How to Get Marketing Qualified Leads

Introduction

Marketing Qualified Leads (MQLs) represent prospects who have demonstrated genuine interest in your offerings and meet specific criteria indicating they’re more likely to convert than general leads. Understanding how to identify, nurture, and measure MQLs is essential for optimizing your marketing ROI and sales efficiency. This article is designed for marketers, sales professionals, and business owners who want to understand how to define, identify, nurture, and measure marketing qualified leads (MQLs) to drive business growth.

Understanding MQLs is crucial because it ensures your marketing and sales teams focus their efforts on leads with the highest potential to convert, optimizing resources and improving conversion rates. In this guide, we’ll cover the foundational concepts of the buyer’s journey and lead qualification, the differences between MQLs and SQLs, actionable steps for generating and nurturing MQLs, and how to measure your success.

Understanding the Buyer’s Journey and Lead Qualification

The buyer’s journey is the process prospects go through from initial awareness to making a purchase. It typically consists of three stages:

1. Awareness: The prospect becomes aware of a problem or need.
2. Consideration: The prospect researches solutions and evaluates options.
3. Decision: The prospect chooses a solution and is ready to buy.

Lead qualification is the process of determining where a lead is within this journey and how likely they are to become a customer. By qualifying leads, you ensure that your marketing and sales teams focus on individuals who have shown genuine interest and are more likely to convert. This not only saves time and resources but also improves the customer experience by delivering relevant information at the right time.

Now that you understand the buyer’s journey and the importance of lead qualification, let’s define what a Marketing Qualified Lead is.

What is a Marketing Qualified Lead?

A Marketing Qualified Lead (MQL) is a lead that has been identified as more likely to become a customer based on specific criteria set by a company’s marketing department. MQLs are typically at the beginning of the buyer’s journey.

Leads are people who have shown interest in your company’s products or services—your potential customers. The more of them you convert to the next stage of the sales funnel, the more opportunities you have to increase your sales.

People can show their interest in your business in many different ways. They may subscribe to your email newsletter, download your free e-books and other materials, attend your webinars, etc. Marketing qualified lead actions—such as engaging with marketing assets or consuming educational content—are used to identify MQLs, as these behaviors indicate a higher likelihood of becoming a customer.

The key thing here is to remember that not all leads are ready to go to the next stage of the sales pipeline. Some may be ready to buy soon after engaging, while others may need more time and nurturing. MQLs are often generated through activities like website visits, content downloads, and webinars, and have shown a higher level of engagement and interest in your offerings compared to other types of leads.

Now that we’ve defined what an MQL is, let’s explore how they differ from Sales Qualified Leads.

Difference Between Marketing Qualified Leads and Sales Qualified Leads

A Marketing Qualified Lead (MQL) is a lead that has been identified as more likely to become a customer based on specific criteria set by a company’s marketing department. MQLs are typically at the beginning of the buyer’s journey. A Sales Qualified Lead (SQL) is an individual who has transitioned into the decision stage of the buyer journey and is ready to be passed to the sales department.

There are different types of marketing leads and we’ll talk about two of them:

When MQLs are compared to other leads, they are more likely to become customers, but only about 21% of MQLs convert to SQLs. This highlights the importance of the handoff from MQL to SQL and understanding the distinction between the two stages.

Qualified marketing leads need more nurturing and information about your products to pass to the next stage of the sales pipeline. If you try to offer a sale to them too soon, the chances are you’d be rejected. You should be very careful with these leads so that they won’t lose interest in your brand. Understanding the difference between MQLs and SQLs is key for optimizing your sales process and approach.

Next, let’s look at how to identify marketing qualified leads in your business.

Identifying Marketing Qualified Leads

Identifying marketing qualified leads (MQLs) is a foundational step in building an effective sales process. For marketing and sales teams, the ability to pinpoint high-quality leads means focusing resources on those with a higher likelihood of becoming customers. The first step is to define what a marketing qualified lead looks like for your business—this definition should be tailored to your industry, company goals, and target audience.

Leads are categorized by their stage in the buyer’s journey and their level of intent to purchase. Demographic and firmographic fit—such as industry, company size, and job title—as well as behavioral data like website visits or email clicks, are used to assess lead quality.

