Attract the Right Job or Clientele: A True Marketing Secret – Lead Validation
Guest Post by Aaron Wittersheim
Aaron’s Story
If you’re wondering why I’m so charged up about lead validation, it’s because it is having a huge, positive impact on our agency. For years, we struggled with the same problem all agencies struggle with: clients who were unsure whether their marketing investments were paying off. And because the other partners and I believe strongly in transparency, we ourselves felt a bit of unease about the inherent fuzziness in some of the data we were capturing and reporting.
We developed the idea of validating sales leads and making it part of every campaign. Our team realized this was the only way to provide crystal-clear information to clients on the effectiveness of their marketing investment. We also learned that lead validation made us far more efficient in managing campaigns. This focus has helped us enormously in the area that matters the most to me: doing excellent work that clients value.
I hope after reading this you can bring more value to your own marketing efforts!
The Value of Validation
If your business has a lead generation website and you’re looking for a way to get a big — really big — leg up on your competition, add lead validation to your marketing process.
“Lead validation” means reading every website form submission and listening to recordings of every phone call generated from a marketing source, in order to separate true sales leads from non-lead conversions. Lead validation is seldom incorporated into marketing campaigns, even among companies with otherwise sophisticated programs and big budgets. Nevertheless, lead validation is a big deal, because:
- Data shows that about HALF of website conversions are NOT leads. Instead, they are things like customer service inquiries, spam, sales solicitations, incomplete forms, competitive reconnaissance, etc.
- Dumping non-validated conversions on sales reps forces them to waste time tracking down dead ends, and ultimately sours them on the value of marketing. In addition, the really good sales leads are more likely to get lost in the shuffle.
- Basing marketing campaign tests and changes on conversion data rather than sales lead data can easily cause campaigns to go sideways … or downhill. More about this in a minute.
- Basing campaign evaluations on conversion data rather than sales lead data causes business owners to overspend because they think their results are much better than they actually are — remember, conversion numbers are going to be a lot bigger than sales lead numbers.
Why Lead Validation Makes Internet Marketing Campaigns Soar
Any capable Internet marketer will tell you the key to success is continual testing. Whether it’s SEO, PPC, email marketing or social media, a campaign never functions at peak levels from day one. By meticulously testing keywords, calls to action, offers, images and much more, campaigns give more and more emphasis to what works to generate leads.
And this testing process is where lead validation is so critical. Consider this example.
- Keyword A generates 100 conversions.
- Keyword B generates 50 conversions.In this situation, the campaign manger will put more emphasis on Keyword A.
If this were a PPC campaign, the campaign manager would increase the budget for Keyword A and reduce the budget for keyword B. If it were an SEO campaign, the campaign manager would create more on-site and off-site content focused on Keyword A, and reduce emphasis or even eliminate emphasis on Keyword B.
But what if lead validation revealed the following:
- Keyword A generated 30 sales leads.
- Keyword B generated 40 sales leads.
With this data, the campaign manager will approach campaign changes quite differently, giving more emphasis to Keyword B.
Time and Money Efficiencies
(Note: Saving your client time and money is the success factor behind many sales).
Multiply this scenario times the hundreds or thousands of testing variables in a campaign, and you can see how lead validation speeds up lead generation — and saves the business time and money it would have wasted.
True, lead validation requires time and money as well, but it is money spent productively. In addition, going back to an earlier point, providing sales reps with a steady flow of genuine leads rather than a hodgepodge of inquiries will boost their confidence in marketing and their enthusiasm to close the sale.
Improving sales morale is an important fringe benefit of validation that can spill over into other sales activities unrelated to marketing campaigns and set the stage for even more dynamic growth.
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Aaron Wittersheim is Chief Operating Officer at Straight North, an Internet marketing agency. He has helped startups, middle-market firms and Fortune 500 companies improve organizational structure and grow through his expertise in process conception, task automation and internal project management.
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