Optimizing Engagement for Pipeline Growth: 4 Considerations for Marketers

Highlights: 

• Drive Revenue with Data Quality: Optimize engagement and pipeline growth by prioritizing high-quality conversions and curating your media and data supply chain upstream to ensure reliable, high-performing insights for demand generation.

• Align Sales and Marketing with Clarity: Increase lead generation effectiveness by clarifying bottom-of-the-funnel performance data and using predictive signals (like lead scoring) to align sales and marketing on high-value prospects and reasons for deal closure.

The landscape of demand generation is rapidly evolving. Marketers are navigating a flood of data, shifting buyer behaviors, and the burgeoning influence of AI, all while aiming to drive meaningful pipeline growth. I recently moderated a panel, "Optimizing Engagement, Lead Nurturing, and Pipeline Growth," at the Digital Marketing for Financial Services East Conference. The event brought together experts from across the financial services marketing ecosystem to share insights on boosting funnel performance by embedding data and analytics at every stage.

Here are four key takeaways from my discussion with Sarah Madden, Head of North American Growth, Marketing, and Communications at Boxx Insurance; and Paul Bell, President of 33Across.

Challenges Facing Marketers for Effective Lead Generation

1. Conversion Quality vs. Conversion Quantity

While capturing a high number of conversions is important, marketers should equally consider the quality of those conversions. Particularly in financial services, a conversion that quickly defaults (e.g., missed first payment) negates the victory of converting a lead. Marketers should add measuring post-conversion quality to their conversion metrics to truly realize ROI and support the organizational goal that makes a conversion matter – driving revenue. A conversion that fails to deliver attractive revenue is not a valuable conversion.

2. The Overload of Curation

The primary struggle for brands and agencies: curating the vast amount of available data and media into an actionable supply source. With data points and media channels multiplying — including CTV, app, web, digital out of home, and audio — the core challenge is isolating a manageable, high-quality supply for demand generation efforts. Marketers should strongly consider curating media at the top of the funnel — at its source — with trusted, high-performing publishers.

3. Lack of Performance Data Clarity

While it might be best to address media at the top-of-the-funnel, data breakdown is a bottom-of-the-funnel issue. Due to a lack of integration across adtech stacks, tracking the reasons for "closed lost" or "closed won" outcomes is difficult. Identifying why an insurance quote didn't close — whether it was a product issue, service issue, or broker relationship — is crucial. These insights, though owned by sales/underwriting, are essential for marketing to understand so they can be incorporated into future lead generation efforts to improve campaign performance. In short, address the reasons why prospects failed to convert to avoid the same unwelcomed results in the future.

4. Separating Predictive Signals from Noise

Marketers are often drowning in audience signals like website behavior, content engagement, intent data, and psychographic profiles. The panel discussed how to find signals that are truly predictive of whether a deal will close.

Sarah detailed Boxx's recent lead scoring implementation, which categorized and qualified leads by defining Marketing Qualified Leads (MQLs) and Sales Qualified Leads (SQLs) with the sales team. Using a model to analyze the data, her team determined that 70% of high-scoring insurance brokers met the sales team’s target audience criteria.

Fueling all of these efforts is data, and I stressed the importance of data quality. Using quality data with high coverage is essential for maintaining performance and avoiding missed conversions due to faulty insights. Basically, you can’t make bad data perform above its limitations. While high quality data can cover for other elements that go into converting leads (e.g., message, creative, timing, etc.) bad data only adds another drag on performance. 

Expanding on media curation, Paul suggested moving media decisions further upstream in the supply chain. Applying media filters at the Supply-Side Platform (SSP) level — a process he compared to filtering water at the spring rather than the tap — ensures only pre-filtered, high-intent traffic reaches the buyer's platform, streamlining the optimization process for the bidding algorithm.

The journey to optimizing engagement and pipeline growth is a continuous process that demands a commitment to data quality, strategic curation, and alignment across sales and marketing. By focusing on the quality of conversions, streamlining your data supply chain, and working to clarify bottom-of-the-funnel insights, marketers can cut through the noise and identify the signals that truly drive revenue. 
Ready to turn these insights into action? Discover how we can help optimize your lead generation strategy.