Balancing Engineering Lead Quotas with Lead Quality

A framework for evaluating your engineering marketing campaigns

How do you get lots of high quality engineering leads?  Let’s try a thought experiment where you have an unlimited budget.  You would document every problem that your products solve.  That would provide you with the background to create hundreds of outstanding downloadable assets, each one about a problem in every relevant industry.  You could then spend your unlimited advertising budget to promote every one of those downloadable assets in every conceivable place.  Essentially, you would run a zillion One:One marketing programs that would cost more than sales people cold calling. 

Let’s call that approach the Nirvana quadrant in the top right corner of this 2 x 2 matrix below.  In the Nirvana Quadrant you get lots of form fills from high quality leads. 

Here’s the legend to the graphic:

If you aren’t in the Nirvana quadrant with your current budget, then you’ll have to make some trade-offs of lead quantity versus quality.  Here are a few examples:

In the “Awareness Quadrant”, you run campaigns that get contacts into the top of a marketing funnel to nurture over time.  These campaigns can be costly because you have to either give away something very general and expensive (eg, a 3D Printer) or pay to promote a less expensive asset.  The lead quality is poor because the marketing asset is typically not related to a specific problem that an engineer has.  That leads you to reduce the number of fields that you collect in order to increase the lead count. 

In the ”Segmented Quadrant”, you create campaigns that go after the exact people that your sales force wants.  Sadly, your limited budget forces you to run only one problem/industry set at a time.  Sticking with just this approach could get you fired if you are measured on lead volume. 

Another great way to get fired is by running inexpensive campaigns that have poor quality assets. That’s why I named the bottom left the “Job Seeker” Quadrant.  These campaigns tend to fail in terms of numbers of leads and lead quality.  They can also negatively impact your brand because the people who do download feel cheated by the promise of the landing page. If you are wondering who would ever do that, then maybe you haven’t seen an engineering marketer gate a promotional brochure.  There are lots of other considerations to trade off in your campaigns besides the target audience, cost, asset quality and number of fields to fill out.  Let me know your thoughts and maybe we’ll come up with an infographic!