10 Expert Tips for Driving More Marketing Qualified Leads

Acquiring leads is relatively simple for most businesses. However, getting marketing qualified leads -- ones more likely to convert -- is a far more difficult task that requires a great deal of research and complex funnel development.
What is a marketing qualified lead?

A marketing qualified lead (MQL) is a prospect who is more likely to become a customer because he or she has already been primed through various methods. Warming up this person to your brand, developing trust and positioning him or her to accept your solution is often accomplished through the content you offer.


“As a marketing organization, if you only serve up the MQLs, then Sales spends less time searching for those MQLs in their typical process, and more time selling to the golden nuggets you supply, thus closing more deals,” writes Alison Elworthy, VP of operations at HubSpot.

Here are a few ways to generate more MQLs for your team:

1. Create magnetic content.

Researching your target-audience members from every angle can reveal their major pain points. With that knowledge, you can work with a content agency to craft compelling content that captures their attention.

When your audience members are the ones researching a problem, your content should be there, ready to pull them into the funnel. If you focus your efforts on creating high-value, comprehensive content, prospects will continue to engage and be more likely to progress further into your funnel.

2. Share compelling content.

You can’t just wait for customers to find their way into your funnel. Take a proactive approach to rounding up more leads by sharing your top-of-the-funnel content in channels and groups where your customers spend their time.

I do this on a regular basis, with the aim of providing as much value to my prospects as possible. I also try to maintain a consistent level of activity in the group so members don’t feel that I’m only showing up to spam them. Once you establish a foundation of trust, your 10-times content will propel more leads into your funnel.

3. Incentivize prospects at the top of the funnel.

Add a highly valuable offer at the top of the funnel to pique your audience members' interest. This incentive should hone in on one of their major pain points. The opt-in for this offer should be available throughout your site, and it should be used as the primary call to action in your blog posts and social outreach.

4. Nurture and follow up.

As more leads opt in, continue to engage them beyond the offer you initially provided. Without engagement from your end, they’ll lose interest and forget about you.

Create a series of educational autoresponders that are designed to guide your leads to the consideration stage, or the middle of your funnel. As long as you’re providing valuable content, your prospects will be happy to continue engaging with you.

5. Leverage your successful customers.

Start connecting with your most successful customers. Personally interview them and find out what kind of success they’ve achieved with the help of your product or service. Develop case studies based on their results and share these studies with leads in the evaluation and comparison stages.

Reading about the success of your other customers, especially those who were facing similar obstacles, will likely push those prospects into positions where they’re ready to convert.

6. Refine your funnel.

Go back and examine each stage of your funnel, as well as the buyer’s journey. Analyze your data to determine which content and events would be most likely to convert your leads into customers. Review their activities throughout the funnel, look for items that correlate with the highest close rates and adjust your conversion path to steer prospects along that same journey to success.

7. Refine your calls-to-action.

The prospects in your funnel want to resolve a problem, and it’s up to you to communicate how you can help them find a suitable solution for their situation. The only way to encourage them to proceed is through your calls-to-action (CTA).

“A strong CTA compels people to click on it,” writes Neil Patel, founder of Crazy Egg. “It leaves a memory in the user’s mind even when they’ve exited the landing page.”

Make sure you’re running A/B tests on CTA variations and constantly refining them so they focus on the value by clearly explaining what benefits await the lead.

8. Intercept leads.

If you don’t want to leave your leads to navigate the path to conversion on their own, you can always intercept them from the beginning and guide them along in the process. Using a service like LeadChat or relying on your own chat integration can qualify leads far in advance and eliminate some of the barriers they may experience once they arrive on your site.

9. Utilize more video.

Improve engagement throughout the funnel by using more visual content, like videos. You can convey a lot more information in a 30-to 60-second video than you can by having someone read long copy. Videos on landing pages have been shown to increase conversion by up to 80 percent, and 64 percent of users who view video content are more likely to convert.

10. Revamp your forms.

Although reducing the number of required form fields can increase conversion rates, that doesn’t always help with qualification. In some cases, you can increase the number of fields without a drop in conversions as long as the information you’re requesting has value to the reader. Kindercare, a nationwide daycare provider, added fields that allowed parents to provide more information, and its conversions remained stable.

How To Protect Your Service Business and Brand It For Success

It's long been said in business circles that customer loyalty is too dependent on the fidelity you show in the quality of your product. While most of us agree that this is true, the question becomes; what about those who have no goods to sell?

