Lead generation is vital to customer acquisition. Sometimes a lead is the key to generating your first sale. Leads have already visited your website and have shown interest in your products or services in various ways either through your website, downloading an ebook, completing an online survey, or through other methods. But somehow marketers are not able to follow through and eventually lose the lead.
Lead generation can be tough for businesses. As reported by Hubspot, 61% of marketers consider traffic and lead generation as their biggest challenge. Just when you think that you have generated enough leads, you are still not getting your desired results. Maybe you aren’t doing your lead generation right. So here are 10 common lead generation mistakes you need to correct.
- No Clear and Consistent Process For Qualifying Leads
- You Don’t Diversify Your Lead Sources
- Too Many Call To Actions
- Focusing On The Wrong Metrics
- Not Communicating Your Value in Marketing
- Not Targeting The Right People
- Not Aligning To Pain Points
- Lack of Consistent Testing
- You Expect Immediate Results
- Not Optimizing Page For Lead Generation
Let’s discuss in detail.
1. No Clear and Consistent Process For Qualifying Leads
The first thing you need to do upon receipt of a lead is to qualify it. When qualifying the lead, use basic information like:
- Curiosity about specific features or products on your website
- Are they looking for more information about your business?
- Was the lead generated from some sales promotion?
Unfortunately, not all brands have a clear and specific process for qualifying leads. While 61% of B2B marketers send all leads directly to the sales department, only 27% of those leads will be qualified. A clear and consistent qualifying lead process can save you time and money as you already know which lead in your sales funnel you will prioritize. Also, by qualifying leads you will be able to better follow up.
With a clear lad qualification, you can look forward to a higher return on investment. However, the ROI won’t happen if you don’t finish the job and close deals. Having consistent metrics is important when qualifying leads. Instill a “one-mind” focus on your sales team so they will know the true value of your sales leads and why.
2. You Don’t Diversify Your Lead Sources
Keeping your leads stagnant isn’t going to help your campaign. It will decrease your click-through and conversion rates down. Don’t focus your lead generation on just one channel or source. You can generate leads from social media networks like Facebook or LinkedIn but don’t confine yourself to those channels. Potential customers will be coming not just from social media but from other channels as well.
With all the different channels that continue to rise, it is worth testing if your campaign will work on those channels. Never assume that you know what works best for your lead generation campaign. Who knows you might get the conversion you otherwise wouldn’t have from the channel you are using.
If you are just starting your lead generation campaign, go for multiple channels. Aside from social networks, try to generate leads from websites and 3rd party databases and compare which will work for you. By using multiple sources, you will be able to extract more data giving you more diversity with your leads.
3. Too Many Call To Actions
While having a clear call-to-action is important, you also need to make sure that you don’t include too many. Regardless of the number of your content, it should all lead to one strategic call to action. It can become overwhelming for customers if you ask for too much information from them. Doing so would also inhibit the performance of your conversion assets. Too many CTAs would make customers work harder and may opt to find what they are looking for somewhere else.
Having too many calls to action can create confusion for customers and keep them from taking any action at all. The question is: How many CTAs should your emails have? Well, two calls to action can be effective when you are unsure of how far a potential lead is in your sales funnel. The first CTA is for “take desired action” and the second is for nurturing the lead.
Support pages need to have multiple CTAs as they will likely have several questions that need to be answered without a phone call or chatbot. Use these pages to present great content to your target audience. Finally, dedicated landing pages should have a single CTA.
4. Focusing On The Wrong Metrics
With lead generation, you need to realize that metrics only define your methods for getting the ultimate outcome. They are not the end result. Metrics help you define the roadblocks of your campaign. By knowing your metrics, you will be able to identify the changes that you need to reach your outcome.
It used to be that businesses focused on metrics like web traffic, social impressions, number of blog visitors, and others. However, these days, the focus should be on metrics that closely align with the goals of the sales and marketing departments. Thanks to technology, it is now possible for marketers to look further down the funnel to determine the efficiencies of their channels and strategies and maximize their effort for their marketing campaign.
Focus on the metrics that will help you improve your forecasting capabilities. Go for the data that will help your business move forward. Tracking the right metrics will be key to your continuous improvement and growth. In the end, these metrics will help you make the best strategic decisions and avoid speed bumps.
