No matter how vastly businesses and industries differ, there is a common life cycle of leads that each company generates with their marketing efforts. Understanding this life cycle is essential for any business to create effective marketing strategies and optimise its sales process. In this article, we will delve into the various stages of the marketing leads lifecycle, from capturing potential customers to converting them into committed clients.
What Are Marketing Leads?
Before we dive into the life cycle of marketing leads, let’s define what they actually are. Marketing leads, in short, are potential customers who have shown interest in your company’s products or services.
They could have come across your brand through various marketing campaigns, such as social media ads, email marketing, or content marketing.
These leads are essential for businesses as they move potential customers further down the sales funnel and closer to making a purchase.
The Stages of the Marketing Leads Lifecycle
The marketing leads lifecycle consists of four main stages: capture, nurture, qualify, and commit. Let’s take a closer look at each stage.
Capture
The first stage in the marketing leads lifecycle is capturing potential customers. This involves attracting interested individuals to your business through various marketing strategies.
These can include lead magnets such as free e-books, webinars, or discount offers that entice people to provide their contact information in exchange for valuable content.
The goal here is to capture leads and gather relevant data such as name, email address, and job title.
Nurture/Open
Once you have captured potential customers’ information, it’s time to nurture these leads. This stage involves building relationships with your leads by providing them with useful and relevant content through email marketing, social media, or other channels.
The goal is to keep your brand in mind and establish trust with your leads. By consistently providing valuable information, you can position yourself as an expert in your industry and increase the chances of converting these leads into paying customers.
Qualify
After nurturing your leads, it’s essential to qualify them. This stage involves determining whether a lead has the potential to become a customer or not.
To do this, you can use various methods, such as lead scoring, where you assign a score based on their engagement with your content and their fit with your target audience.
Other factors to consider include:
- Budget
- Authority
- Need
- Timeline
Commit
The final stage in the marketing leads lifecycle is to commit. This is where a lead turns into a paying customer. It’s crucial to have a well-defined sales process at this stage to guide your leads towards purchasing.
You can use tactics such as:
- personalised communications
- targeted offers
- special promotions
It’s also essential to have a seamless transition from the marketing team to the sales team at this stage. The two teams should work together closely to ensure the lead’s smooth and consistent experience.
Post-Commitment
Congratulations, you now have a new customer!
But your relationship with them doesn’t end here. The post-commitment stage is just as crucial in the marketing leads lifecycle.
This phase involves keeping your customers satisfied and engaged to promote repeat business and brand loyalty.
You can achieve this through tactics such as:
- providing exceptional customer service
- personalised offers
- continuously seeking feedback to improve their experience
Understanding the marketing leads lifecycle is crucial for any business looking to generate and convert leads effectively. If you want to stay ahead of your competition and drive growth, continuously monitor and optimise each stage in the lifecycle.
This is where Leadtrekker, a lead management system and CRM software, can help you.
How Can Leadtrekker Help Your Marketing Leads Lifecycle?
Curious to discover how Leadtrekker can revolutionise your marketing leads lifecycle? Keep reading!
Marketing Campaigns Stage
As mentioned, potential customers come across your brand through various marketing campaigns. Leadtrekker can assist in managing the leads generated by these marketing efforts, saving your workforce time and energy and allowing them to focus on revenue-generating processes and lead engagement.
The two types of marketing campaigns that Leadtrekker can help with include Paid digital marketing and traditional media.
Paid Digital Campaigns
With such a wide variety of platforms allowing for paid digital marketing campaigns, keeping track of those generating revenue can be challenging. Whether on social media, newsletters, Google Ads or external links, you’ll want to see what channels are generating your converting leads so you can focus your budget and strategy on achieving the best results.
Using tagged URLs in your campaigns, Leadtrekker can link a lead to a campaign, enabling you to assign customer value (or revenue) to your campaigns. It does this by capturing the data in the URL and writing it into your Leadtrekker account.
Traditional Media Campaigns
Traditional media consists of print magazines and newspapers, radio and television. This type of marketing can be extremely effective for the right business, so it should be considered when strategising your marketing plan. How do you track traditional media campaigns and the success of them?
Alongside a media monitoring tool, you can assign a unique trackable phone number to your traditional marketing campaigns. This will allow you to monitor each campaign’s number of calls. Using Leadtrekker, you can manually add this data to make unique notes on each lead.
Once the campaign has run its course, a report can be compiled using Leadtrekker to determine whether your traditional campaigns add value.
Nurture/Open Stage
The ‘open’ stage in the lead’s lifecycle is when a lead has shown interest in your product or service either organically or thanks to your marketing efforts and has made first contact. This is where your team will need to nurture the lead through the sales funnel and towards conversion.
Once initial contact has been made, Leadtrekker will automatically respond to the lead who reached out. This will ensure your new sales prospect knows their request has been received, making them feel important and seen.
Leads Can be Auto-assigned
In this stage of the lead’s lifecycle, keeping up with the number of leads at once can be tricky. The auto responses will ensure that the lead knows they have been heard, but sooner rather than later, a salesperson (or relevant department) will need to get in touch to ensure that the lead’s inquiry is attended to.
A sales team can often be confused about who should deal with the next lead. This can create a bottleneck; leads pile up, and many fall off the radar because they aren’t attended to timeously.
This is where Leadtrekker comes in. Using an auto-assign feature to distribute the leads evenly between your team eliminates bottlenecks and drastically improves response times.
Auto Reassign Leads
If the lead has not been responded to by the salesperson in a set amount of time (for whatever reason), the lead will automatically be reassigned to someone else. In this case, a manager can be notified, and any issues can be straightened out immediately to ensure optimal productivity.
Qualify Stage
The most important point here is that you don’t want to waste precious resources (time, effort and manpower) chasing a lead that isn’t going to convert into a sale.
To ensure that you are optimising your processes effectively, qualifying your leads will provide clarity so that you can focus on promising leads rather than every lead that reaches your website.
Once you’ve established your ideal lead, you can use a lead management system like Leadtrekker to collect the information automatically and use this database to prioritise the leads.
Step 1: Use the data collected by Leadtrekker to make contact with the lead, whether it is making a phone call or using a form for them to fill out. This will help you determine whether they are within the scope of your ideal customer or not and whether they should be labelled high priority or not.
Step 2: Once contact has been made, you can use the Leadtrekker interface to score your leads out of 10 by using the confidence slider feature. Scoring your leads means giving them a numerical value to indicate how much of a priority they are. This value will be determined in Step 1.
Step 3: Once your leads are sorted by priority, you can start to action them accordingly. The higher-priority leads should be pursued more intensely without being bombarded with information. The lower priority leads should be engaged with less intensity but still a steady level of communication. Using Leadtrekker, you can move leads to different stages to monitor how long ago a lead was last contacted and what steps must be taken.
Commitment Stage
Leadtrekker offers multiple tools that can:
- Track client communication and status on your Leadtrekker database
- Set email reminders to follow up on leads to ensure they don’t feel neglected
- Improve response times by setting notifications for a salesperson once a lead is assigned to them; i.e. if the lead is moved on to the next phase, the relevant person will receive a notification
- Should this person not respond within a set amount of time, the lead could be assigned to someone else
Bottom Line
Create effective marketing strategies and optimise your sales process by investing in Leadtrekker and ensuring that every stage in your marketing leads lifecycle is managed and monitored. With Leadtrekker’s comprehensive tools, you can capture leads, score them based on priority levels, and track their progress until they become committed customers.
Contact us today for a free demo!
