5 effective ways to qualify leads from cold to hot
When it comes to marketing, we all know that there are many facets that shape the success of company campaigns. Lead generation is one of the most imperative, yet challenging, parts of any marketing strategy.
While most companies that practice inbound marketing worry about getting new leads into the funnel, they often fail to look at which of those leads will actually qualify into customers. So, you need to find out whether people are simply browsing your articles or website, or if they are actually there to become a customer.
We classify the different leads in the beginning stage of the funnel as cold and hot leads. While knowing how to identify the difference between the two is essential – learning how to qualify cold leads into hot leads is even more so.
WE CALL THIS PROCESS LEAD NURTURING.
This is how your company can implement a great lead nurturing campaign that will turn your cold leads into piping hot ones in just a matter of time:
SMART CONTENT
Before creating a single piece of content – be it a landing page, an email or a blog post – you need to thoroughly understand everything that you possibly can about your target market. You need to comprehensively investigate the details of where your product/service meets with your customers’ lives.
With an inbound marketing methodology, this means that you need to create buyer personas for your ideal target market. This should include (among others):
- What they do for a living
- The stage of the funnel they are in
- Their goals and problems
- Their biggest resource for solutions
RELEVANT CONTENT THAT WILL CONVERT
Once you have created your buyer personas, you need to create content that will nurture them from cold leads into hot ones. This means that you have to create extraordinary content that engages them, is relevant, and reaches them through the right platform.
You also need to make content that is more likely to convert, for example, an online advertisement should have:
- Aesthetic appeal and eye-catching qualities
- Relevance to persona
- An excellent value proposition
- A hard-to-resist call to action
SMART FORMS
Landing pages are basically the icing on the cupcake. They are the places that should be your lean, mean, lead-generating machine. However, in the past, landing pages tended to have a high percentage of bounce back rates. This pretty much came down to ineffective or complex forms that simply put leads off.
Enter the smart form. This form has changed the way that we gather information about prospects and allows companies to better target their customers with relevant, timely content through email segmentation and other handy tools.
LEAD SCORING
According to Hubspot “lead scoring lets you assign a value (a certain number of points) to each lead based on the professional information they've given you and how they've engaged with your website and brand across the internet. It helps sales and marketing teams prioritize leads and increase efficiency.”
Lead scoring is one of the most effective and efficient ways to identify the leads that are worth following up on, and helps to identify the personas that you should be targeting with your content for the best results.
USING THE BEST CRM FOR YOUR COMPANY
Choosing the right CRM is a huge part of having a successful lead nurturing campaign, and it brings your smart forms, smart and relevant content, as well as lead scoring all together in one place. A great CRM will do much of the slog work for you and allows you to concentrate on the aspects that will have more of an effect on nurturing your customers down the funnel.
When it comes to lead nurturing, at Rise + Shine, we certainly know a few things. We use an inbound marketing approach that centres around the very best principles in direct marketing to help companies attract their ideal customers. If you would like to know more about lead scoring, smart forms and other ways to get a better lead conversion rate for your company, download our new and exciting ebook 30 Greatest Lead Generation Tips Tricks and Ideas.
