With the economy reopening, many businesses have a pressing need to recoup the losses they experienced during the shutdown. There’s no time to waste, and that’s why I thought I’d take a moment to review my five essential lead strategies for converting prospects into paying customers:

1. Demographics:  High-quality leads should provide deep insights into your prospects as well as the information you need to get in touch with them. To start, you’ll want to focus on the prospect’s demographic profile including gender, age, location, income, education, profession, job title, etc. This information can be hard to come by through traditional lead gen efforts. It may be gathered in stages as the prospect continues on their journey with you. To speed and scale the process, you can also acquire this data from third-party providers.

For most businesses, the goal with demographic data is to target prospects who mirror existing clients, or at least align closely with them. Understanding the characteristic similarities will allow you to group together those prospects with potential shared interests. From there, you can create and align specific messages to each of these customer segments and optimize your marketing strategies accordingly.

2. Firmagraphics: The same idea as above applies to firmagraphics, which are the descriptive attributes of the companies that typically buy your products and services. These characteristics can include the type of company, their size – in terms of revenue or number of employees, industry, technologies typically in use, geographic location(s), etc. Knowing and segmenting these attributes sets you up for success when it comes to addressing prospects’ specific needs and challenges with your marketing campaigns, and will be essential for communicating with them effectively with relevancy and perspective during the buying journey.

3. Buyer Intent: Demographics and firmographics provide insightful information, but they don’t indicate whether the prospect is “ready to buy now.” At OMI, we are big proponents of the use of IP address monitoring to uncover this valuable information, which we call prospect buyer intent signals. Our customers use these signals to fuel their marketing and sales efforts. The signals not only emanate from website visits, but also from content downloads, email marketing clicks and other digital engagement activities. By recognizing which businesses are searching for your solution (or topics related to it) and when they are searching for it, IP address lookups can go a long way toward uncovering warm leads as well as prospects who are ready to “buy now.”

However, IP address monitoring has its limitations. It primarily provides company data as opposed to identifying the actual individual conducting the online search. Fortunately, there is a solution: by marrying intent data with business contact data, you can narrow down your prospect search within those identified companies and pinpoint contacts by function and title – the people most likely to buy. As a frontrunner in this area with a track record in providing high-quality business contact data, our team at OMI is partnering with innovators in the intent monitoring space to enable businesses to use IP address monitoring to significantly bolster Account Based Marketing (ABM) and other strategies to identify qualified buyers. You can find more information here.

4. Trigger data: When prospects and customers register for or simply view your content, download reports, engage with your campaigns and offers, or provide you with data insights that you can use to your advantage, they are essentially “triggering” you to take action. Are you making the most of the opportunity? 

Triggering should be tied to automated emails that are promptly sent out to your prospects. These emails have a higher chance of being acted upon compared to “standard” email messages. By targeting prospects at a pivotal time in the sales journey or with a high-value offer that aligns with their demonstrated interests, you stand a higher chance of earning their attention and their business. You can read more about triggering here.

5. Contact information: We all want our marketing messages to reach the people they are intended to reach. That’s why the most critical element of a high-quality lead generation program is current, accurate contact information, including email, phone and address data. But every database needs constant updating. Outdated and erroneous information should be automatically and consistently cleaned in order to be optimally effective. In addition, simply utilizing your own contact database will almost certainly not deliver the sheer volume of new prospect leads you’ll need to meet your sales objectives. Acquiring quality data from a reputable provider is the foundation you’ll need to get your business development efforts back on track.

If you haven’t turned to a third-party business contact data provider like OMI in a while, now is a good time to revisit the idea. We’ve earned the trust of Fortune 50 brands and emerging startups alike, and our ability to enable our clients to zero in on the right audience at the right time is what we’re best known for.

While each of the above lead elements is essential in reaching new prospects, combining them unlocks their true value and empowers you to take your B2B campaigns to the next level by engaging prospects who have the highest probability of becoming new customers. Like everything else in life, it takes teamwork to get the best results.

Outward Media’s proven data cleansing services and targeted, accurate email data can enable you to achieve better email marketing ROI and, ultimately, convert more prospects into customers. Take a look at our case studies to find out more.