Utilizing the power of analytics can help to increase your lead generation. It shows you what is and isn’t working with your sales and marketing strategies.
“If you can‘t measure it, you can‘t improve it”
Peter Drucker
Some of the ways that analytics can help you is by giving you insights into:
- Customer behaviours
- Which campaigns have worked best and ended in the most closed sales
- Your own team, what they’re doing well, and where they need improvement
Analyzing data from all of these aspects will help you to predict what kinds of marketing and sales strategies will work in the future and which to avoid.
1. Insights into customer behaviour
To know how to generate more leads you need to know the ones you already have. It’s well known that personalization is key to getting customers. You need to know how to tailor your strategies to the kinds of customers you’re looking for. Digital analytics can help you with this.
You already have data on your past customers. Looking at this and finding patterns is pivotal. Your best customers will have a lot in common. Even something as simple as location, industry or company size. This will all be able to give you an idea of the kinds of lead you should be aiming for.
For example, digging in to the customer data in a previous company I could work out the average life time value (LTV) of a customer. Knowing how much and how long an average customer was willing to pay would then allow me to go back and adjust how much money I could spend to acquire that customer and be profitable.
But digging further into the data I could group customers into different types. Size, Industry, Location, where they heard about us and what content they interacted with on our website etc.
One particular example showed me that customers who interacted with our live chat box on the website tended to be 3 times the size of our average customer and were more likely to convert. So it was an easy decision to extend live chat times with extra staff and to call more attention to it.
Once you know the kind of lead you’re looking for, you can tailor your content and the platforms you share your content on to suit them. Tracking who interacts and engages with your content the most will let you know if you have personalized your content enough to get the leads you want.
A CRM tool is important to keep track of prospects and leads. You can see all of the interactions you have had with leads. It can highlight if there are any patterns emerging between possible leads and already qualified leads so you know where to focus.
2. Insights into which campaigns have worked best
You want to know how well your Sales and Marketing campaigns are working. Insights can reveal which are getting the most attention, and ending in the most closed sales. It’s easy to look at your website’s analytics and focus on page views and returning customers. But, online marketing and demand generation is much more than that. How did the lead originally get to your website? Through a search engine? Through a social media link or email? Do they regularly interact with the content you share?
With analytics, you can answer all of these questions and more. Let’s look at email campaigns for example. If you sent out an email campaign to certain leads, analytics can show you the types of subject lines that are most likely to get opened, which leads opened the email, which links within the email got the most clicks, and which leads went on to become a qualified customer after clicking on these links.
It’s the same with content and links shared on social media. You can see what got the most interaction and click-throughs, and thereby see what kind of content attracts the most suitable leads.
I tend to break analytics down to customer acquisition channels and track these channels individually. You can see an example of this breakdown and how I report on it here.
All of this information makes it easier for you to tailor your content in the future so that it attracts the most likely to qualify leads.
3. Insights into your own team
You need to be able to see how your Sales and Marketing teams are working. Not just on their own, but how they affect each other and how they perform together. Sales and Marketing are notorious for not always getting along, so it’s important to keep track of how well the leads from Marketing are doing once they are passed on to be followed up by Sales.
There are certain analytics that can be measured to keep track of this, including:
- How many leads turn to Marketing Qualified Leads (MQLs)?
- How many Sales Qualified Leads (SQLs) come from MQLs?
- How many SQLs become viable opportunities?
- How many opportunities become closed sales?
All of this data will be able to show you how well both Marketing and Sales are at qualifying and nurturing leads. If one team is having trouble it will show in the data and you will know exactly where you need to help them improve.
Analytics are an important part of your marketing and sales strategy. Without them you’re just fumbling around in the dark, hoping to find a lead. But by utilizing them you give yourself the light that you need to boost your lead generation efforts.
