Who's in the lead? If you want to be out front in product creation and marketing, you need to take control of your data. Collecting information from business leads helps you create products and marketing plans that work. What Information Do You Need?Let's start with the basics. When a lead comes into your online or brick and mortar business, you need some information about that person in order to understand their interests and needs. Much of the time, basic demographic information can help you target your products and marketing toward a certain group of leads.
Where does your lead live? This tells you something about their needs. For instance, those who live in the suburbs are likely more interested in buying garden equipment than those who live in urban condominiums. What does your lead do for work? This gives you information about the possible income bracket of your lead, and it also tells you something about their needs. How can you contact your lead with offers in the future? Get an email address or mailing address to make sure that you can stay in touch.
Getting More Information About Your Business Leads
If you can, you want to get additional information about your lead. Demographic information is useful, but knowing a person's postal code or age may not give you much information about why they are there. You can gather this additional information by sending your leads offers that they respond to, so that you can track their product interest.
You can also track the categories of products that they buy so that you develop an understanding of what might appeal to that particular segment of your market. By running surveys or other asks for customers, you can also get more refined information about your leads' degree of interest in new or existing products or the specific problems that they're hoping to address by visiting your business. Surveys, demographic information, and responses to offers can also give you information on leads' life events, such as the birth of a child or retirement. In turn, this information can help you target your marketing around these life events.
Finally, you want information about the sources of your leads.
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Did your lead hear from you from an offer you sent out
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an online ad
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a media story
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from word of mouth
If you're looking into online advertising, you can track search terms and clicks. You can also track offers such as coupons by coding them so that you know why people came into the store. Other lead sources such as word of mouth are harder to track. You can accomplish this using a verbal or written survey or contest to encourage your leads to give you a bit more information about why they became a customer.
Whether it's basic information about the demographics of your leads or more specific information about their interests, collecting information about your business leads can enhance your working relationship with your current and future customers. Good information helps you create and market products that are a fit for your customer base.
