If you want to strengthen your brand and grow your audience, lead tracking can help you gain valuable insight about your business. Marketing campaigns aren’t just about the planning and execution – the follow-up is just as important. Learn the basics of lead tracking and how it can increase your reach, engagement rates, and sales.
What are Leads and How Does Lead Tracking Work? 
The words “lead” and “prospect” are frequently interchanged in marketing, but they are not one in the same. Leads can come from a number of sources, including mailing lists, referrals, or search engines, but not all leads will fall within your target audience. A prospect, on the other hand, is a lead that has been qualified by expressing a genuine interest in your product or service.
So, if leads are not a guaranteed “win” in the business world, why should you track them? All leads are potential prospects, and all prospects lead to potential sales. A lead will only convert into a prospect when they see value in the product or service you are offering. If a customer gets to your website and does not like what they see (even if it is relative to what they are searching for), you’ll miss out on a valuable marketing opportunity.
Let’s say that you were given a list of leads, and only 5% of these customers were interested in the product or service you were offering. What would make more sense: trying the same approach on a new list or improving the process to maximize your return? Alternatively, if a marketing campaign preformed really well for your business, would you go back to the drawing board or build on that momentum? Lead tracking is the process of tracking the actions of your leads and measuring the positive or negative outcomes of their behavior. It’s about understanding the customer journey from start to finish and turning any obstacles along the way into stepping stones.
Understanding Your Success Stories & Failures
Not all leads will fit into your target audience, and not all prospects will be worth the time and energy it takes to inspire action. For example, if you’ve had a lead on the fence for several months that has shown no real progress, it may not be worth one of your sales consultants investing their time on a dead end. Your marketing campaign should focus on reaching the highest amount of customers possible and filtering out the people who do not align with your business goals.
Marketing campaigns are founded on having clearly defined goals, such as increasing sales, driving traffic to your website, or growing your online presence. Tracking your leads will help you measure how effectively you are working towards these goals. When you have a low open rate on an email blast or sales are down from last month, you need to figure out where your marketing campaign went wrong.
Scenario #1: You send an email blast to new leads for your business. The email has a low open rate and very few people took an action in the email.
Scenario #2: In your most recent social media campaign, several leads were drawn to your ad, which generated traffic to your website. However, many of these leads bounced off of the landing page without taking any further action.
In both of these scenarios, leading tracking can be used to measure the effectiveness (or ineffectiveness) of your marketing campaign. In scenario #1, there are a few reasons why your email may not have performed the way you expected:
- Your referral source was not credible
- Your email did not provide any value the audience
- The messaging and/or presentation was sloppy
In scenario #2, it’s possible that:
- The lead struggled to find information
- Your call-to-action was confusing
- Your website is not user-friendly
Thankfully, leading tracking can help you generate a better outcome in both of these scenarios.
Cultivate Relationships with Your Audience
If no one is opening your emails or clicking on your ads, it’s reasonable to assume that your method for generating leads is subpar. You might be too reliant on referrals and not well-versed in the world of social media and networking. Investing in a third-party service that can grow your online presence by engaging with new leads would be a worthwhile investment.
If your email was opened but did not inspire action, the problem goes beyond lead generation – it’s the way you are conveying your brand to leads after you have got their attention. Without lead tracking, you won’t know what aspects of your campaign are holding you back from closing the deal. Track your leads like your business depends on it (because for many people, it does) and then convert them into prospects by cultivating positive relationships.
The most beneficial aspect of lead tracking is that it allows businesses to deliver value to their audience. And value isn’t just weighed on a monetary scale. Consider offering your leads a free trial, an educational webinar, or a spot at your next networking event. Then measure whether or not these new value-driven methods are generating optimal results for your marketing campaign.
