Stop Wasting Time on Bad Leads: 5 Reasons Your Website's Lead Quality is Subpar

Let’s talk about law firm website leads. Odds are, you’re having conversations about how to attract more leads, how to improve the quality of your leads, how to convert your leads, or all of the above. And in that conversation, you might be wondering, “why are we getting bad leads in the first place?”?

According to a study conducted by Hubspot, only 7% of salespeople consider leads received from marketing as “very high quality” and 23% of salespeople said the thing they need most from their marketing team is “better quality leads”.

I believe there are five main reasons why law firm marketing teams are generating “bad” leads. To understand why it’s happening to you, you need to take into consideration the full buyer journey, starting with how to define a lead and evaluating how your lead management framework maintains sustainable lead sourcing, nurturing and conversion.?

Explore the five reasons below to identify areas of improvement in your lead management process:?

Your Marketing and Sales Are Misaligned

Navigating the relationship between marketing and sales can be nuanced, especially when you take into consideration variances in lead hand-off processes. But strategically integrating marketing and sales processes can have a?significant impact on lead quality.?By clearly defining what defines a ‘good’ lead, there’s increased potential to avoid miscommunication between teams and alleviate stress to the pipeline.?

Knowing the difference between a lead and a?qualified?lead is where most law firms fall short.

Marketing and sales should collaborate to determine tipping points from lead to qualified lead over the course of a complete buyer journey.

The key to success when defining all of the above, is that both sales and marketing need to work together to define the criteria and actions that indicate intent. When both teams can agree, then there is no gray area for a “good” versus a “bad” lead – either the lead has met the criteria to move forward to a qualified lead stage or it hasn’t.

You Don’t Understand Your Client’s Journey

82% of demand marketing is ‘wrong place, wrong time,’ which means that 82% of demand marketing is not orchestrated around the customer journey.

It's important to start with basic industry research on topics like macro trends, pain points, and content consumption. From the insights gathered,you need to have a 3-step top-funnel to bottom-funnel approach,

The first step is to ‘engage’ with early-stage content that attracts a wide audience by touching on high-level, thought leadership topics, like industry trends. This is also where things like keyword research come into play.

Transitioning to ‘nurture’ continues the conversation with middle-stage content by moving the prospect along and ‘nurturing’ them until they’re ready to progress in their buyer journey. This includes them looking at your case studies, signing up to your email newsletter or downloading a relevant guide/e-book

And lastly, the ‘convert’ step aligns with late stage content that addresses product/solution-oriented content and ultimately guides the buyer to sales.

Your Content is Reaching the Wrong Audience

Whether your content has gone stale, there’s a shift in your target audience, or you just aren’t seeing an ROI on the time and effort that goes into producing new content, you should consider a content model refresh.

The first question you should ask yourself is, ‘Who is our ideal client and what do we know (or not know) about them?’ This ties back to the buyer journey and taking the time to invest in getting to know your client before you jump into conversation. Mapping out what those conversations look like requires informed decision-making on the different types of buyers you’re already attracting versus who you’re targeting in the future.?

Creating this outline also allows you to discover gaps in content that needs to be created, as well as identify content that’s still relevant and can be repurposed.

Your Engagement Channel Strategy is Ineffective

Engagement channels are where the content and buyer journey intersect. This is where you will connect with your audience organically and create meaningful interactions over time, leading ultimately to closed-won revenue. Unfortunately, most law firm marketers have no idea how to build or optimize the right engagement channel mix.

Most law firm partners or law firm marketers can’t answer questions like

"Which personas in the top of funnel aren’t paying off down the funnel?"

"Are keywords and content aligned to their place in the funnel?"

And "Which channels are producing higher quality leads?"

An ineffective engagement channel strategy leads to a poor-quality funnel.

Social media channels can look like good investments at first glance, but with the right measurement and focus, they might show themselves to be providing mass quantities of ‘leads’ with less than stellar sales lift.

To overcome this challenge, you not only have to understand how your engagement channels layer into your demand marketing strategy, but you must have an infrastructure that supports detailed data analysis so that you can answer the tough questions.?

Your Lead Management Framework is Weak

Lead Management is, simply put, how a law firm qualifies its potential clients. If your strategy for how to qualify and manage those leads is weak, then you’re likely tossing “bad” leads over the fence from marketing to sales and potentially letting “good” leads slip through the cracks.?

Most law firms are still relying on traditional BANT (the one business class I took in uni is coming to fruition) data to qualify all leads, but?that’s not nearly enough.

The lead qualification process should include demographics and firmographic data, yes, but it should also be able to weight a lead based on where he or she is in the funnel AND the type of content he or she has consumed.?

To do this, your lead management framework should include a strong profiling component. This framework should guide data intake sequencing in your lead management by asking for small bits of information(questions at the end of social media posts, and replies/feedback from email newsletters).

Each interaction, in turn, should be scored accordingly so that you’re bubbling the highest quality leads to the top and allowing the lower quality leads to receiving more nurturing.

Conclusion

In review, while the idea of converting a ‘bad lead’ to a ‘good lead’ may seem simple, it requires a deeper dive into aligning teams, providing timely and strategic content, developing an efficient engaging social media strategy, and sustainable lead management framework.

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Got any questions or need help with improving lead quality from websites?

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