What’s Holding Your Lead Gen Strategy Back?

When it comes to picking a spot for dinner or deciding what to read, a little spontaneity is a good thing. For lead generation strategies, though, predictability is the goal. You want to know exactly how reliable your lead gen activities are – how many leads you’ll get from a given action, your cost per lead, your total nurture time. With reliable metrics in your lead gen strategy, you’re able to maximize conversions and minimize wasted effort.

Here’s how uncertainty creeps into your lead gen plans and what you can do to fight it.

Incomplete Analytics

When you have access to the nuts and bolts of how your lead gen strategy operates, you can figure out what’s going on if it’s not working smoothly. Your marketing automation system is as good as the MARKETING AI® consultant who’s guiding you through it; with it, you can pinpoint every detail of who your leads are, how they found you, and what they need from you to take the next steps on their buying journey.

One factor many B2B businesses miss in analyzing the effectiveness of their lead development and generation is time. (We talk about that more in our companion article, “Add a New Dimension to Your Database Marketing with Cohort Reporting.”)

Poor Attribution

Attribution is the science of determining how leads arrive at key points in the decision-making process. Once you know what convinces leads to buy, you can effectively help new leads become buyers too. First-touch and last-touch attribution assign all the decision-making power to the first or last interaction points your lead had with you. They’re useful snapshots of what a prospect was thinking just before making a decision, but these forms of attribution are missing nuance.

With automation, you and your MARKETING AI team can develop algorithms to assign attribution over a far wider range of decisions your leads make.

Unexplained Variables

You’ll always face a few random occurrences; even the best AI can’t yet predict when a video will go viral or a product will become the next big thing. Most of the time, you should have a good idea of why your leads make the choices they do. If you don’t, it’s time to take a closer look at the data. A sudden influx of leads from an unfamiliar source could be good news if a new market has discovered you, or it could mean a new competitor is checking you out. Your analytics will tell the full story.

Your leads are reasonable people. They make sound decisions based on facts and careful research. Why, then, do they sometimes seem so inconsistent in their choices? That’s up to you and your marketing automation consultant to figure out – and together, you can. Once you’re able to predict lead value and behavior reliably, you’re able to move from seeing marketing in terms of cost to viewing your lead gen activity as a revenue driver.