Enterprise Marketing: Improve Lead Quality and Transfer to Sales

Improving Lead Quality with Enterprise Marketing

Inbound enterprise marketing is one of the most powerful lead generation tools that you have in your arsenal. However, while it is excellent at generating leads, the power curve of inbound marketing peaks before the lead gets converted. In other words, you will need to have an effective sales team to monetize the leads you generate through your inbound marketing campaigns. Turning leads into sales is even easier when you set up your campaign with a dual focus on both generating and nurturing leads. The right nurturing programs can generate up to a 200 percent increase in the qualified lead flow to your sales department.

The first step in creating a lead nurturing inbound enterprise marketing campaign is to actually do it. A campaign that nurtures leads requires more content and more follow up than one that just generates leads and turns them over. This requires additional work and planning on the part of the marketing team.

Content is just as important to nurture leads as to generate them. However, the content you need is different. Instead of writing blog posts and e-books or creating videos aimed at getting a prospect to give you more information, good lead nurturing content continues to add value to keep the prospect engaged over the long term. It should also be able to help that potential customer down the sales funnel by identifying their potential problems and solutions and answering the questions that they may have as a part of the buying process.

A successful campaign also requires a higher level of content personalization. Once you have the lead to nurture, you already have some information that you can use to tie a prospect to one of your predefined buyer personas. As that prospect moves through your enterprise marketing system and into your sales funnel, you also get more information on his or her needs that you can use to have your system send out appropriate and highly targeted messages.

In a perfect world, your enterprise marketing campaign will follow a relatively set schedule. First, you start out by hooking the prospect with high-value educational content. This convinces him or her to keep coming back. It also builds credibility for your brand. Over time, you can then transition into more transactional messages, gradually moving from teaching about the industry to teaching about your product to teaching about why the client should purchase your specific product or service.

Finally, an enterprise marketing lead nurturing program is only as good as the tracking system that it employs. Internally, that system helps to track messages and adjust content. Externally, it gives you the information that you need to make changes to landing pages and emails and to optimize your lead quality and the rate at which they convert.

We have created a comparison of market automation software that can help you decide which tools can help with your enterprise marketing and your lead nurturing initiatives. Click here to download it.

Marketing Matters Inbound?is an inbound marketing firm specializing in online conversions, content?strategy, call-to-action mapping and traditional media placement. Our experience in?B2B digital?marketing?and?traditional media?allows us to deliver results through a strategic media mix. We believe in?aligning and merging marketing and sales/operations for optimal return on your marketing investment.