Would you like to know what my absolute pet peeve about lead generation is?
It's bad quality leads. Those contacts that clearly have no genuine interest in interacting with your company beyond an initial eBook download or other content offering. As my role revolves around generating leads using Inbound Marketing for our business, these entries in my contacts list just get my blood boiling. They skew my stats and mess up my reporting.
How do I spot these tire kickers? Well, there are generally a few giveaways in the details they supply in the form.
- Unpronounceable names comprised of random keyboard strokes
- Potentially valid email addresses but hard bounce on send
- Telephone numbers made up of sequential digits
In fact, let me do a quick copy-paste to show you an example!
As you can see this chap has left me very little to work with in terms of lead qualification. The company name, email, first name and last name are all made up of letters conveniently located alongside one another on the keyboard. The telephone number may or may not be a genuine contact number – I haven’t tested it – but at least he put in a little more effort than the more common 0123456789. Right, I think you get the idea. These types of leads are the bane of my lead generating existence. So how do I go about avoiding having to deal with this? Here are a few pointers.
Tactics to Avoid Bad Quality Lead Generation
Focus on Your Buyer Persona
One of the very first steps of setting up an inbound marketing programme is to develop what we call a buyer persona profile. This is a document that outlines your ideal customer. It details both career and personal information such as:
- Role in company
- Challenges, pains and aspirations
- Preferred resources for information, research, industry insights, online socialising, etc.
- Decision-making influence
- Demographic data
- Hobbies and interests
- Family life
There is a lot more that we look at but the overall idea is to intimately understand your buyer persona. The buyer persona is at the core of every piece of content you create – whether it’s a social media update, blog post, email or marketing offer. The content you create (or curate for that matter) has to directly resonate with your buyer persona. If content speaks directly to them, you will find that the incidence of these ‘fake leads’ will decrease.
Build Trust
Imagine you’re wandering up and down the aisles at your regular grocery store. There is someone standing promoting a product of sort that you are completely unfamiliar with. You pause for a moment to have a look and they quickly throw a sheet over their stand and their goods, saying that you can only sample the item if you fill out a form with your full contact details. I’m going to hazard a guess that you’re going to 1) shoot them a very confused look and 2) walk away. If you’re anything like me you’ll probably 3) think obsess about what on earth was under that sheet and 4) return and fill in the form with dummy details just to see what it’s all about.
Perhaps I’ve got a little carried away with my analogy here but the point is that without some level of trust, chances of anyone happily imparting their (genuine) personal details is slim.
I do find that the majority of these leads come from PPC campaigns where there is no historical relationship. While they may be interested in our offers as they match their needs, they are unfamiliar with our brand and hesitant to provide details upfront. Leads originating from our blog posts, website pages or social media tend to provide real details and therefore easier to qualify. They may not always be a sales ready lead, but at least with contact details I am able to follow up with them and address their needs through lead nurturing programmes. Further analysis reveals that those PPC generated leads do often go on to convert as better quality leads after further interaction with us.
Publishing content frequently, being actively involved on social media platforms and providing helpful, valuable information goes a long way to building trust with your prospects. Had the person behind the promotion table been someone I knew or interacted with on several occasions, or perhaps even just overheard speaking to someone else about the product, I would have had less hesitation to fill in that form in the first place (with my real details of course)!
Do you have anything that annoys you about lead generation? Pop me a comment and we can commiserate!
