you utilise Facebook or Google for your lead generation, tracking the conversions using the pixel is not always possible. You can’t track the conversions using Facebook Conversions API or Google Offline Conversions. In this way, not only the issues related to the tracking of Cookies are solved, but it is possible to embrace a full-funnel tracking approach that gives you a clear overview of the conversions caused by your campaigns and, consequently, you will be able to yield marketing qualified leads that are increasingly willing to buy.
However, if you need to use cookies, you can still do so, but make sure to implement reliable cookie consent management to keep a balance between user privacy and data collection.
3. Monitor customer feedback
Another method to qualify marketing leads is by observing your customer’s feedback. This contains the comment and feedback left on the website. Although not all comments and feedbacks are productive, you will still get them on your products or content. The product feedback can be on how to enhance your product features or make it more user-friendly. Others can be about their positive experience on your website. Pay attention to them and fix them. This will help you qualify more visitors for marketing leads.
4. Check various marketing touchpoints of your closest competitors.
As an end-user, see the elements and signals which can qualify visitors as leads better than your visitors. For instance, check if they have a better user interface, better lead-capturing process, better social media presence, and similar signals. Try to enhance your marketing touchpoints to qualify visitors to MQL leads.
How to generate marketing qualified leads
1. Offer quality lead magnets with Facebook Leads Ads
Facebook’s over 2.7 billion monthly active users across different countries of the world have made it one of the best ways to forge quality leads. Facebook keeps rolling out technologies that help businesses get quality leads. One of these technologies is Facebook Lead Ads. This type of ad permits you to collect information from prospects on the Facebook platform. The ad shows up on Facebook users’ news feeds. When they click on the ad, a form pops up showing their information such as their name and email address. The user confirms the detail and clicks on submit right there on the platform.
Facebook Lead Ads is optimized for mobile as about 96% of Facebook users access the platform through a mobile device or Tablet. With Facebook Lead Ads, all conversion frictions common to landing pages are eliminated. This is because users fill the form right there on the platform, thus increasing your conversion rate.
Facebook provides you with access to its pool of data to discover people who are interested in your business. To make signing up to your email list easier, offer a quality lead magnet. This will attract them faster to sign up for your offer. Lead magnets are resources given out for free. It includes e-books, checklists, webinar replays, marketing calendars, video courses, etc.
2. Create valuable blog posts on your website
The second way to forge marketing qualified leads is by using content marketing. It is one of the best tried and tested strategies that generate excellent results. This is why 89% of b2b marketers use content marketing for their business. Content marketing can give you three times as many leads per dollar spent.
One type of content marketing that works so well is blog content. People love quality information. This is why 20% of internet users spent time reading content online and 68% of people spend time reading about brands that interest them. Because of this, 62% of marketers have blogs.
As good as blog posts seem to be, not all of them can generate quality leads. A blog post that generates quality leads will have a catchy headline that will attract visitors’ attention to read and provide answers to their questions. The content must evoke emotions that will entice readers to enjoy the blog post and also take action thereafter.
There are three popular ways to generate leads on your blog. The first is using sign-up boxes with free resources such as e-books, and checklists to give readers in return for their email addresses. The second is the content upgrade and the third is anchor texts CTAs in the blog content pointing to where to download a free resource, and after post banners.
3. Use Webinars
A webinar is a great way to forge marketing qualified leads for your business. This is why 87% of marketers found webinars to be an effective marketing strategy in a survey. Also, 51% of people who visit the webinar landing page will convert on the initial sign up, while about 36% of them will attend the webinar.
Webinars also offer a high conversion rate of 19% compared to that of a website or PPC ad, which is between 2.35% – and 5.31%. There are different webinars such as educational webinars, case study webinars, and product demos webinars.
4. Use Long-tail keywords (SEO)
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) accounts for 49% of business blog traffic while Longtail keywords account for 70% of all web searches. Long-tail keywords are keywords with low search volumes.
Using long-tail keywords in your SEO strategy makes it more effective.
Long-tail keywords help you generate organic traffic to your website. This helps to increase marketing qualified leads for your business. Use long-tail keywords in your content to help you rank for keywords that people are searching for. Once they find informational content that satisfies their desire on your website, they will be compelled to sign up for your email list. If you don’t have an in-house team that can handle an extensive SEO project, you can get optimized for search engines with designrush.
5. Check the metrics
Metrics are important in marketing qualified lead generation. It tells you what is working and what is not. Based on the metrics, you can make an informed decision on the best lead generation strategies to use for your business. There are different things you need to track. This includes:
- Conversion rates: The conversion rate in this case is the rate at which you are converting visitors to marketing qualified leads. When you measure this accurately, it will help you know the number of marketing qualified leads needed to generate the desired revenue target
- Funnel leakage: Funnel leakage shows you where your funnel is leaking i.e. where visitors are falling off the sales funnel. You can track this by checking out your conversion rates at each stage of the funnel. Look for the exact stage where the people are dropping off and fix it
Checking the metrics will help you focus on what is working and make it work even more.
Conclusion
Every business needs a constant supply of marketing qualified leads to survive. There are various ways to generate marketing qualified leads such as using Facebook Leads Ads and lead magnets, creating valuable blog posts on your website, using webinars, and using Long tail keywords. We hope you find this guide on the market qualified leads helpful.