Steps to Identify MQLs

1. Define MQL Criteria: Collaborate with sales and marketing to set clear criteria based on your ideal customer profile (ICP), including demographic, firmographic, and behavioral data.
2. Track Engagement: Monitor actions such as website visits, content downloads, webinar attendance, and email interactions.
3. Score Leads: Use a lead scoring system to assign points based on engagement and fit.
4. Review and Refine: Regularly revisit your MQL criteria to ensure they remain relevant as your business and customer base evolve.
5. Align Teams: Ensure marketing and sales are aligned on what qualifies as an MQL for seamless handoff and nurturing.

Effective identification of MQLs requires close collaboration between sales and marketing departments. Aligning on lead qualification criteria ensures that both teams are working toward the same goals and that quality leads are passed seamlessly from marketing to sales. This alignment not only increases efficiency but also maximizes the chances of turning potential leads into paying customers.

With a clear process for identifying MQLs, the next step is to qualify and score these leads for prioritization.

Lead Qualification and Scoring

Lead qualification and scoring are essential tools for managing leads as they move through the sales funnel. A lead scoring system assigns points to each lead based on specific criteria—such as job title, company size, engagement with marketing content, and other demographic data. This approach helps marketing and sales teams quickly identify the most promising leads and prioritize their outreach.

By evaluating leads based on their behavior and fit, businesses can streamline the sales process and focus on those with the greatest potential for conversion. For example, a lead who has downloaded multiple pieces of marketing content and holds a decision-making job title at a target company will score higher than a less engaged contact. This allows teams to allocate resources efficiently and tailor their marketing strategies to the needs of each segment.

Lead scoring also provides valuable insights into how leads progress through the sales funnel, enabling continuous optimization of both marketing and sales conversations. By tracking and refining your lead qualification process, you can improve conversion rates and drive more revenue from your marketing efforts.

Advanced CRO platforms can significantly streamline the lead scoring process. For example, Crolytics.ai combines behavioral tracking with AI-powered analysis to automatically score leads based on engagement patterns, demographic fit, and intent signals. This automation ensures consistent scoring criteria across your entire lead database while freeing your marketing team to focus on strategy rather than manual data entry. By integrating lead scoring with your CRM and marketing automation platforms, you create a seamless system that identifies high-potential MQLs in real-time and triggers appropriate nurture campaigns automatically.

Now that you know how to qualify and score leads, let’s discuss the importance of understanding your buyer personas.

Understanding Buyer Personas

A deep understanding of buyer personas is crucial for attracting and nurturing marketing qualified leads. Buyer personas are detailed profiles of your ideal customers, built from demographic data, job titles, company size, pain points, and buying behaviors. These personas help marketing teams create targeted marketing content and campaigns that resonate with the right audience.

By leveraging buyer personas, businesses can develop marketing strategies that address the specific needs and challenges of their target audience, making it easier to generate qualified leads. Sales teams can also use these insights to personalize their sales conversations, ensuring that each interaction is relevant and valuable to the potential customer.

Incorporating buyer personas into your marketing and sales processes not only improves lead quality but also enhances customer relationship management. This targeted approach leads to more effective nurturing, higher conversion rates, and stronger long-term customer relationships.

With your buyer personas in place, let’s see how intent data can further refine your MQL identification.

Using Intent Data

Intent data is a powerful resource for identifying marketing qualified leads and understanding where they are in the buying process. By tracking online behavior—such as website visits, content downloads, and social media posts—businesses can gain insights into which leads are actively researching solutions and showing clear intent to purchase.

Analyzing intent data allows marketing teams to identify leads with a higher likelihood of conversion and tailor marketing content to their specific interests. For example, a lead who frequently visits your pricing page or downloads product comparison guides is likely further along in the buyer’s journey and ready for more direct engagement.

Integrating intent data with your marketing and sales systems enables real-time tracking of lead activity, supporting more personalized outreach and timely follow-up. This data-driven approach helps businesses optimize their marketing strategies, improve the customer experience, and increase the chances of converting leads into customers.

Now, let’s explore actionable tactics for generating marketing qualified leads.

Optimizing MQL Conversion with CRO

Once you’ve identified marketing qualified leads, the next critical step is optimizing their journey toward becoming sales qualified leads and customers. Conversion Rate Optimization (CRO) is the systematic process of testing, analyzing, and refining your marketing assets to maximize the percentage of MQLs that progress through your funnel.

