What is Lead Volume?

Lead volume can be defined as the number of qualified prospects you’ve obtained in your database who you believe might exhibit buying behavior at some point in time. The more leads you can produce (i.e. the amount of prospects you gather), the higher your lead volume will be. While a simple concept to understand, the type of lead volume you want isn’t simply a numbers game. Having an abundance of leads is great, but not having a game plan in place to handle them will result in minimal success. You’ll need to understand the qualities they possess, their online behavioral traits, and where they are in the buyer’s journey to determine what course of action to take.

Why should companies seek to improve Lead Volume?

Having a high lead volume can be very beneficial to the success of your business. At the end of the day you need enough leads coming through the door that will eventually become paying customers. This process is known as lead conversion. It can be more clearly defined as a marketing and sales process that involves converting leads (prospects) into customers through the use of nurturing strategies such as behavior automation, retargeting, and email nurturing. The process of lead conversion begins after leads have been generated. Unsurprisingly, you’ll want your lead conversion rate to be as high as possible since that equates to more paying customers and will help determine how effective your marketing efforts are with your target audience.

In order to convert leads, you will need to bring them in. Having enough leads entering the system allows your marketers to better target and nurture them through their buying journey. If you aren’t bringing in leads, you can’t nurture them, and you certainly can’t convert them.

In order to effectively market to your target audience to bring those leads into your marketing campaigns, you’ll need to understand the buyer’s journey and how it relates to the marketing funnel. We’ll discuss that in more detail below.

When should companies focus on addressing lead volume?

Companies should constantly be addressing their lead volume to understand the health of their lead gen efforts and the fluctuations of the same while thinking of ways to continually generate more leads. Having a healthy amount of leads entering your database is what every business needs to continue operating. The more lead volume you have, the more likely you are to have a higher gross number of successful conversions.

How can you improve Lead Volume with Marketo Engage?

Marketo Engage is a power marketing automation platform that allows you to promote your business efficiently and effectively. More specifically, it helps businesses automate and measure marketing engagement, tasks, and workflows. Marketo allows your marketing operations team to provide a steady stream of content at a consistent cadence (otherwise known as lead nurturing) to prospects and customers in a way that’s maintainable and scalable. You have the ability to target prospects, qualified leads, and customers with automated and personalized email marketing campaigns. Where a lead is in the buyer’s journey will determine what stage of the marketing funnel they’ll belong in, and ultimately, what type of content they should receive. Properly assigning leads to the appropriate stage of the marketing funnel is critical to identifying areas where leads are falling out of the funnel and where your marketers need to focus their campaigns to optimize lead conversion and lead generation. This process is managed through Lifecycle Processing. In addition to Lifecycle Processing, a framework to nurture leads according to the stage in the sales funnel will allow your marketers to ensure proper and timely communications to leads as they enter the database and move through the buyer’s journey.

There are three commonly identified stages to the funnel as it relates to nurture: top of funnel (TOFU), middle of funnel (MOFU), and bottom of funnel (BOFU). The TOFU stage is the widest because any prospect can fit into this category. Your primary goal in this stage is to provide general information about your products or services to gain some interest amongst your target audience. Individuals may have little to no interest in your company at this time.

Focusing on TOFU activities is done through lead generation, which grows your lead volume. A consistent process which allows you to control the flow on inbound leads, ensures a repeatable, predictable, and growing pipeline. Which is the ultimate goal. The main focus area is often a conversion on your website where a visitor becomes a known lead.

Improving lead volume at this stage can be done using Marketo Engage by pushing out content via Marketo landing pages and forms to provide more options for prospects to find you and convert to known leads in the database. Make sure to optimize your landing pages and calls to action on them to interest your audience and provide them with something of value in return for providing their information.

As previously mentioned, improving lead volume isn’t just a numbers game. Generating hundreds of thousands of new leads in the database doesn’t necessarily mean results. You want as many of the leads generated as possible to become closed-won. To manage this, you’ll need lead nurture, which will move leads from the top of the funnel, through the middle and into the bottom at the highest conversion rates possible.

In Marketo Engage the most popular way to manage prospects and convert them into customers is through a nurture program. A nurture program for conversion typically consists of the three stages of the marketing funnel discussed above.

Leads should enter the nurture program upon creation and flow through the streams as they demonstrate additional interest in your products or services. Your sales and marketing teams should come together to create a lead scoring model to identify positive interest in your organization through engagement with marketing activities. As scores increase, leads should move through the nurture phases as appropriate to improve the likelihood of conversion to closed-won.

Conclusion

It’s clear that lead volume largely factors into a company’s longevity and success. Without an adequate amount of leads entering the database, a company will likely fail. What a company chooses to do with those leads, no matter the volume, will have an impact on their success as well. In order to bring in the necessary revenue to keep a business afloat, you’ll need a steady inbound lead flow of leads that are converting into paying customers consistently. Having a sound nurture program in place will provide relevant content to each of your target audiences and their resulting interactions will give you a better understanding of their pain points and profile. A lead scoring model will help classify where your leads belong and if done correctly, will ensure the content they receive is most likely to resonate with them and ultimately lead to conversions. If you’d like to learn how we can help increase your company’s lead volume and conversions rates, contact us today!