Generating quality B2B leads can be a mission of mercy. You are on your own set to figure out how to make this work. Each company is very unique, with a key differentiator that you have to find and market. You must make marketing work well and turn leads into prospects.
You can talk a big game, but you need to produce profits at the end of the day. Without prospects for your sales funnel, there’s nothing to track. So get results, and this article will help you. Here are five powerful methods for tracking your B2B leads.
What are your B2B sales leads costing you?
You spent thousands of dollars on a massive marketing campaign this quarter.
How To Generate B2B Leads
In addition, you engage in ongoing strategies. Among them are long-term SEO, PPC, content creation, and social media marketing, which cost you another quarter million.
You know that a comprehensive marketing strategy is essential. But how do you determine which campaigns and long-term strategies are most effective?
Which ones generate qualified leads, turn those leads into conversions, and turn conversions into loyal customers?
Not tracking your B2B leads can cost you wasted time, lost revenues, and a poorly allocated budget. However, by understanding more about your leads, you can more efficiently convert them into paying customers.
With technology today, you can go far beyond your conversion rate to gain insight into where quality leads come from, which leads are best, and how to make the most of those leads.
Let’s explore five powerful methods you should be using to track B2B leads.
Source & Cost Attribution
We’ll start by customizing Google Analytics (GA) or a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software you may be using. Your goal is to track the source of your digital leads.
You need to know where your leads came from. Maybe they came from:
- Social Media
- Organic
- Direct
- Referral
- Paid search
As you drill down, you’ll be able to see:
- The sites from which this traffic arrives.
- How long do visitors stay when they come from a specific source?
- How likely is that source to generate an immediate conversion?
Each source will have a cost attributed to it, according to which marketing effort most impacts that lead.
For example, your organic traffic comes in through SEO and content creation. You spend a certain amount on this area.
You can determine whether these leads generate the right ROI by looking at how much you spend per lead and conversion from this source.
Leads To Close Percentage
Simple math leads to close percentages. No fancy technology is needed here, but it’s incredibly insightful.
You’ll divide the number of conversions by the number of leads generated from that source.
When purchasing B2B leads, divide the number of conversions from the leads by the number of leads purchased. Furthermore, based on your average conversion, you can give each lead a cost attribution (as described above).
This simple math lets you know whether those leads were good. If so, you should spend more time acquiring qualified leads.
Generally, you’ll pay less per lead for methods like social media and SEO. However, the conversion rate will be much lower because these leads are often less qualified.
Your strategy is not deficient. The visitor may not be ready to buy. Depending on where the buyer is in the sales cycle, it takes 7 or more touches before a conversion.
But we’re only getting started, so secure your safety harness and get ready for a crazy ride.
Sales Cycle Length
Measuring the length of the sales cycle in the digital world is a little different. When you make your first meaningful contact with this individual, you don’t always know who this person is.
But through the use of cookies placed by tracking software like GA, you can determine:
- The length of time between their first contact and conversion
- Where the first contact originated (Organic, Social, etc.)
- How they arrived when they converted
This gives you an important metric to measure the success of your various marketing efforts. You can invest more in strategies that turn B2B leads into conversions as quickly as possible.
When you look at the typical B2B sales cycles, you notice that each business is different. Some deals can be closed in a day, while others take months or even years to make. When you factor in the cost per conversion, you must allocate more of your budget toward qualified leads.
Are you getting excited about tracking leads yet? Once you open the floodgates monitoring data, you’ll be astounded by how lead tracking can completely change your strategies for the better. It can put you leaps and bounds ahead of your top competitors.
Tracking Across Devices
Tracking across devices is a technology that is still in development. If one of your B2B leads visits your website from their smartphone, iPad, or home computer, they will appear as three different visitors.
You won’t be able to get a complete picture of their journey.
However, a somewhat manual way to track important B2B leads across devices is to give each lead a UserID in Google Analytics or your CRM.
You must enter the user’s basic information and assign the lead an ID. Then, you can track the lead’s behavior across devices.
While you couldn’t possibly do this for every lead, doing this for some of your larger accounts or qualified leads will give you greater insight into how that lead or customer interacts with your company over time.
You can then better measure your efforts to build and maintain a relationship with that customer.
Behavioral Tracking
We’ve touched on behavioral tracking throughout. But it deserves its section for a significant reason.
Understanding where your lead is in the B2B buyer’s journey and how what you do influences this journey can be named among your most valuable data points.
Services like Google Tags and other CRM software allow you to track specific behaviors, like:
- Watching videos
- Partially watching videos
- Downloading documents
- Leaving your site, then returning
- Time spent on the page when they converted
Based on that behavior, you can evaluate where a person is in the buyer’s journey.
For instance, let’s say you offer a downloadable white paper. You may want to track the number of downloads and how quickly leads convert after downloading.
This can tell you A) if your white paper is influential and B) how close the lead is to buying when they download it.
You determine that downloading the white paper means a lead is in the decision-making phase and ready to be converted.
You have already determined through behavioral tracking of your B2B leads that if you send Email A at this point in the buyer’s journey, you can seal the deal.
You send that email and convert that lead.
Wow! That’s just how powerful tracking leads can be.
Understanding B2B Leads
You already know that not all leads are equal. A qualified B2B lead is a decision maker who has already decided they need your service. And they know what they’re looking for.
They must be convinced that now is the time to buy and that they should get that service from your company.
Tracking your B2B leads helps you understand how to get that lead to take this final step.
What would you add to our list of 5 powerful tracking methods if you could?
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