If you want more quality in your pipeline, you need more quality in your marketing efforts.
That means you should focus more on your ideal customer profile (ICP) and their journey to conversion.
Reflecting on the year, I can tell you that these are some of the most impactful places to spend time and resources to support a more quality-driven pipeline.
I just saw a post in my social feed that could not have been more timely:
Content is your round-the-clock salesperson.
It can reach more people in one day that you’ll meet in a lifetime.
– Ayesha Ameer
The content that you’re putting out there is dictating the type of lead you’re going to get from that content.
So, when you’re looking at your pipeline, what do you see?
I hear it from organizations all the time. They want leads in their pipeline who are most likely to convert (i.e., high quality).
And I also see the efforts they’re putting in, and there’s so much opportunity they’re missing.
The bottom line: If you’re looking for higher quality in your pipeline, you need higher quality in your marketing efforts.
To inject more quality into your marketing efforts, you need to build a content strategy based on what your ideal customer wants and needs to solve their pain.
So, step back and audit: What is your round-the-clock salesperson selling for your business? Is it attracting the right leads?
Quality can no longer be an afterthought for your marketing team, and the executive team needs to get on board, too.
The stuff in this article isn’t new. But sometimes, we need reminders of the foundations.
My hope is that it gives you at least one ah-ha moment to help you be more intentional – and successful – with your lead generation efforts.
How To Shift To Quality-Driving Marketing Strategies
I’ve had the pleasure of moderating half our 45 webinars this year with some great experts!
There are some resounding themes that surface across them all. The importance of quality, branding, consistency, and holistic strategies came to the top of the list.
And have you noticed all the branding articles in your LinkedIn feed, or is it just my algo? Psst … it’s because it’s important…
With leaner teams, leaner budgets, and leaner attention span (and let’s not forget all the changes in search this year), marketers just don’t have the resources to “try it and see what happens.”
There are some places you can focus your resources on that can have a big impact on the quality of leads you attract and retain.
First, you have to understand all the content touchpoints your audience needs to help nurture them into the next phase along their journey.
Think about call-to-action (CTA) to get them into your pipeline, and educate them if they’re not ready to convert yet. (This is where alignment with sales will be an essential part of this strategy planning.)
A solid strategy tells your story, delivers value throughout the customer journey, and woos your audience with a solution that fits their needs.
No more creating content that doesn’t serve your audience.
Notice what I said: Your audience needs. Put yourself in their shoes and create content that informs and shows value.
The Importance Of Intent-Driven Content To Support Journeys
Remember those leaner teams, leaner attention span? Teams don’t have time to do all the things. Plus, consumers don’t have time to focus on all the content that hits them.
So, focus your attention on places that matter.
Intent-driven content supports journeys by focusing on the content relevant to the ICPs you want to grow, helping streamline content creation.
Using the research from the ICPs and sales and marketing alignment, this is where you’ll create targeted pieces that address specific pain points or needs at that moment of the journey.
Content is tailored for each stage of the journey (awareness, consideration, decision, retention, advocacy), and showcases your value at that stage.
When coupled with your first-party data, you can create a personalized experience to make them feel seen. This helps build loyalty.
Email/CRM Automation Is The Easiest And Fastest Way To Inject Quality Content Into Customer Journeys
We all know that it costs more to attract new customers. So, start by looking at the leads you already have. Improve their experience with you.
You have gold at your fingertips. Use data you have on your leads (i.e., demographics, firmographics, engagement, behavior) to help you understand where leads are in their journey and how you can nurture them with targeted content. This also serves as the foundation for leading scoring.
Tip: Use third-party compilers to enrich missing or outdated data that would be helpful to your segmentation strategy, like accuracy, buyer intent, company size, revenue, etc.
Lead scoring is often overlooked by many sales teams. This functionality, available in CRMs, can help you easily identify where leads are in their marketing journey and how qualified they truly are.
Leads get scored based on the likelihood they will convert. For each demographic or firmographic they have that matches your core ICP, they get points.
Plus, they get additional points for each action they take on your site.
Sales and marketing need to collaborate here on what data points, actions, and behaviors get what score. The idea is that the higher the score, the more likely that the lead is a qualified lead.
Once a lead hits a certain score (determined and agreed upon by the team), the most qualified leads get pushed to your sales team to nurture and close (SQLs, sales qualified leads), and the lower scores stay with marketing for automated nurturing (MQLs, marketing qualified leads).
Using these data-based insights, give them a custom experience to show them you’re here to help and provide value.
The onboarding process is the most important part of their interaction with your brand. That first email is the first impression of how you’re going to interact with them. Let’s do a quick audit:
First, can you tell, based on how they got in your pipeline and what actions they’ve taken on your site, what stage of the journey they’re in?
Second, does that onboarding content match that stage?
Where I see most lost opportunities is when brands go for the direct sell, even if the lead is still in those awareness/consideration stages.
In those stages, they need information to educate and nurture them to conversion. A direct sales push could have them unsubscribing if you’re not providing value, making it more difficult to get them into your pipeline again.
Beyond onboarding, look at your journey stages or the segments of the audience you have.
Once you have the journey mapped, look at the content you already have that can support the journey. Fill gaps where needed.
Use one piece of content to make several (“sweat the assets”). Try different formats to help reach users with media that is more palatable for them.
And, most of all, lean on sales and customer service to help develop content you don’t have.
Automation Within Your CRM Is Powerful
If the tech gods didn’t want us to use technology, they wouldn’t have blessed us with all the toys we have.
For this article, I’m going to focus on the automation within your CRM/email platform that can help you be more efficient and effective with your resources, and enable your sales to spend their time on the most valuable leads.
Automation can be set up to tag users based on actions or behavior, which helps increase or decrease lead scores.
The key benefit of lead scores is that you can send only the most qualified leads (SQLs) to your sales team. Let marketing nurture those who aren’t ready yet.
Then, building on the segmentation and scoring above, with the right setup and triggers, you can identify their place in the journey and provide them with the right content at the right time.
Example: We have prospecting flows set up for readers who download one of our ebooks, but don’t subscribe to our newsletter.
The goal is to get users who don’t subscribe to our newsletter to do so.