Lead Generation: Less Can Actually Be More

Content marketers today are faced with a wide range of conundrums in trying to drive engagement. Quite rightly a lot of time is spent agonising over the range and quality of the content being produced, the format of the content and it’s place in helping prospects move along the funnel into customers.

One area that doesn’t really get much analysis is what to expect of prospects when downloading or engaging with the content. Do you allow free access? If you ask for contact data, what do you ask for?

In B2C marketing, the typical answer has been to get the core contact info of name, email, postcode and phone. In B2B marketing it varies but typically they ask for lots more, with fields on company name, job title, responsibility, department and sometimes even purchase timeframes.

There are two key points to this:

Lets actually start with the second point. The answer is a clear yes. For every additional field you ask for, you lose leads. How many is a bit of a ‘how long is a piece of string’ question, but there has been research that suggests a 5% drop in lead conversion for every field. The best way to solve this is to a/b test forms and analyse which gives the best ‘efficiency’ in lead conversion for the data provided.

Now lets move back to the first point, how much data do you actually need? The main problem with designing forms is that a lot of marketers (and sales) think of the information they ideally want, rather than the information they actually need. Should a form give you ALL the information you need on a prospect, or should it give you the basics to start a conversation? Content marketing is often the first point of prospect engagement with a company, therefore is it right to ask them for everything?

There’s a good reason to ask the last question, mainly because lots of people don’t give accurate information on forms (at least 30% based on Convertr’s recent data). They don’t know the answers, they can’t be bothered to give the right answers, they don’t want to be contacted, they don’t want you to know or they just get it wrong.

The good news is you can actually get accurate information without having to ask for it. Enriching leads in real-time is a great way to get valuable data on lead prospects without having to get them to fill in the details. B2C marketers can find out socio demographics, household and even social media data. B2B marketers can get company location, industry segment, company size and financial data and all from safe, accurate and publicly sourced 3rd party providers.

So if you’d like to get more from your lead generation or content marketing and ask less of your prospects, let us know.