10 Tips to Improve Your Lead Quality — Fast

Later, flaky leads! Filter out spammy subscribers and noncommittal clicks with these lead-quality improvement hacks.

Here you’ll learn:

• Why you need to work on your buyer persona
• How to use paid social media marketing (SMM) for better lead quality
• Which website aspects might need a second look
• How to change your content to improve lead quality

When it comes to leads, quality always trumps quantity.

Seeing more quality leads in the ol’ customer relationship management (CRM) tool is a top priority for 79% of marketers worldwide.

And while lead generation is one of the ultimate inbound marketing goals from paid social to paid search, it’s not worth much if those leads stink. 

After all, each bad lead could cost more than you’d earn from a good one.

So, if your lead generation numbers look good, but the conversion rate leaves much to be desired, it’s time to improve that lead quality. 

Let’s take a closer look at how to improve lead quality — and do it fast enough to prevent unnecessary expenses.

Improve your lead quality with these 10 tips. (Image: Unsplash)

What is a “quality” lead?

A quality lead is someone who visits your website, completes one of your calls to action (CTAs), and has an interest in your product or service.

In other words, someone who is likely to buy. 

We usually reel in these leads through online marketing efforts, like pay-per-click (PPC) advertising or social media marketing (SMM). 

And while a quality lead doesn’t necessarily have to be sales-ready, there should be a very high level of interest or intent — enough that a little lead nurturing from an email marketing campaign or follow-ups from the sales team could turn them into paying customers.

A quality lead is someone who visits your website, completes one of your calls to action (CTAs), and has an interest in your product or service. (Image: Unsplash)

What does it mean to increase lead quality? 

Increasing lead quality is all about caring less about the number of leads you pull in and more about whether or not those leads move on down the sales funnel. If you don’t already, it’s time to include quality of your leads in your key performance indicators (KPIs). 

But like all digital marketing efforts, there is no single way to make this happen. 

There are, however, a handful of tried-and-true strategies we recommend here at HawkSEM:

1. Work on your lead forms

While forms are a great way to acquire more information about your leads, they can also attract the wrong people (think spammy click farms — yikes).

The fastest and the easiest way to filter out lower lead quality is to polish those website forms. 

Here’s how: Add additional required fields and a CAPTCHA to your forms. Instead of asking for the user’s email address only, include more in-depth fields like “occupation,” “full name,” or even the specific product or service they’re interested in. 

Adding fields to your forms might make you nervous. What if you scare off leads when you ask for more information? But remember: this is exactly what keeps less interested candidates away while giving you additional information about potential leads.

The trick is to maintain the balance between requiring more information to deter uninterested leads and not overwhelming a higher quality lead with questions. 

When in doubt, A/B test your forms to determine which ones work best. 

2. Implement email list hygiene

Low-quality leads tend to give nonexistent email addresses in exchange for lead magnets on your website. 

To eliminate these low-quality leads from your email list, consider using an email list-cleaning tool like NeverBounce, ZeroBounce, or Jitbit. (There are plenty of others as well.)

These easy-to-use (and not-too-expensive) programs check your email lists for invalid addresses. The process only takes a few minutes. Some of them have options that allow you to check the email address while the lead is typing it into the form.

Cleaning up your email list is an easy way to remove unqualified leads. (Image: Unsplash)

3. Segment landing pages

If your pay-per-click (PPC) campaigns send different segments of your target audience (using different keywords) to the same landing page, you could lose high-quality leads and generate unnecessary traffic.

The more relevant your landing page feels to the visitor, the more likely they are to become a new lead — and a higher-quality one, at that.

Take the time to (re)review your buyer persona and demographics. Perhaps it’s time to create several personas and design a landing page to match each one.  

Create different landing pages for different services, or even pain points. Answer their questions before they even have the chance to ask. The best leads will be well-informed and ready to continue along the sales cycle.

