5 Ways to Track Leads More Effectively

5 Ways to Track Leads More Effectively:from Business 2 Community by Erin Collins

Lead generation and lead management are the backbone of the sales process and remain vital to the overall marketing process as well. Effective lead management can allow your organization to optimize budgets, close more business, and gain a competitive advantage.
It’s critical that marketers are doing everything they can to track leads efficiently. However, with the growing number of marketing channels available, knowing where leads are coming from and who is behind these leads can be challenging. The following is a list of 5 ways marketers can track leads more efficiently:

Analytics

Tracking analytics is an essential piece of the lead tracking and lead management formula. Tools such as Google Analytics allow marketers to track where visitors come from and what they do on their site, which keywords resonate with prospects and lead to conversions, and which online ad or creative is the most effective. Each of these abilities leaves marketers with a chance to use the tracked data and adjust their site or site content to make it more appealing to visitors.

URL Campaign Tracking

Tracking URLs is another important aspect of effective lead tracking, specifically when users are being driven to a page from a source other than a call-to-action directly on a company’s website. Marketers using email, online advertisements, and other calls to action should be using tracking URLs. Within URL campaign tracking, group values can be assigned to campaigns to enable tracking by source, giving marketers a snapshot of a specific group or source of traffic and the ability to analyze success.
URL campaign tracking can also be used for offline channels. One way to do this is create a customer URL and add “/radio” or “/tv” at the end of the landing page URL string. Similar to online channels, this will allow marketers to track offline campaign success online.

Origin/Promo Code

Promotional codes, or as Neolane calls them, origin codes, can be extremely beneficial for marketers, especially during trade shows or other company-sponsored events. Promotional codes can be a great way to track which prospects or customers attended each show, which may in turn give insight into their interests. Subsets should also be created to track and distinguish different levels of participation/activity at the same event—for instance, a booth visit versus a badge scan at a session versus someone that attended a cocktail reception. This can help direct the appropriate level of follow up.

Unique Phone Numbers

Tracking telephone-generated leads can be a significant challenge for marketers. However, incorporating a series of unique telephone numbers on a campaign-by-campaign basis can simplify this process. This can be done by placing unique phone numbers throughout various channels, such as a unique number for print ads, television ads, online ads, etc.

Social Opt-In

Social media opt-ins are also a great way to track engagement and lead capture. If a visitor wants to inquire about a product or service or is simply interested in a brand, marketers should allow them to opt-in through social media channels. This will give the marketer the ability to gather valuable customer information based on their social profile, which is a great source for data as well as a way to see leads that are coming through social media.
Lead tracking and lead generation is vital to the sales process. Using tools like analytics, URL campaign tracking, promo codes, unique phone numbers, and social media opt-ins are just a few ways to leverage the digital age’s offerings through online and offline channels for lead tracking.
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