Lead generation is absolutely crucial to identifying potential customers that are interested in your business’s products and services.
With online leads coming from various sources such as search engines, email marketing, banner advertising and social media, you need to take an informed approach so you can reduce waste and focus your marketing budget on the sources that are driving the most high-quality leads.
Not only this but they need to prove the return on investment (ROI) from marketing to justify the budget in the first place.
So how can companies use data to identify exactly what drives lead generation, isolate the ultimate source of leads and streamline their marketing strategies? We asked Daniel Reilly, director at Ruler Analytics, to explain;
In the past, analysing the source of leads has typically been done by guesswork. By looking at sales, focus groups and even just using common sense, a marketer might estimate what drove sales and which keywords were used to get potential buyers onto their website.
Unfortunately, if a business doesn’t spend enough time, or have the right information or tools to investigate its lead generation, then it won’t be able to precisely identify potential customers interested in a certain product or service – or how they got there.
Nowadays data is readily available to help marketers and sales teams improve lead generation and secure a high number of customer conversions through a website.
One way that this works is by looking at how people have found a website through keyword attribution to the customer journey, which may result in an online or phone conversion. Effective use of data analytics can allow businesses to reap the following benefits:
1. Get more customers
Identifying the best sources of leads (such as Google, PPC and social media) and converting leads into opportunities basically means businesses can go out and target more customers.
By understanding how leads are generated through these marketing channels, using analytics and call tracking software, sales teams can calculate which source(s) are converting leads into opportunities and prepare resources ahead of a campaign.
Sales teams can then prioritise their time more resourcefully and only concentrate on the sources that will produce the most valuable outcomes. For example, a PPC campaign may result in a high number of phone calls which have not been directly linked to the efforts of the marketing team.
With data platforms, like Ruler Analytics, it is possible to easily identify the most effective marketing source through call tracking and analytics reports, which clearly reveal the customer journey, from search to conversion – be that phone or online.
2. Understand your audience
It’s possible to see how a customer moves through a website. Understanding this journey will give whoever is in charge of sales and marketing useful information about the customer’s behaviour towards certain products or how they are presented.
For example, it can help identify if the website is easy to navigate or not. Data can also reveal if people searching for something are immediately exiting the page because perhaps the brand is confusing or not providing the information that they require.
Company identification is also possible through certain software. This can give staff vital clues about which business is browsing a site and allow the marketing team to target offers or more information to warm up the lead.
3. Know which regions or areas are generating the most traffic
In addition to knowing who is looking at the website, it is also incredibly useful to know which regions or areas are generating the most traffic.
While marketing teams can use this information for local SEO purposes or social media targeting, the sales department can use the location of potential leads to become more targeted and have a clearer outlook in order to plan for future projections.
It’s surprisingly simple and straightforward to discover lead location using software that can track leads from logging the users IP (Internet Protocol) address.
4. Know which products and services are working
It makes sense to give the sales team information about which products or services are attracting leads so that they can tailor their message for each interaction.
For example, if a lead visits a law firm’s website, looks at pages relating to conveyancing, and then requests a quote, a sales rep can start the conversation with information about the content that was viewed.
In order to receive this kind of data, businesses need to individually track visitors and leads, which widely-used Google Analytics does not do in detail.
The right software, however, can give visitor reports that enable a business to identify which pages leads were browsing before converting a particular goal, such as making a phone call, filling in a form, or requesting more information.
5. Get more from your marketing spend
With call tracking and analytics, campaigns can be streamlined into what works best and problems can be highlighted in the sales pipeline and fixed.
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For example, call tracking can show how a lead got to the point of making a call, but then show why that lead didn’t convert.
Armed with this kind of knowledge, some businesses have been shocked to see that the marketing was working, but calls were not being answered, or worse not being dealt with properly on the other end.
Ultimately, being able to analyse data helps to get more from a marketing budget. It means businesses can cut costs and ensure spend from the marketing department is going as far as possible, as well as determining exactly where leads are coming from to make sure no marketing effort goes to waste.
Sales and marketing teams must bridge the gap and communicate in order to maximise their efforts. By analysing data, and tracking calls, businesses can stop wasting time on guesswork and see what really makes a difference and which areas need work to increase lead generation.
For many, analytics means much more – being able to prove the ROI to a board of directors and investors. Any business needs to be able to clearly demonstrate how marketing impacts the bottom line and get complete clarity on every pound and pence of the budget.
This article has been written exclusively for ByteStart by Daniel Reilly, director at Ruler Analytics, a visitor-level marketing analytics and call tracking solution provider.