The Role of CRO in MQL Management

CRO goes beyond simply generating more leads—it focuses on improving the quality and conversion rate of the leads you already have. By applying data-driven testing methodologies to your landing pages, email campaigns, and nurture sequences, you can identify friction points that prevent MQLs from advancing and systematically remove them.

Key CRO Tactics for MQL Optimization

• A/B and Multivariate Testing: Test different versions of your landing pages, CTAs, email subject lines, and form designs to determine which variations drive higher MQL-to-SQL conversion rates. Even small improvements (such as changing button color or headline copy) can yield significant results at scale.
• Conversion Copywriting: The messaging you use to communicate with MQLs must address their specific pain points and stage in the buyer’s journey. Conversion-focused copy emphasizes benefits over features, uses social proof strategically, and creates urgency without being pushy.
• Funnel Analysis: Map the complete journey from first touch to MQL to SQL, identifying where prospects drop off. Use analytics tools to track behavior at each stage and prioritize optimization efforts on the highest-impact pages.
• Personalization and Segmentation: Not all MQLs are created equal. Segment your leads by industry, company size, behavior, or persona, and deliver tailored experiences that speak directly to their needs. Personalized landing pages and email sequences consistently outperform generic approaches.
• Advanced CRO Platforms: Modern CRO platforms can automate much of the testing and optimization process, providing real-time insights into what’s working and what isn’t. Tools like Crolytics.ai combine AI-powered analysis with conversion optimization best practices, enabling marketing teams to continuously improve MQL quality and conversion rates without requiring extensive technical resources.

Measuring CRO Impact on MQLs

Track these key metrics to assess the effectiveness of your CRO efforts:

• MQL-to-SQL conversion rate: The percentage of marketing qualified leads that sales accepts and engages
• Time to conversion: How long it takes MQLs to become SQLs or customers
• Cost per MQL: The total marketing spend divided by number of MQLs generated
• Lead quality score: Sales feedback on lead readiness and fit

By implementing a structured CRO program, businesses typically see 20-30% improvements in MQL-to-SQL conversion rates within the first six months, directly impacting revenue without increasing lead generation costs.

Now that you understand how to optimize MQL conversion, let’s explore specific tactics for generating these leads across digital channels.

Marketing Qualified Lead Generation Tactics

Effective lead generation strategies, such as content marketing, social media engagement, and leveraging lead scoring systems, are essential for cultivating and managing MQLs. It’s important to ensure you have enough leads to justify your marketing efforts and costs, as a healthy lead volume is crucial for maintaining a strong sales pipeline. Well-executed marketing campaigns—across channels like email, social media, and PPC—are essential for cultivating MQLs and evaluating your overall online marketing effectiveness.

Extra Tip: Whether you’re an established brand or have launched recently, you need to develop certain criteria that would help you define your marketing qualified leads. Define what actions potential customers should take so that they would be qualified as marketing and sales leads. You can also decide how many leads you expect to generate in a certain period. This would make marketing and sales processes easier and more effective.

Regularly revisiting and adapting your definition of MQLs is important as your customer base grows and consumer preferences change, ensuring your criteria remain relevant and effective.

Also, at this stage, we assume that you already know who your customers are and you’ve created your buyer personas. Otherwise, you won’t be able to target the right audience to turn them into leads. Tracking qualified lead actions—such as specific behaviors or engagements—can further improve your lead generation efforts and help identify when prospects are truly sales-ready.

Digital Lead Generation Strategies

Modern digital channels have transformed B2B lead generation, making it possible to attract, engage, and qualify prospects at scale without relying on interruptive tactics like cold calling. By leveraging the right mix of paid and organic strategies across multiple touchpoints, marketing teams can systematically build a pipeline of high-quality MQLs. Here are proven digital tactics for generating marketing qualified leads:

Facebook Ads

Facebook is the largest social media network and your target audience or some of them will hang out there too. Also, Facebook has different types of ads that can be helpful to all businesses. In our case, the best way to generate leads is to use Facebook lead ads. Lead ads allow you to collect information from a user through a form.

When someone clicks on a lead ad on Facebook they’ll be prompted to fill in a form, and in the form, you can request any information that you deem important for the rest of the sales cycle. But remember that users won’t give you information about them just like that. You need to offer some quality lead magnets so that they agree to share personal information with you. Lead magnets are useful materials for users like e-books, white papers, checklists, tips, etc.

Lead Magnets

By offering useful material to people, people will more likely subscribe to your newsletter. So, define your target audience, create useful content for them and you’ll get some quality network marketing leads.