What fidelity is used to join businesses that are 100 percent or largely service businesses? The truth is, if you have a product, your product is your brand and can sustain you. If you wholly deliver services, you become the brand, and then it becomes necessary for you to learn how to brand yourself for success.

Service businesses are sitting ducks for litigation and a plethora of complaints, and they can very easily be torn apart. Product integrity is a bit easier to maintain than integrity of staff and the people who make up the business.



These tips will help you brand your service business for success and build a stable base from which you can further your aspirations.

1. Develop a feedback system for both positive and negative feedback.

Communication they say, is not complete until feedback is received. When your business has to deal purely with services rendered, like a hair salon, telecommunications business, clinic, car wash or property management business, you need feedback much more than any other business. For instance, I run a property management firm and find myself susceptible to cross fire, from both the property owners and the tenants. While most people in my shoes listen primarily only to the property owners, it is wiser to listen to all parties involved. Getting feedback -- and asking for it regularly, even if it is negative -- is a strong move in protecting yourself.

Many businesses have faced litigation and even filed for bankruptcy as a result of little things ignored over time. Feedback helps you know what to work on or what to keep up. You can use feedback charts, boxes or provide room for feedback on your company app, if you have one. Make feedback avenues available and beyond that, encourage and ask for it. It protects you more than it makes your customers feel valued

2. Treat data like gold.

The high profile Yahoo hack was an eye-opener for everyone involved in the service business. The allegation that Yahoo knew about the hack initially and did nothing raised a great number of hairs on users of the platform. U.S. Sen. Richard Blumenthal stated, “If Yahoo knew about the hack as early as August, and failed to coordinate with law enforcement, taking this long to confirm the breach is a blatant betrayal of their users’ trust.”

You may not have a physical commodity, but trust is the commodity you are selling -- you are selling yourself. If your customers are required to submit sensitive data, they have to see that you have adequate plans to secure them.

Limit the staff who have access to this information. It should be criminal for your staff to take work home and log onto your platform from a public server. You do not have to keep sensitive data for longer than is necessary, so as not to increase the possibility of loss. Put electronic data and electronics on lockdown; the contents of an entire hard drive can be saved on a flash disk the size of your thumb. Most importantly, if your customer data is serviced by third party vendors, ensure that vendors adhere to stringent privacy practices and insist they upgrade if they aren’t in strict adherence.

3. Concentrate more on personal branding than corporate branding.

Research has shown repeatedly that customers trust people more than businesses. Understanding this will cause a shift in how you carry on your business. While you need the visibility that billboards, logos and conventional advertising will give you, to sustain the business in the long run, you need to concentrate more on personal branding and learn how to brand for success.


People are far more likely to follow you, talk to you, trust you and engage with you if they believe they are interacting with a real person. This is where the benefits of humanizing your brand really come into play. Personal branding is simply bringing down branding to the smallest component of a business -- the individual. It starts with you as the business owner and then must reflect on your staff through trainings and mentorship.

The question -- “What do you want your business to be known for?” For service-based businesses, what do you want to be known for?

4. Understand the three rules of customer attraction and retention.

There are generally three broad rules of customer attraction and retention. First, you must apply the adequate tools to gain visibility. This may take any shape appropriate for you -- conventional advertising, social media advertising or, one I personally advocate, social impact advertising. Social impact advertising is when you carry out deliberate efforts that have positive societal impact. It often works best with businesses whose services are rendered majorly to customers in their immediate geographical location. However, with the advent of social media and content marketing, it can draw any number of customers from anywhere and retain them as well.

Secondly, you need to have consistency. Consistency is not very relevant if you have a weak brand, but if you have developed a strong personal brand, efforts should be put towards maintaining that brand through the consistency of customer interactions.

Lastly, you need to earn loyalty. Consistency does this, but the additional services you render is what many customers will keep coming back for. The battle between Uber and Lyft has largely been in this realm. Their apps, customer support and innovations have primarily revolved around gaining loyalty with perks, give-aways and techniques that introduce speed and ease to the customer.

In effect, the goal is to showcase an identity, or personality, that is visible, consistent and valuable to your customers or your audience.

5. How you say it is more important than what you say.

For product-based businesses, most of the customer’s focus is on what you have to offer, but with service-based businesses, how you offer it matters a lot as well. If you need to write proposals to prospective clients or investors or even just have to address customers, you have to pay more attention to your tone and content.

A property owner is more likely to let me manage his property because of my approach than because of my expertise, because frankly, the skill is the same everywhere. You should be going straight for the heart to make them accept you. A good product usually cushions the effect of bad service, but when service is all you have, you have to step up your game.