4. Review your content

Your content should make a sales-qualified lead feel seen, heard, and understood. Here are a few ways to make sure your copy speaks to the visitor and pushes them to convert:

• Use keywords that resonate with your target audience 
• Keep the visitor’s pain point at the heart of your content: What is their problem? How could you help them solve it? What would their life look like after? 
• Leverage lead magnets that provide real value — and CTAs that encourage immediate action (for example, “Get your free checklist now”)
• Ensure the copy is easy to read with lots of line breaks and images 

While rewriting your content may take a while, you can repurpose information you already have to change length, format, and complexity.

5. Location, location, location

Local businesses who advertise with Google Ads (or other forms of PPC advertising) can struggle to attract high-quality leads since they compete for keywords with companies from other locations.

To improve lead quality, work on long-tail keywords that include location.

You can also implement negative keywords to prevent users who live in other cities or states from seeing your ads.

6. Improve accessibility

This one is pretty simple.

If your website isn’t accessible to everybody, you could lose potential customers with high conversion potential.

Improving your website’s accessibility won’t just bring in higher-quality leads; it can also ensure ADA compliance, improve your SEO efforts, and is just the right thing to do.

Partner with influencers to improve lead quality. Source: Unsplash)

7. Partner with influencers

The term “influencer” is now defined as a particular niche of individuals on social media who have a large number of followers. These social media celebs will often partner with brands to promote their offerings in exchange for a paycheck or free products and services.

And influencer marketing works. The industry has grown from $1.7 billion in 2016 to a whopping $16.4 billion projected by year’s end.

If you’re looking to pull in highly qualified leads, partner with an influencer whose followers resemble your target audience. Because followers trust (and often admire) the influencer they follow, their posts promoting the product feel more trustworthy than an ad from the brand itself.

Rather than partnering with a macro-influencer with a huge following, you can consider opting for micro-influencers, who have smaller — but, often, more engaged — following, and usually charge less to boot. Today, some micro-influencers can provide a 20% higher conversion rate than macro-influencers.

8. Work on GBP quality

If your company is local, you need to improve the quality of your Google Business Profile (GBP). The more effort you put into this profile, the more relevant leads will see your website.

Google uses GBP when ranking businesses in organic search on Google Maps, Google Search, or Google Shopping. The stronger the profile is, the more likely you are to get qualified leads.

Optimize your GBP profile for lead generation by:

• Adding consistent and accurate NAP (Name, Address, Phone number) information.
• Choosing the right business categories
• Allowing messaging
• Posting high-quality photos

If you already have reviews in your GBP profile, make sure to reply to all of them. This shows prospects that you care about your clients and it re-engages the existing audience.

9. Use paid social media marketing

Social media platforms have comprehensive targeting capabilities. Take advantage of what Facebook (aka Meta), Instagram, and others have to offer. By implementing precise targeting, you decrease the risk of attracting a low-quality lead.

Facebook Ads has excellent metrics (quality, engagement rate, and conversion rate rankings) that help you evaluate the relevance of your ads to your target audience.

You can also take advantage of lookalike audiences that bring in leads, which are similar to your existing customers.

10. ConversionIQ

What if there was a way to round up all the data from your different marketing channels — your Google Ads metrics, organic traffic, email and social media campaigns — and get a holistic view of your buyers’ journey? 

I’m talking about when users first engage with your brand to where you lose them (or convert).

What if you could pick up on trends, like which types of users turn into leads? And which leads turn into customers? Or why some users *almost* become leads — but fail to convert? 

Well, that’s exactly what ConversionIQ does.

This proprietary software built by HawkSEM connects all your marketing platforms and organizes that data onto one easy-to-navigate dashboard, giving you a birds eye view of your marketing strategy. 

With all that data in one place, it’s a whole lot easier to pick up on which strategies pull in higher quality leads. (Psst: You can learn more about ConversionIQ here).

The takeaway

While there are several ways to improve lead quality fast, to achieve long-term results, you need to review your entire marketing strategy. The key points to review are your buyer personas, content, and paid advertising efforts.

Keeping the above quick fixes in mind can help you improve your approach to lead generation and streamline lead quality in the future.