By krbaker@hubspot.com (Kristen Baker)

The more you know about your buyer personas, leads, and customers, the easier it is to effectively target them. This entails identifying the channels and platforms in which they spend their time and understanding their needs and challenges.

It also means knowing how your leads find your business — how and by which method they come across your company. This is known as a lead source.

Lead Source

In this blog post, we’ll review the definition of a lead source, why lead sources are so important, common types, and best practices for managing and tracking them.

Why do lead sources matter?

By understanding and identifying lead sources, you’re able to gain context around why and how your audience members find you. As a result, you can improve the customer experience and buyer’s journey with targeted content, communications, interactions, and more.

This allows you to determine which lead sources are most valuable to your business so you can hone in on them as well as measure your success over time in attracting and converting leads.

Additionally, knowing which lead sources bring in the most qualified leads helps you focus your resources where they matter most and where you’ll get the greatest ROI.

Identifying and understanding your lead sources is also a major part of lead management, the process in which you manage — or nurture — your leads until they decide to convert.

These are all details you need to improve the buyer’s journey, effectively target your unique audience, and shorten the sales cycle.

Types of Lead Sources

There are several types of lead sources. Here are some common examples.

• Email marketing (email campaigns)
• Organic search (lead sources from the search engine results page/ SERP)
• Paid ads (PPC, display ads)
• Social media
• Direct mail
• Referrals or word-of-mouth
• Gated/ premium content offers
• Blog articles
• Events (in-person or virtual)
• Backlinks (link from a page on one website to another — if another website links to your website, you have a backlink from them)
• Traditional advertising (billboards, TV, radio)

Next, let’s talk about a handful of best practices when it comes to your lead sources. You should keep these in mind while identifying, analyzing, and improving your lead sources.

1. Identify and track your lead sources.

If you’re looking to identify, track, and measure your lead sources, you’ll likely use a lead tracking tool. These tools are often part of your CRM, marketing software, or sales software.

Lead Source Tools

Here are some examples of powerful tools that can help you with lead source tracking.

1. HubSpot

HubSpot is an all-in-one CRM platform for scaling businesses with powerful marketing, sales, service, and ops software and tools. There’s more than one way to use HubSpot to collect, track, manage, and measure leads and lead sources.

For instance, with HubSpot CRM Lead Management and Tracking Software, all contact records for your leads are …read more

Source:: HubSpot Blog

Author: Aaron