As B2B marketers, we need to constantly evaluate the quantity and quality of our B2B website leads. Sometimes people tend to overcomplicate the process with a convoluted grading system.
In this blog, I am going to simplify the process down to 3 easy steps.
Step 1: Lead Source
By far, the most important step in evaluating a B2B website lead is the marketing source of that lead. You cannot optimize or improve your marketing strategy if you do not fully comprehend where your leads are coming from. All leads should be attributed to a source and this needs to be done monthly. The lead attribution report will help your company determine which B2B marketing tactics are working and which are not.
Determine if your lead is coming from organic search, a directory, direct, email marketing, social media, or another referral source. The continuous analysis of lead sources helps you determine where to allocate funds and resources for the future. It also gives a high-level view of your overall leads in one spot.
Read more: Tips to overhaul your lead generation and lead nurturing.
Step 2: Budget
You only have a successful business if it is profitable. As such, money drives much of the decisions on where you allocate marketing funds and where you don’t. For instance, we have found that Yelp does not produce leads who have the appropriate budgets for Bop Design’s B2B web design services and most are not B2B firms. For this reason, we do not allocate any advertising budget to Yelp to generate leads. We discovered this when we performed the attribution and determined all leads coming from Yelp were not high quality due to inadequate budget. As the budget is often one of the main disqualifiers of leads, this should be considered when evaluating a lead.
Read more: B2B is not an industry.
Step 3: Customer Need
As you refine your B2B marketing strategy, typically there are leads who have ideal initial service needs and leads who do not. The type of need a lead has helps you prioritize one particular lead over another. For example, at Bop Design we have determined over a 10+ year period that leads with a B2B website redesign need are the best fit versus a lead who initially needs collateral design or content marketing. Hence, leads with a website need are always a top priority and our lead generation strategy revolves around B2B web design terms.
There you have it, 3 steps to evaluate your B2B website leads. These 3 steps should be applicable to any B2B business and help you allocate your marketing resources efficiently and effectively.
