What Are High-Value Leads and How to Attract Them

High-value leads feel hard to come by for most marketing teams. In fact, improving the quality of leads is a top priority right now for nearly three-quarters of B2B businesses!

So what gives? Digital marketing technologies are more advanced than ever, but companies still feel like they’re missing the mark with much of their lead gen strategy.

In this guide, we’ll step back and cover what actually defines a high value lead and how you can develop a balanced, targeted approach to lead gen that helps you attract them.

Quick Takeaways

• High value leads are aligned with your target audience and have high intent to purchase.
• Most leads never convert due to poor nurturing and/or too much focus on lead volume without an equal balance of qualification standards.
• Effective ways to attract high value leads include: know your target buyers, automate lead qualification, highquality content, run targeted campaigns, and use intent data.
• Outsourcing lead generation is often the best way to generate high value leads without sacrificing time and attention in other key areas.

What are high value leads?

High-value leads are leads that are both aligned with your target audience and have high intent to make a purchase in the near future. Despite the many lead-gen tools and technologies available for marketing teams today, many still find high-quality leads to be elusive. Their teams spend too much time chasing potential leads that simply aren’t likely to convert.

In fact, B2B research shows that an alarming 80% of leads will never actually convert to sales.

There isn’t one singular reason for this — lack of nurturing certainly plays a role in many cases, as does the sheer number of options B2B buyers have for most solutions.

But another common problem exists across B2B industries: the pressure to generate as many leads as possible at all costs. Lead volume is an important marketing metric for sure, but it can have a negative impact on results if it isn’t balanced by a focus on lead quality standards.

The best lead generation strategies aim to achieve scale without sacrificing quality, so that every lead that enters the pipeline has a high likelihood, with the right follow-up tactics in place, to turn into a closed deal.

They do this with a targeted approach, the right lead gen tools and technologies, and high levels of automation for seamless execution. Let’s dive in further to what this looks like in practice.

5 Ways to Fill Your Pipeline with High-Value Leads

Know Your Target Buyers

The surest way to lower your lead quality is to cast the widest net possible, then hope for the best. Now that strategies like SEO and targeted ad campaigns exist, you can be sure competitors will get to your best-fit leads first if you aren’t targeting them effectively.

To start, be sure you have a strong sense of your ideal customer profile (ICP) and buyer personas — frameworks that describe the organizations and individuals who can benefit most from your solutions. Then, meet these target buyers where they are by publishing content and being active on the channels where they do their research.

For example: Tech industries rely heavily on webinars and online events to compare vendors. Consulting firms depend on referrals and personal recommendations from current clients. Beauty and fashion retailers leverage social media.

These are just a few examples. The point: Know your buyers and your audience, and meet them where they are both online and off.

Automate Lead Qualification

Lead qualification is the process of ensuring each lead meets criteria you set to indicate fit with your ICP and personas as well as level of purchase readiness. Organizations typically use three levels of qualification:

• Marketing Qualified Leads (MQLs) — Fit ICP and personas, ready for nurturing
• Sales Accepted Leads (SALs) — Accepted by the sales team for initial sales outreach
• Sales Qualified Leads (SQLs) — Deemed to have high purchase readiness

Your CRM and other marketing and sales software tools can be used to automatically qualify leads as they enter the pipeline. This eliminates manual and time consuming work and ensures your teams can prioritize leads intentionally.

Create High-Value Content

Today’s buyers do more than half of their vendor research independently before they ever reach out to a sales team. Further, they look for high value content to demonstrate a brand’s level of expertise, understanding of their unique business problems, and ability to provide real solutions.

In simpler terms: High-value leads are attracted by high value content. You need to create it at volume, use SEO and other optimization tactics to make it visible, and publish frequently across multiple channels (blogs, social media, email, etc.).

To handle the amount of work to keep up with today’s B2B content demands, many companies choose to outsource content creation to an agency with the resources to do it at scale.

Execute Targeted Campaigns

Even within your product/service portfolios, your target customer likely varies for each specific offering. By executing targeted campaigns meant to generate the right leads for each solution you provide, you find more highly aligned leads and increase the level of initial connection with potential buyers.

Why? Because when buyers are on the receiving end of targeted campaigns, they’re given a sense that you truly understand what they need and have the solutions to deliver it.

You can execute targeted campaigns using segmented email lists, behavioral retargeting ads, SEO, and more. Demand gen and lead gen agencies are pros at helping you execute these types of campaigns.

Use Intent Data

Intent data tells you about where a buyer is in the purchase process based on their online behavior. You can collect intent data from website tracking systems, search engine queries, poll or survey responses, social media activity, past purchase history and more.

By using intent data to target your lead generation efforts, you create a more informed starting point and can align specific tactics accordingly based on the buyer’s current status.

Intent data is particularly useful for account-based marketing (ABM) campaigns, when you’re aiming to target specific, individual accounts in a personalized way. But you can also use it for larger-scale lead-gen efforts and as a way to segment your leads for follow-up.

Intent data can deliver powerful benefits like lower CPL, better engagement, higher marketing ROI, and pipeline expansion.

High-Value Leads: The Bottom Line

It’s tempting to think more is always more when it comes to lead generation, but the reality is that if your leads don’t convert, you’re wasting time, money, and resources. To attract leads that actually translate to sales down the line, you need an intentional, targeted approach.

Remember:

1. Know your target audience and meet them where they are

2. Automate lead qualification using your CRM and other tools

3. Create high value content for each of your audiences

4. Run targeted campaigns to align buyers with the right solutions

5. Use intent data to target your highest-potential leads

And if this all sounds beyond the scope of what your team can handle in-house, don’t worry — lead generation is one of the most-outsourced business functions for that very reason. Look for a partner committed to knowing your business and finding you leads that will convert.

Over to You

Ready to transform your lead generation strategy right now? Televerde can help you do it. We provide customized lead gen, lead nurturing, and lead management solutions to help you grow your pipeline and achieve your unique business goals.

Contact our team today to learn more and get started.