Marketing Lead

Generating revenue is, unfortunately, not something that can be done without excellent lead generation. But what is a marketing lead, really? In marketing, prospects and potential customers are often called leads, and they are regularly qualified and assigned to various categories.

Since prospects, potential customers, or marketing leads, come in various forms and have different meanings to different businesses, a good understanding of the customer journey is required. In this article, we will help you get a better grasp of what a marketing lead is, how leads are qualified, and why they are so important as a part of the lead generation strategy. 

What is a Marketing Lead?

A marketing lead is a prospect or potential customer who has shown an interest in a brand’s products or services.

Every company and brand will aim to generate as many marketing leads as possible. Although it is done through different marketing strategies, all strategies have lead generation as their main goal.

A marketing lead may simply be described as a person who has interacted with an advertisement or responded in a positive way to the Brand. Different brands will have different criteria for what qualifies as a new marketing lead.

Wordstream defines the process of qualifying leads as making sure the leads you attract through your ads and other marketing assets are those who are most likely to drive your business goals.

How to Define Marketing Leads?

Depending on the type of business and niche that a brand operates in, there could be several ways to define a marketing lead. However, in general, lead is a prospect or potential customer who is interested in purchasing a product or service.

To gain a better understanding of each type of marketing lead, let’s take a look at how a customer may be defined according to the stage of the customer journey they are in.

IQL – Information qualified lead

The buyer’s journey is just getting started for these leads. At this point, a business ought to provide value in exchange for personal information like a person’s name, email address, location, etc. The term “cold lead” is another name for this kind of marketing lead.

MQL – Marketing qualified lead

These customers are in the middle of the marketing funnel. They have continued to show interest in a business over a period of time. These prospects often seek a company’s solution once they have identified an issue. A “warm lead” is another name for this kind of marketing lead.

SQL – Sales qualified lead

These leads are also called “hot leads”, and are at the very top of the marketing funnel. A customer at this stage is only a step or two away from purchasing a brand’s product or service.

Why are Marketing Leads Important?

Marketing leads are at the core of a brand’s ability to generate profit. The importance of each marketing lead can hardly be overstated. Nevertheless, let’s take a look at some points which illustrate why each potential customer is so important.

Marketing leads dictate ROI

The return on investment that a marketing manager can expect from the designated marketing campaigns’ budget highly depends on how many qualified leads the company has access to.

Each qualified lead may bring great value to the company, especially to startups and small businesses. green panel

Focus on marketing leads improves marketing

When a marketing manager has no starting point on what to base a company’s marketing efforts on, digital marketing efforts can produce subpar results. By focusing on a certain target audience, where each person is more likely to be a qualified lead, digital marketing can attract more, high-quality leads.

What Are The Best Marketing Lead Strategies?

Attracting high-quality leads may be done through many different lead generation strategies. Nevertheless, here are some good digital marketing strategies to attract leads who are ready to move through the sales funnel.

Use appropriate tools

Using the right marketing tools is one of the most basic, but also the most important strategy for attracting prospects.

Certain brands will benefit more from inbound marketing, some may perform better with email marketing, some may opt for content marketing on social media, and some may use a completely different marketing campaign to attract sales-qualified leads.

Create relevant content

Whichever method of digital marketing you opt for, it will most likely have an aspect of content marketing to it.

That is why attracting marketing-qualified and sales-qualified leads highly depend on the ability of marketing managers to keep the target audience in mind when creating materials for content marketing.

Use lead magnets

Offering something valuable or useful for free is the basis of creating a good lead magnet. When a customer tries to access valuable content, they will be prompted with a window that asks for some of their information, such as their email.

Lead magnets are a highly effective strategy in attracting marketing-qualified leads, as they can be nurtured into sales-qualified leads who eventually become loyal customers.

Additional Tips & Tricks

• Subscription forms can be a great method to gain a potential customer or two. This is what many websites and blogs use to generate leads
• Nurturing leads is as important as lead generation. A good nurturing strategy can turn leads from marketing-qualified leads to sales-qualified leads and boost revenue
• Using behavioral data is an important aspect of lead generation and marketing managers will often use this data to adapt their digital marketing strategy 
• For their lead forms, Google and Facebook, both, offer several lead form parameters. Advertisers can choose to optimize for either more leads or more qualified leads, although it is generally recommended to choose quality over quantity

Now You Know What a Marketing Lead is!

A marketing lead is a prospect or potential customer who has positively interacted with a brand. Marketing leads may be categorized according to various criteria but they are most commonly termed marketing-qualified and sales-qualified leads.

You learned what a marketing lead is, why it is important, and strategies to generate marketing leads and you’ve got a few tips & tricks in your pocket. With all this knowledge and information, it’s up to you now to determine if qualifying marketing leads is the marketing approach you need to take for your company or organization.