As marketers we know generating leads is a big component indicating success. When it all comes down to it, the content we create is to grow an audience of potential customers. We love seeing the numbers of leads grow. We set goals and aim high. Bosses love seeing a 100x growth on lead count. And why wouldn’t they? More leads means more potential sales.
Or does it? Lead quantity is a valuable metric to track and work towards achieving, but it’s not the only measurement for lead analysis. Where lead quantity ensures you are gaining a reading audience, lead quality is ensuring those leads are potential customers. You want leads who have a high potential of buying from you. Flip the switch and change your marketing focus from high quantity to generating high quality leads. This will mean a shift from a wealth of dedicated readers to dedicated customers.
Why Do We Focus on Lead Quantity?
Getting your content read by a wide audience is exciting, but what if none of those leads have any interest in your business? PPC, Google ads- we can all game the system and bump numbers with paid activity. Taking a more organic approach? Using broad topics that catch the eye of many or catchy subjects that cast a wide net.
It’s hard not to get caught up with lead volume, it’s exciting to know your content is being read by a large audience. The thought process behind the volume based metric is that the more leads you have, the greater the chance those leads will convert to sales. It’s a numbers game, if I have 10,000 leads coming in every month, a percentage of those leads are ready to buy. Right? Yes and no. We all took probability and statistics in high school, so yes the odds are you will generate a certain number of customers when focusing on lead quantity.
Quality versus Quantity
Setting goals around qualified leads (think sales leads) should be an important part of your marketing strategy. The more you move away from trying to produce volume only and balance that with lead quality, the more successful your marketing program will be. Having 10000 leads is exciting, but if none of them are going to buy from you you’ll be going down the road of heartache and low business growth.
Let Your Buyer Personas Be Your Guide
Remember that buyer persona research you did a while back? This is where lead quality comes into play. Writing content that supports the needs and interests of your buyer personas attracts these quality leads and reflects in your marketing success. The content you create are for the readers that have downloaded your content and are in a buying mindset. It’s less of a numbers game when you are gearing your marketing towards persona dedicated educational content. You're talking about real challenges your potential customers are having that you can actually solve.
Don’t get me wrong, setting lead quantity goals is important and needs to be part of your marketing strategy. You can’t hope to just write the perfect piece of content that will land a million dollar deal of one customer, that’s too lofty (and too risky). But having content that supports lead growth is only part of the game and should not be the only metric defining success. Focus your marketing efforts on qualified leads with educational content over high quantity leads with paid media. This provides balance to your program, supports business growth, and generate sales.
