Stop Guessing: Know Your Leads' Interests with These Simple Steps

This week, I'm departing from AI to illustrate that there are things you can easily do to start learning what your leads are interested in.

This is a tactic we've employed with clients and ourselves across industries, B2B and B2C -- and you can easily implement as a test.

In the marketing reality we find ourselves in - engaging leads is HUGE. While I've been teaching how to accomplish this, and beating the drum around building relationships with your leads, it's likely more important now than ever.

The good news is that you can do this experiment really easily.

Watch the video:

This strategy uses your lead list that you already have. And I'm going to assume that it is made up mostly of your ideal customers, or people who are potential buyers of whatever you're selling. This is a process that utilizes email (and given that email is still the workhorse of marketing, delivering the highest conversion rate, it's worth dialing it in).

Understanding Your Leads Beyond Basic Metrics

To really know your leads, it's crucial to go beyond just open rates and click-throughs. It’s about knowing what happens after they click. Follow their actions—page views, downloads, form completions—to get a complete understanding.

Action Step: Leverage tools that allow you to track and analyze these behaviors to segment and target your leads better.

For this experiment, you can use the basic email providers like Constant Contact or MailChimp, but for sustained implementation, these will not work well.

Automations: The Key to Staying Engaged

With your existing email tool, can you set automations based on your leads’ activities? Automations make it easier to keep your leads warm and responsive without spending more hours on manual tasks.

Action Step: Set up automated workflows in your email service provider to follow up with leads based on their actions, such as clicking a link or downloading a resource.

Like I said, for this experiment and to see how it works, you don't have to have all the fancy tools. But if you're going to implement at scale, you've got to be able to automate.

We have a strategy on how to do that exactly that we don't cover in this article -- but it's also pretty easy to implement... let me know if you want more details on that.

Segmenting Your Leads for Precision

Ideally, you should be able to "bucket" people based on what they do. Different actions indicate different levels of interest, and segmenting allows you to tailor your communications to meet these interests.

Action Step: Create interest buckets (lists) or tags within your email service to better target your leads with relevant follow-ups.

In the new world of marketing - making precision strikes can have a big result. Sure! You're sending to fewer leads in a send, but you'll get much better engagement - because with this strategy you can go much deeper with your content -- rather than everything staying on the surface.

Crafting Emails That Address Key Issues

Create emails that tackle core issues of your audience. In the video, I discuss three different subjects related to building and lead generation, and provide another example based on a client we worked with.

It’s essential to break these down into distinct areas to delve deeper and provide more targeted solutions.

Action Step: Following how we clarify this in the video, draft an email with three different interest links and monitor which ones your leads click to further refine your future content.

Listening to Your Leads Through Digital Body Language

Your leads are telling you what they need through their digital body language—clicks, downloads, form completions, survey responses, etc. Listening to this behavior is crucial for crafting relevant follow-ups.

Action Step: Analyze the actions taken by your leads to better understand their needs and interests, then tailor your content accordingly.

Bucketing your leads allows you to easily see what areas of interest appeal to your list. That's the first step to hitting the mark consistently.

Even with an AI-based content strategy (which I will include in a future newsletter) not all leads are interested in all topics... so AI may help identify the deep insights - but you still will want to employ a strategy like this to "bucket" and better understand what resonates.

Same ICP might have different specific focuses and areas of interest.

Implementing Automated Follow-Ups

As I've mentioned, manual follow-ups are not sustainable in the long run. Implementing automated follow-ups allows you to maintain a continuous thread of communication without the extra workload.

Action Step: Set up a series of three automated emails containing different, valuable content for each of your initial segment (topic) areas, and track the responses to each.

This is a next level strategy so you can see how it expands. In practice, you choose your follow ups based on overall interest (for example, some leads might be in multiple segments - so you might pick the segment with the larger population).

Crafting a Content Strategy Based on Lead Behavior

Once you’ve started listening to your leads, use that data to guide your content strategy. This will help you stop guessing and start providing what your leads are genuinely interested in.

Action Step: Continuously refine your content strategy based on the engagement metrics and actions of your leads.

Exploring Simple Yet Powerful Approaches

Getting started doesn’t have to be complex. Simple methods can yield powerful results, allowing you to test and see the impact before diving deeper.

Action Step: As I've outlined, begin with basic segmenting and automated workflows, and expand as you see positive results.

Take Your Lead Engagement to the Next Level

Now that you’ve got the framework, it’s time to put it into practice. Imagine the results you’ll achieve by truly understanding and engaging your leads.

Take Action: Implement this strategy in your business, and let me know how it goes!

If you want to dial-in your content to your Ideal Customer Profile, our Campaign Coach App and getting started training might be a great next step!

Get started on a path to sustainable growth, increased engagement, and higher conversions.