Say it with us: Information is king.
In order to better optimize your services and lead generation marketing campaigns, you’ll need all sorts of data, including data on your new leads, or people showing interest in your product, services, or brand. How you analyze those leads, though, can impact how you view and adjust your current campaigns and services.
This analysis can mean the difference between high conversion rates and letting high-quality leads go to waste!
Lead Generation in the Online World
Lead generation, or lead gen, in traditional marketing means converting consumer interest into a sale. In other words, traditional lead generation tactics focus on leading potential customers through the sales funnel/along the buyer’s journey.
In digital marketing, effective lead generation collects user contact information (the lead) online. Simply put, digital lead generation strategies are more about collecting user information and data points. Online lead nurturing therefore often involves an effort to drive traffic to an optimized landing page with a compelling CTA, or call to action. This CTA will encourage the target audience to willingly submit contact information.
Website traffic can be obtained through either organic or paid. You gain organic traffic with effective search engine optimization (SEO) strategies, where you craft relevant content for a target demographic using a chosen keyword. You gain paid traffic through pay-per-click (PPC) campaigns, such as paid social media marketing campaigns that place an attractive ad in front of a chosen demographic in the hopes of getting click-throughs to a landing page, which could generate leads.
How to Analyze Leads
There are two primary lenses with which you can analyze your leads: quantitative data and qualitative data. Both metrics are necessary to determine which leads could be potential customers (aka qualified leads).
Quantitative Data
Quantitative data is easily measurable, with hard facts and numbers. Types of quantitative data include:
- Number of website visitors (website traffic volume)
- How long someone spends on your landing page
- How many people engage with you (engagement rate) on social media platforms
- How many people bought your product or signed up for your service
- Number of job applications for an open position
Qualitative Data
Qualitative data is harder to define, as it is not backed by hard numbers the way quantitative data is. Types of qualitative data include:
- Surveys asking people for opinions on a service or product
- Online reviews about products or user experience (the text, not just the numerical “3 out of 5 stars”)
Why You Need Both Qualitative and Quantitative Data
The best approach is a well-rounded one; that’s why analyzing leads with both qualitative and quantitative data can give you a better perspective of your current lead generation efforts… and how successful those efforts may be.
For example, quantitative data (like website traffic and time spent on a page) can tell you if people are visiting your website and how long they are staying on the site. Analyzing these data points may reveal that lots of people are visiting your site, but they are not staying long at all. That means they are less likely to convert to successful leads.
So, these data points will tell you if there is a problem, but they will not tell you why the problem exists. Now you are unable to determine why someone is or is not interested in your website or why they are not staying long enough to convert.
That is where qualitative data can come in handy. Social media comments or online user reviews may reveal that the users are frustrated with their page experience: the website does not load fast enough, so they bounce. This information lets you know that you need to optimize site speed. Once you do that, you may then notice an increase in the amount of time users stay on your page, which in turn may generate more leads.
While it’s important to use tools that help you gather quantitative data, like Google Analytics and Google Search Console, it’s also important to make sure that you are gathering qualitative data points, too. You can do so by sending out surveys in email marketing campaigns and allowing comments on your company’s social media accounts (and responding to these comments, too).
Online Lead Gen Relies on Effective Data Analysis
Without quantitative data, you would have no idea if a problem exists in the first place. But without qualitative data, you would not understand what causes the problem in the first place… meaning you would not know how to address the problem effectively. With both types of data, however, you can better identify problems and their root causes (and solve them!) in an efficient manner.
Kristen Greif
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