Interactive Content

You can also increase engagement by using interactive content experiences such as quizzes, interactive assessments, or ROI calculators within your Facebook Ads.

Video-First Prospecting

Additionally, consider video-first prospecting by using short-form video and live streams to humanize your brand and drive high-intent submissions.

YouTube

YouTube is another popular social media that can help you generate leads, especially when video content is becoming more and more popular all over the world. You can create informational videos and different how-to videos that help your audience to solve their problems.

Personalized Content

Creating personalized content tailored to your ideal customer profile (ICP) is essential for increasing engagement and managing marketing qualified leads effectively on YouTube.

If you create high-quality videos that your audience is interested in, you can get new leads in no time. Offer a guide, an e-book or some other kind of content during the video by asking for the email address or some other personal information from users.

Also, pay attention to the comments section. Users can comment about how much they like your content or products—including your B2B video content—and it can give you valuable insights on what you can change to improve.

Zero-Party Data Collection

Additionally, consider using zero-party data collection by incorporating surveys or interactive tools within your YouTube videos to encourage prospects to voluntarily share their preferences.

And don’t forget about other social media as well. Your audience may not use YouTube or Facebook actively, but they’ll definitely be active on some other social media.

Webinars

A webinar is another good option for getting qualified leads. It’s also a good way to meet your potential customers and be able to speak to them. It can help you to better understand their needs and convert them to customers faster.

You can host different types of webinars like informational webinars, case studies, and product demos. What you need to do is to analyze your target audience and find out what topic would be interesting for them.

You can connect the list of webinar attendees with your CRM so that it would be easier for you to send them emails. It’s very important to remind the attendees about the webinar a day, or a few hours before. And also, you should send them emails after the webinar with brief information about what you discussed during the webinar.

It’s also a good idea to co-host a webinar. You can partner up with another brand that has the same target audience as you and organize a webinar together. By doing this, you can attract the other brand’s audience and make them your leads.

Now, let’s look at how email marketing can help you generate and nurture MQLs.

Email Marketing Leads

Email marketing is one of the most efficient ways of lead generation. When people give their email addresses to you, it means that they are interested in your brand and products and by nurturing them with different types of email, you can turn them into customers.

Best Practices

• Be easy to read
• Have a simple yet appealing design
• Be written in simple, concise language and be clear to understand
• Have the CTA button stand out from the rest of the email
• Have catchy subject lines

Lead Magnets

Note that buying email leads is a bad practice and it’s not recommended. Sending emails to people, who haven’t given their addresses themselves, is similar to cold calls. Besides, you risk ending in the spam section, so they won’t even see your email. It’s better to think of ways how to persuade people to give you their addresses than spamming them.

And one of the best ways to do it is by offering them some quality lead magnets. It’s not necessary to use ads to get email marketing leads, you can do it through your social media posts, webinars, and of course through your website.

Your website is a great place to put some CTAs in your blog section, services/products page, and landing pages. It’s the first place people visit to get information about you so it’s very important to have a website with high-quality content, appealing design and the right CTAs. Lead management tools can help ensure that leads transition smoothly from marketing qualified leads (MQL) to sales qualified leads (SQL).

Don’t forget that after getting the addresses of your email marketing leads, you need to send quality content to them so that they become your customers in the future. It could be some updates, exclusive content, VIP places for a webinar, etc.

The design of your newsletter is also crucial for your success. If you put your CTA in the wrong place or use bad fonts, your subscribers may not pay attention to them. Automated tools can handle lead scoring, tallying points based on criteria set by the marketing team.

Compliance & Privacy

Finally, always be explicit about how you use subscriber data and ensure compliance with regulations like GDPR or CCPA to maintain data privacy and transparency in your email marketing.

Next, let’s explore how to generate free qualified marketing leads through content, guest posting, and social media.

Free Qualified Marketing Leads

As mentioned above, it’s not necessary to use paid ads or any other paid method to get qualified marketing leads. There are plenty of ways to do it without spending a lot of resources.

Content Marketing

Content is a powerful tool to make people love your brand, find new customers and share your brand message across the world. This especially refers to your website content and blog. It’s one of the main ways people find you, so you have to have a professional website with great content so that people click on your CTAs to become leads.

