The Importance of Lead Tracking and How Can Your Business Do It

• By Cindy Williams
• 09-05-2022
• Technology

Given the current surge in online adoption and sudden outburst in digital-first strategies, it’s imperative that sales and marketing teams respond decisively to help stabilize the business outcomes. Marketers will have to reimagine their current data-driven strategies not only to increase profitability but in some cases, to help keep the business afloat. Therefore, every forward-thinking company is nowadays leveraging the multitude of advantages from data analytics to expand the frontier of value creation. Lead tracking, one of the most relevant marketing strategies in the current era, has been tremendously beneficial for B2B/B2C sales and is generating remarkable results in more appropriate lead generation, people management, cross-selling, and pricing.

More importantly, lead tracking allows digital marketing agencies to gauge how close a potential lead is to making a decision, which helps the marketers to make timely decisions. The process also enables businesses to prevent missed handoffs between marketing and sales teams as well as other prominent functions, like customer success — and most importantly avoid lost opportunities.

What is Lead Tracking?

Lead tracking is a highly beneficial marketing strategy for businesses to help categorize and classify visitors who can be potential customers. The categorization is based on the visitor's activities on a website or platform. It collects the declared data on the visitors' buying behavior, such as the chances of making a purchase and the volume of leads at each stage of sales development. It helps to track the activity of every potential customer, from initial website visit to final purchase or checkout and keeps an organized record of those activities for future analysis and marketing optimization.

Through this strategy, a marketing agency or digital marketer can essentially monitor where leads originated from, also they can identify whether the leads were inbound or outbound. An inbound lead is a potential customer who has proactively visited your website and contacted your company, often through Google organic search or keyword search. An outbound lead is the one that your marketing team contacted or reached out to, such as through an email campaign.

This information accumulated from lead tracking can help marketing professionals in categorizing their leads in the sales or marketing funnel. Hence, helping the team determine and understand strategic methods to concentrate leads further down the funnel. Marketers can also fine-tune their business marketing campaigns using the data, and promptly abandon strategies that are not helping to move prospects through the funnel with less friction. They can also provide relevant actionable insights to the sales teams, such as who they should be talking to and when, and what they should say to a lead to improve sales.

Why is Lead Tracking Important for Businesses?

Lead tracking is an essential marketing strategy for businesses because it seamlessly helps in bridging the gap between marketing and sales activities. It ensures that businesses collaborate with both sales and marketing to come forward with data-driven strategies to increase profitability.

Below are some of the benefits of implementing lead tracking for business profitability:

Establishes customer awareness
Unlike a physical store, the online world rarely gives sales representatives the opportunity to interact with actual visitors. Because most of the time the visitors look at a website, social media page, reviews, testimonials, and much more before making a purchase decision. Lead tracking helps overcome this challenge by providing a deeper understanding of your customers without even having the need for sales reps to personally interact with them. The data a business's marketing team gathers through lead tracking will inform you everything you need to know about their background, preferences, and beliefs. This is valuable information for online businesses to create customer profiles and segment audiences so that you will be able to match them with more relevant products and services. It helps businesses in building a stronger relationship with their customers, which is imperative for the growth of a brand.

Informs organizational goals
The more a business understands customer perspective, the better chances it has to improve the strategies required to maximize sales. With lead tracking, businesses can learn more about what type of audiences are more inclined to the services or products the business sells. Hence, they can modify their organizational goals to meet the requirements of those audiences. It also helps the business digital marketing teams to improve current marketing activities and present ideas on how to enhance it. Lead tracking provides your business with a direction on the strengths and customer pain points that you should immediately address so that your business can compensate for any existing weaknesses.

Optimizes sales and marketing process
Your business will no longer have to blindly trust instincts or word-of-mouth to optimize sales and marketing. In fact, businesses can make better decisions and can create more informed strategic plans based on the data accumulated from lead tracking. A business will no longer have to depend on a one for all marketing strategy but rather focus on a more personalized approach. This significantly minimizes errors that would otherwise cost marketers valuable time and money. Because when businesses' marketing activities have a more solidified objective, they also provide better results. In the case of lead tracking, this means higher quality leads and better sales.

Why Should Every Business Track Its Leads?
So now that you have an idea about what lead tracking is and what it basically does for your business, you might still be confused about why your marketing team should spend time tracking leads. After all, if your marketing team is capable of driving leads or potential customers to your website then what's the need to track them?

There are fundamentally 2 reasons why every business should track their online leads.

The first reason is that businesses should essentially know who their leads are in order to nurture them. Lead nurturing is an essential process for businesses as it develops and reinforces relationships with customers at every stage of the sales funnel.

The other important reason is that lead tracking shows the digital marketing team which of their campaigns are driving better, more relevant results. If marketing teams are unable to track the leads, they will have no idea about which marketing strategies or channels drove potential customers to your business website.

As mentioned earlier, it shows the entire customer journey, everything from which poster or content intrigued the customer on visiting the website to which CTA helped in the conversion and much more.

How Can You Track Leads To Your Business?

Here are a few lead tracking strategies for your business to try!

1. Form submissions
Form submissions are one of the easiest methods to know your website leads. When visitors fill up your business contact forms or subscribe to your email lists, they are providing you with the relevant information you require to know to keep up with them. You can also customize your form to ask them about how they reached your website. Did they learn about your business through social media ads or blogs? Based on their answers, you can prioritize marketing on the platforms which drive more customer interactions.

2. Phone call tracking
Most businesses provide contact details such as phone numbers on their website. When potential customers leverage these contact details to ring up your business and ask about your services or get product information the last thing a marketing team wants is to not know which campaigns drove those calls. By leveraging phone tracking tools, you can identify the platforms or channels on which the customer found your phone number. If more people call regarding the same question, that tells you that you should have your web developers or designers update website information on that topic.

3. UTM parameters
Urchin Tracking Module (UTM) parameters are segments of programming code that web developers can add to your website URLs so that your marketing team can track traffic to and from those URLs. It helps them trace leads through the different pages a customer visits, determine how they landed on certain pages, and what was their next action. This will help your marketing teams seamlessly determine which pages or campaigns drove the most leads for your business.

4. Invest in some lead tracking tools
It’s obviously a good idea to leverage digital tools to help track business leads. But if you think that could be complicated to manage along with the core business functionalities, then you can always hire a digital marketing agency. Such agencies literally have all the analytics, lead monitoring, customer tracking, and CRM tools that your business will need to understand customer requirements and business objectives. Nevertheless, you do not have to invest in these tools yourself or have to employ a full-time staff to do the work for you.

Conclusion
With the right lead tracking strategy, your business will no longer have to make blind decisions or prioritize unqualified leads. Moreover, your marketing and sales team can be better equipped to drive leads across the sales funnel and toward the purchase funnel. If you want a helping hand with your lead tracking strategy, there are several digital marketing agencies that can boost your business! Find the right agency doing website design in Toronto and get your marketing on track to improve ROI and outrank competitors.