Business Owners – Do You Want High-Quality Leads?

Turn Digital Marketing Into a High-Quality Lead Machine

You probably don’t need us to tell you that generating high-quality leads is essential. However, the process can be quite tricky, even if you’re using the highly effective digital marketing funnel approach. 

Fortunately, there are ways to take this approach to the next level.

By understanding the best ways to attract quality prospects, engaging with them through microtransactions of increasing value, and finally collecting and using the resulting customer data, you can turn your current marketing funnel into a high-quality lead machine.  

In this article, we’ll review digital marketing funnels and discuss a couple of tactics for delivering high-quality leads.

Let’s dive right in!

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The Digital Marketing Funnel

A digital marketing funnel is a strategy that’s designed to attract traffic, build trust and create mutual value. It does this by creating a tactical hierarchy that reflects the prospect’s level of engagement. Less likely leads are at the top and more likely leads are at the bottom.

As customers become more interested in your solution, they move down through the stages:

• Top of funnel: Customers may be aware of your offer, but aren’t interacting with it yet.
• Middle of funnel: Customers are somewhat familiar with your offer and company and are willing to interact in casual ways.
• Bottom of funnel: Customers are actively considering your brand as an option. They are much more willing to engage with you.

Since there’s bound to be more people who are unaware of your brand than those who are, this organization takes the form of a funnel. The idea is to move as many qualified prospects from top to bottom as efficiently as possible.

However, following this strategy comes with unique challenges. Let’s consider the top of the funnel as an example. You don’t just want generic traffic, you want to attract prospects with the potential to become best customers. Catching a specific audience’s attention can be difficult—after all, you’re not the only one competing for them:

Mid-funnel marketing is where you have an opportunity to build trust with your ideal customers. It’s your chance to build a relationship. This can take time, but don’t skip this step.

Now that you’ve established some trust, your bottom-of-funnel efforts are where you really have a chance to screen out the low-value prospects and sell to potential best customers.

So how can you do this you might ask? 

How to Turn Your Digital Marketing Into a High-Quality Lead Machine (2 Steps)

Understanding your best customers’ avatar, their demographics, their attitudes, their pain, and what they gain from your solution is the key to efficient marketing and even more conversions. Your best prospects will have challenges, problems they want to solve, that are similar to your best customers.

Here are two simple steps that you can take to boost the number of high-quality leads. 

Step 1: Use Quizzes and Assessments to Attract and then Qualify High-Quality Leads

Obtaining more high-quality leads starts with basic user data. There are quite a few ways that you can do this. The two methods we are talking about today are quizzes and assessments. However, there are crucial differences between these two tactics.

Quizzes are typically a fun tactic that’s effective at the top of the funnel. They’re usually designed to catch a high-quality prospect’s attention and let them interact in a light-hearted (low cost) way. Quizzes are a good way to add users to a mailing list, as Stitch Fix does with its style quiz:

Quizzes are also effective because they’re low-cost, attention-grabbing microtransactions that can be used to identify potential leads. However, try to keep in mind that this is their primary purpose. They’re not really meant to collect in-depth information. They tend to benefit your customers – not your marketing strategy. This is fine when they are used as a top-of-funnel tactic.

So, where do assessments come in? 

An assessment goes beyond the surface-level information that quizzes provide. They’re meant to build richer relationships with potential customers, and they’re designed to gather concrete data that will help you filter out the prime prospects and move them down the funnel. An assessment is a high-value microtransaction best suited for low to bottom-funnel activities.

One way they do this is quantity. Quizzes are often brief and take just a few minutes to complete. Assessments will contain more questions, often as many as 20 questions or so in several sections. As such, they usually require more time and effort to complete – making them ideal for customers who are already interested in your brand.

The other reason is quality. You want to use questions to assess anything from customer expectations to their desired price range to their commitment levels. Rather than collecting frivolous data, an assessment collects concrete feedback that helps you understand and market to your audience with high precision. When an assessment is well constructed it also allows the prospect to better understand their own needs.

We’re not saying that assessments are better than quizzes. On the contrary, you should consider both when creating your digital marketing funnel. Quizzes at the top where they’re designed to attract prime prospects and begin the trust-building process by offering a low-cost microtransaction and assessments at the bottom where they’re designed to generate higher levels of trust through deeper, more complex questioning. This will result in higher-quality leads. 

Step 2: Leverage Insights Gained From Assessments

Now that you know how to use quizzes and assessments, it’s time for step two: using the information that you’ve gained. Unlike quizzes, which are designed to be fun and light, assessments perform best when the questions are created intentionally. Try to ask for data that serves a specific purpose, such as:

• Pinpointing the exact problem a customer wants to solve – even if they don’t know what it is
• Gaining a better idea of their price range – this helps you filter out the freebie seekers
• Finding out what the ideal service would look like to them – powerful information that can be used to inform you content strategy
• Understanding how committed they are – this also helps filter out the tire kickers and it’s recognized that “commitment” is an important persuasion factor 

You can ask almost anything that will serve your marketing strategy. However, try to limit your questions to those that will lead to concrete action. That way, you can focus and improve the efficiency of your efforts.

After you’ve collected this information, you can start integrating it into your plan. One very effective way to do this is email automation. By knowing your low-funnel audience better, you can tweak your email content for maximum impact.

Zillow offers an example of this. First, the company assesses what customers are looking for in a home. Then, it sends out emails whenever a listing matches a customer’s exact needs:

You can also use the learning from assessments to create ads that will appeal directly to high-quality prospects. If you know exactly what your best prospect is looking for because they told you and then bought your product or service, you can offer incentives that meet their needs and draw them into your funnel. 

Finally, you can also integrate assessment information into your personal interactions. Demonstrating that you understand what a customer is looking for in a sales call builds the relationship, which fosters more trust and leads to more conversions.

Conclusion – Combine Quizzes and Assessment Surveys for High-Quality Leads

Let’s face it: making the final sale often depends on understanding your audience and having them understand (trust) you. Assessments can help you with both.

In this article, we reviewed the marketing funnel and showed you how to use quizzes and assessments to upgrade your digital marketing into a high-quality lead machine:

1. Use quizzes at the top of the funnel and assessments at the bottom
2. Use the information gathered in the assessment to improve your content strategy and craft targeted conversion campaigns

Do you have any questions about using assessments to generate more leads? Book some time to chat with us. We’d be happy to hear from you.

Author: James Hipkin

Since 2010, James Hipkin has built his clients’ businesses with digital marketing. Today, James is passionate about websites and helping the rest of us understand online marketing. His customers value his jargon-free, common-sense approach. “James explains the ins and outs of digital marketing in ways that make sense.”

Use this link to book a meeting time with James.