Analyze your content, delete all the outdated posts, create new content consistently and don’t forget about the CTAs. People like reading about useful information that can help solve their problems. If you share quality content that is interesting for the audience, they will most likely become new leads for you.

Additionally, tracking behaviors suggesting deeper interest—such as repeated visits, content downloads, or engagement with key resources—can help you identify when a lead reaches the threshold to be considered ready for outreach or sales engagement. This ensures you transition leads from marketing qualified leads (MQL) to sales qualified leads (SQL) at the right moment.

Guest Posting

Guest posting is another way to increase your brand exposure to a wider audience. There are many blogs and influential websites where you can post your content and get new leads. You need to do some research to find the ones in your industry.

You can also collaborate with brands to exchange articles for mutual benefit. Look for the brands and websites that are connected to your industry and have the same target audience. Guest posts show your industry authority and can work great especially if you operate in B2B.

Guest posting is also great for SEO, as your website will get more backlinks which can increase your domain authority.

Social Media

You can also use social media to organically generate marketing-qualified leads. You just need to create relevant content for your audience and encourage them to open communication, ask questions to you and subscribe to your newsletter. Try to create interactive content, different Q&As, live events, and chats to communicate with your audience directly.

Another great idea would be to organize contests or offer giveaways to increase your reach. Offer some valuable prizes, which can be e-books or sample products or anything that would encourage people to participate in the contest.

You can also create quizzes, and surveys, which are excellent ways to get more information about your audience.

SEO

I’ve mentioned several times that your website is one of the main sources to get qualified leads, which means your SEO needs to be strong to drive more traffic to your website.

Try to target more long-tail keywords, which may have lower search volumes but can be more effective than the high volume keywords. The reason for that is that they are less competitive and more specific, meaning that it’s easier to match your content to the user’s intent. And if you can create content that perfectly matches their intent, you will more likely get more leads.

Also, remember that you need to encourage visitors to look for more content on your website and come back again. You have to have structured content with links to your other articles, and an easy-to-use website, so that users can freely navigate there. If you provide a great user experience, these users have a high chance to become your marketing qualified leads.

Utilizing the right tools and technologies can also streamline MQL management, making it easier to track, nurture, and convert leads efficiently.

Now, let’s see how to measure the success of your MQL generation efforts.

Measuring Success and ROI

To ensure your marketing qualified lead generation efforts are effective, it’s essential to measure success and return on investment (ROI) regularly. Key performance indicators (KPIs) such as conversion rate, lead volume, and sales revenue provide a clear picture of how well your marketing strategies are working.

Tracking the cost of generating MQLs and comparing it to the revenue generated from converted leads allows you to assess the ROI of your marketing efforts. By analyzing these metrics, businesses can identify which tactics deliver the best results, refine their marketing strategies, and optimize the sales process for greater efficiency.

Regularly measuring MQL success not only highlights areas for improvement but also helps allocate resources more effectively. This ongoing analysis empowers marketing and sales teams to make data-driven decisions that drive growth, increase revenue, and ensure long-term success in lead generation.

Implementing a data-driven conversion methodology is essential for accurate measurement and continuous improvement. This approach combines quantitative analytics (conversion rates, revenue attribution, funnel metrics) with qualitative insights (user feedback, session recordings, heatmaps) to build a complete picture of MQL performance. Rather than relying on vanity metrics like total lead volume, focus on quality indicators such as MQL-to-customer conversion rate, customer acquisition cost (CAC), and lifetime value (LTV) of customers sourced from MQLs. Modern analytics platforms can track the entire customer journey from first touchpoint through closed deal, enabling precise ROI calculations and informed budget allocation decisions. When combined with systematic A/B testing and experimentation, this methodology transforms MQL generation from a cost center into a predictable, scalable revenue engine.

Final Words

Whichever way you choose to generate marketing qualified leads, remember that you need to understand your audience’s needs first. Research which type of content they are more interested in and offer them exactly what they are looking for. Only this way you can be sure to increase your reach and get more leads.

As your customer base evolves, it’s important to regularly review and adapt your MQL definitions to ensure they remain relevant and effective. Consumer preferences and business goals can change over time, so revisiting your criteria helps maintain alignment with your target segments.

Also, remember to create specific criteria to qualify leads as marketing qualified leads. By doing so, it would be easier to measure the results.

Ready to transform your website into an MQL generation engine? Book a consultation to discuss how conversion-optimized design, development, and ongoing testing can improve your lead quality and volume.