
Lead Generation Mistakes that Marketers Need to Stop Making
It is a fundamentally known fact that businesses survive on sales which in turn are dependent on successful lead generation. Marketers may generate too little or too many leads, but salespeople often find converting these leads into customers, a challenge. We shall deal with the common errors committed regarding lead generation and their remedies in this segment.
1) Leads are being bought rather than generated organically
It’s often seen that email lists are bought if there is a dearth in lead generation. More often than not, they backfire because people on these lists may not be even closely related to your product/service offering and are likely to mark you as spam. It’s rather advisable to put some value on the inquiry and package it properly to capture user info and use the user info to create organic leads for these users to become potential customers.
2) Lead generation content is fixed for people in different stages of the buyer’s journey
Every person coming on your website will be at a different stage of buying cycle. A person browsing the website for the first time needs to be first educated about the product offerings rather than providing a product demo, which shall be more apt for a visitor at an advanced stage of buying cycle. There needs to a variety of things on the website that engages the visitor to dig deeper into the website. Smart CTAs or click-to-actions, that transform depending on the person viewing the page based on his or her interests, location, items or services bought previously, pages viewed already, and so on, can be used.
3) You aren’t using your blog to generate leads
Gone are the days when blogging was just a pastime. It has now become a serious business now, but people still seem to be not attaching CTAs on blogs on account of insufficient valuable content offers to put behind a form. It’s easy to generate leads from blog posts by making effective use of CTAs. These CTAs can lead the visitor to freebies on the website whilst promoting content having subject matter which may relate to them.
4) Lead generation tools being used might not be credible
Visitors coming to your website have to be effectively tracked for their patterns and actions and put up the content in a way that resonates with their choices and preferences. The idea is to have a set of tools that best capture these patterns and keeps a track of them. Tools to capture leads and visitor information come in very handy for these activities e.g. Google Forms, Contact Form 7, JetPack etc.
5) The “Right Perception vs the Wrong Perception”
Continuous improvement is essential for evolution, but more often than not we do it for the sake of improving the product and not for testing the credibility of the existing product. Focus needs to shift in this direction to achieve desired results. The process of ideation should follow a more holistic approach i.e. by not validating opinions but, by comparing actions.
6) Top pages are not optimized for lead generation
Not all pages of the website generate the same amount of traffic, in fact, that is limited to some specific pages like the home page or contact page. It’s important to direct your effort for creating opportunities on such pages for conversions. Using analytics, figure out the most important pages that generate maximum traffic. These pages can then be optimized for a maximum lead generation by creating appropriate CTAs as a highlighted feature.
7) Social media not be used strategically for lead generation
Today, social media had gained worldwide acceptance and is becoming an increasingly powerful tool for lead generation. In addition to being a low-cost option, it is equally effective. If you are not getting enough leads, chances are it’s not being done strategically. Apart from using the regular features of social media that are designed for lead generation, another effective way to do this is, by amalgamating blog posts and relevant offers that have historically generated higher leads for other new posts or offers.
8) Forms are either too long or too short
Balancing is the key when it comes to capturing user preferences through forms. Short forms will get more people to fill out but the quality of information will suffer and long forms will attract fewer user entries but will be more qualitative. Hence, a tradeoff between the quantity and quality had to be arrived at. It has to be very finely researched as to what information is absolutely critical to your goals and objectives. Roping in the sales team for this might be a good idea for a more overall lead generation.
9) Sales is in oblivion regarding a qualified lead
Lead gives the opportunity to convert a visitor to a potential customer and eventually to a customer. More often than not, the likelihood to gaining a customer comes from the lead provided by Marketing. However, Sales people tend to go after their own qualified leads. It is essential to have quality leads and that too in good numbers. So it becomes imperative for Marketing and Sales to go hand in hand and align their thoughts to arrive at qualified leads in the true sense.