A Marketing Qualified Lead (MQLs) is an individual or organization engaged with your marketing efforts and could become a customer with proper nurturing. The concept refers to people who know what they are looking for and have entered a company’s website, browsed through it, and perhaps downloaded some material to enrich their knowledge.
An MQL might be someone who visits your site, clicks on a programmatic ad, or downloads an eBook about a high-level topic in your industry.
MQLs are promising leads and are more likely to become paying customers than cold leads. MQLs are based on feature-based or tiered pricing. It needs to pitch in by contacting external customers. MQLs are more useful for demo requests.
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Why Are MQLs Important?
MQLs have already expressed interest in your company, so they will likely be more receptive to a sales pitch. Attracting new customers is an expensive part of marketing and demand generation. If your sales team pitches every potential lead or spends time cold calling, they may win a few new customers, but they’ve probably spent too much time focusing on pitches that go nowhere.
Being able to distinguish between an MQL’s meaning and that of a regular lead gives your sales team a chance to focus on those most likely to buy. The team doesn’t have to spend time pitching to people unlikely to buy because those leads filter out of the pipeline.
Qualifying leads can also give you insight into the most successful marketing efforts. You can track the content that generates the highest number of clicks and focus your marketing efforts on those topics.
How to generate MQLS?
The generation of MQLs is related to defining the ideal client profile and creating high-quality and relevant content that attracts the right audience.
Google’s SEO best practices indicate that content should be informative, functional, and original to attract and keep users’ attention and increase the chance of converting them to MQLs.
Among the strategies you can adopt are the following:
- Offer free downloads of rich materials, such as eBooks;
- Use data capture forms (for example, as a condition to accessing an exclusive report);
- Offer discounts or special promotions;
- Use email marketing techniques;
- Hold informational events or webinars;
- Offer product or service demonstrations;
- Create optimized landing pages;
- Follow up and nurture leads.
How to get MQL?
1. Create opportunities for your lead to share relevant information
Online forms are one of the best strategies because, if designed well, people enter information without hesitation. The important thing is that you offer something valuable in exchange for those forms, such as access to unique content (a video, a talk, or a guide that helps them in their daily lives) or a reward, such as those given to those who subscribe to a newsletter.
Of course, you must ensure that the information you request is designed for a simple lead to becoming MQL, so you cannot be too intrusive and ask for information such as telephone numbers, marital status, or more personal details. Still, you must go step by step to arouse your interest. An email or creating an account using your Facebook profile is enough.
2. Implement lead nurturing
When it comes to MQL, lead nurturing is critical. It is about giving your lead relevant, valuable content according to the stage in which they are so that they better understand the advantages of choosing your products or services. At the same time, they discover valuable advice or data to solve their life challenges.
This process is gradual, and starts with offers that go from the general to the specific since as your lead interacts with your content, the more information you will obtain about their interests. That way, you can refine the messages and knowledge to be increasingly personalized. It is what happens with the campaigns in your email marketing platform: the welcome email is the same for all the people who subscribe, but the response and the actions obtain help to better segment and outline the strategy so that interest increases.
3. Add calls to action for when your lead wants to use them
The call-to-action buttons and links are very useful in shortening the distance between a lead and an MQL. Instead of waiting for the person to take the initiative and call or write an email to ask for more information, add buttons that make it easier, such as “I want to receive the latest news” or “I have a question,” “Go to the product page,” among others. These actions allow you to identify who is most curious and who is approaching the decision stage to make a purchase. They are less invasive resources than sending emails or messages, and they are always available when your lead decides that it is time.