What Is Data-Driven Lead Generation?
A recent survey shows that up to 30% of a typical company’s revenue is generated through marketing.
Yet turning leads into sales remains one of the single most difficult parts of getting your business to grow.
Fact is, most leads who enter your marketing funnel – even many so-called qualified leads – do not end up buying your product or service.
This, right here, is a massive bottleneck for many companies trying to climb the leader.
And all too often, these struggling companies think this can all be fixed with a bigger marketing budget – without setting a useful strategy in place.
The #1 Mistake You’re Making In Marketing Right Now
Leads don’t pay the bills…conversions do.
But whether it’s hitting the “Buy” button, making the phone call, or lining up to check-out, most of your prospective customers just aren’t taking that final step.
You might feel so close to making the sale. Like something somewhere is missing, and all your customers need is one final “push” towards conversion.
This is where many, many companies make a big mistake.
Instead of taking a forensic look at their broken marketing funnel and analyzing where, exactly, their leads are dropping off…
These companies pull out their credit card and expand the campaign, as-is, to an even wider audience.
They fall prey to the all-too-common misconception that you should be marketing your service or product to as many people as you can.
However, this “scattershot” marketing approach won’t bear any fruit if 99% of the people coming across your product or service aren’t buying!
Sure – you’ll be reaching more potential customers overall. It stands to reason that your conversions should increase accordingly.
But that doesn’t actually solve the problem you had in the first place: that too small a portion of your leads were actually buying.
Your conversion rate is still low. You’re still spending too much money per lead.
Put simply, you’re not getting your money’s worth.
What You Should Do Instead: Quality Over Quantity
This is exactly where data driven lead generation is so important.
Rather than focusing on reaching more people, this methodology helps focusing on the right kind of people. Your target market.
Data-driven lead generation focuses on leveraging sales and marketing data to focus on the quality of leads over quantity. This is an extremely important concept.
Data-driven lead generation doesn’t necessarily focus on getting as many leads as possible. Rather, it integrates sales into the mix and focuses on pushing the leads to actually buy a product.
This approach can further amplify the success of any marketing strategy, and constant iterations can serve to work out that strategy’s pains and shortcomings.
Lead Generation & Data Analytics
In order to build the right models for your business that can provide you with the most usable data, it is crucial to gather accurate, relevant marketing and sales data.
This data can then help generate insights and prove or disprove your hypothesis of whether a specific strategy could work.
With data analytics, you can focus on understanding the different attributes of your target market and develop detailed insights – the kind that you can use to produce powerful marketing messages.
Furthermore, this can allow you to find connections between different attributes and data sets that aren’t possible through traditional biased thinking.
For this to happen, you need reliable data which can help drive your analysis.
Good Data Is Unbiased Data
Here’s the real beauty of data driven lead generation:
Data is always unbiased.
The pre-set notions and theories that are followed in “traditional” marketing (some of which are literally over a hundred years old!) are not always relevant in this ever-changing technological environment of ours.
It is important to get unbiased data to help drive analysis and to get results.
Having unbiased data will help you generate those high-quality leads that have a significant chance of turning into a sale.
In order to find reliable, unbiased data, you have to develop an understanding of who you’re targeting and identify the best acquisition channels to collect the most valid data. These can include techniques such as tracking anonymous users visiting your website, gathering feedback from your customers, monitoring trends of loyal customers or using social logins to access a prospect’s profile.
Often, your company’s history is its biggest asset. Using historic behaviour and historic data from older clients can help narrow down your target market and really allow you to focus on generating quality leads. In order to narrow your target market, you need DATA!
Here are some of the key metrics to focus on in your quest to building a data driven strategy:
- How much of your revenue comes from marketing channels such as email, social, PPC, and others?
- How many leads are you generating in a specific time period?
- How many customers actually buy a product or book a service from your website?
- To date, how much actual revenue has your marketing strategy generated (and how does this compare to what you forecasted?)
- How much money have you generated from each lead source?
- How many leads have become opportunities for each of your marketing channels?
Start Putting Data To Work For You Now
To be honest, this only really begins to scratch the surface of what data-driven lead generation strategy can do for your business…but it’s a solid place to start.
And the very best time to start is now.
With all the uncertainty in the world right now, no business can afford to take a “scattershot” approach to its marketing budget.
This is the time to stand out or stand back and get left behind.
Reach out to us when you’re ready to start turning more leads into paying customers.
