What Marketing Channels Deliver Your Best Leads?

Whether you're carrying out marketing for yourself or for clients, the leads that you generate are an important indicator of how effective your marketing methods are. Clicks to your website, the number of visitors, bounce rate on your website - these are all great indicators, but that's all they are; general indicators. When deciding which marketing channels are working well and which aren't, it's important to pay particular attention to these leads and the quality of them.

As they say, quality is better than quantity.

More than looking at the number of leads generated by a particular marketing channel, you must start to consider the specific value of each of these leads by adopting a method of measuring how much business each lead actually generates. For example, you might find that out of two marketing campaigns, both generate ten leads. However, once you follow these leads further you discover that one campaign mainly attracted solicitations and not really relevant leads, whereas the other not only brought in ten leads but out of these ten, three quotes were sent and one of those quotes became a sale. From knowing the quality of the leads rather than simply the quantity, you know that one marketing campaign was much more successful than the other and should therefore be prioritized in the future over the other campaign.

As a real-life example, we tracked the search marketing results for one of our clients and found that Google brought in five times more visitors to the website and generated 45 times more leads than Bing and Yahoo. However, the conversion to actual quotes from Bing and Yahoo was higher than Google, making the huge difference between the amount of leads generated from them much less significant, proving that we shouldn't be discounting Bing and Yahoo as a form of lead generation.

So, how do you achieve this level of lead tracking? Well, when we realized the importance of recording this data, we invented a system, which we, in turn, developed into a product to help other marketers with lead tracking. We called this WhatConverts; a system that ties individual leads back to their original marketing source.

What can WhatConverts do for you?

It's all in the name: WhatConverts helps you to identify which marketing sources convert to leads, quotes, and sales. WhatConverts does call tracking, web-form tracking, e-commerce tracking, keyword tracking and more to help you get an accurate picture of what converts from your marketing. Something as simple as a phone call coming in can be tracked. You can then qualify that lead, determine if it is quotable or not and put in the quote value and the sales value into your records. The same goes for web forms and e-commerce transactions.

This allows you to show your clients more concrete data to illustrate the results achieved by your marketing efforts. You can assign an actual value to each method of marketing that you have utilized based on how many sales they generated and how much profit they are making for your client. Keeping a record of these results, i.e., the amount of leads, quotes and sales generated from each marketing campaign, will let you see which marketing activities are proving effective and which you should scrap altogether.

These insights also provide you with a form of insurance if the client or their salespeople ever point fingers at your marketing, claiming that it is not generating the results it should be. If salespeople start to blame low sales levels on low-quality leads coming in, when in fact they're just not doing their job properly, you have evidence from the sales calls to prove this fact and support the quality of your leads.

WhatConverts acts as a way to show whether campaigns are effective or ineffective, and also provides evidence to show your client the results you are generating for them, proving the value of your service. WhatConverts is user-friendly and easily integrates with a number of applications including WordPress, Google Analytics, Google Adwords and Sales Force.

Don't just quantify your leads, qualify them with WhatConverts.