5. Not Communicating Your Value in Marketing
Lead generation shouldn’t be about you but about your prospect. However, if you want to make it about your business, communicate its value to your customer. What problems are you solving for your customers? They wouldn’t care about the accolades or achievements that your company has won. What they are after is what you can do for them. They want solutions not bragging rights.
The message you convey can be a driver of success. If your message revolves around how great your business is, it won’t be relevant to your customers and won’t inspire them to take action. Providing them with solutions to their problems, needs, or interests is a good way to drive action from your target customers.
Focus on the benefits of your product or service and what it can do to your customers first then on the features. The benefits of the products will provide value to your customers. Ask yourself the following questions:
- What’s in it for the stakeholders?
- What’s the purpose of the product or service?
- What makes your product or service better than the competition?
6. Not Targeting The Right People
Marketing your product to the wrong people is a waste of time and resources. Knowing who your target audience is will help you send targeted messages to them, which can help increase your conversion rate. Your marketing should be directed towards attracting qualified leads. When it comes to lead generation, you should go for quality not quantity.
Getting more leads is always better but you should be smarter and go for the targeted approach. By targeting the right audience, you can look forward to getting better results and more conversions. With the right people, you can send more personalized and relevant messages.
Once you have targeted the right people, create a buyer persona and then make tweaks based on the results. This kind of approach helps generate leads with value instead of “spray marketing” to a general audience.
7. Not Aligning To Pain Points
The main reason customers come to you is that they have a problem that needs to be resolved. They have pain points and you need to address them. If you don’t highlight those pain points, they won’t take any action. Features or benefits are nice but you can offer better value by removing any roadblocks that keeps them from moving to the next step of your sales funnel.
Understanding customer pain points is crucial to resolving their problems. There are 4 types of pain points that your customers might be experiencing:
- Support. This could include delayed response, lack of product knowledge, and non-availability from the preferred channels. Support pain could badly affect customer retention & loyalty.
- Productivity. This type of pain point includes inconvenience in using the product or redundancy in the buying process. 87% of customers would abandon their shopping carts during checkout if the process is long or complicated.
- Financial. These pain points have to do with the customer having to spend an excessive amount of money on the current business causing financial strain on them. It may include subscription plans or membership fees or a high cost of repeat purchases.
- Process. This refers to how businesses interact with customers using different methodologies and processes.
Identifying customer pain points is crucial as it could impact your sales and marketing strategy. For your sales team, it can help them personalize their sales pitch and present their product as the right solution. For marketing, it can help them advertise their solution effectively in an appealing manner.
8. Lack of Consistent Testing
Consistency is important in lead generation. During your campaign, you need to maintain a consistent look from your ads to the landing pages. If you don’t, chances are you could lose a prospect along the way. Don’t leave your customers confused about whether or not they are on the right page. They could end up abandoning their cart altogether and searching elsewhere.
By not being consistent, your lead might think that you offer something you don’t. Using the wrong image may convey a different message to the customer. You need to give your customers confidence that they are on the right page. You need to optimize your lead generation campaign to ensure that your leads will be directed to the right page.
With lead generation, you need to identify what’s working and what’s not so you can make adjustments to what you are doing. With so much data at your hands, it would be easy for you to track leads from where they came from. You need to spot the areas that deliver the best results and the best quality leads.
9. You Expect Immediate Results
You need to keep in mind that lead generation strategies take time to get up and running. Your campaign should be focused on getting quality leads rather than on quantity. Don’t expect to see results right off the bat. You need to give your campaign enough traction first. A month of blogging wouldn’t deliver the metrics you desire any time soon.
You can easily get frustrated and impatient if your lead generation campaign seems to be not working. Lead generation is a trial and error process and it takes time to get the process right. In addition, you also need to get sufficient data first before you can get started with lead generation.
The key to success in lead generation is staying patient. However, this is easier said than done. But you need to understand that results won’t come right away. It could take months for the results to show but once they do, it becomes sustainable and the leads will come.
10. Not Optimizing Page For Lead Generation
It is understandable that when you have a high traffic page, it will be the only page you will optimize for lead generation. If you have a blog, for example, you might be tempted to launch a lead generation campaign on your blog followers. High traffic translates to high potential.
However, by doing this, you could be missing out on other opportunities by only optimizing high traffic pages. Studies show that 93% of customers start their buying journey on the Internet. This means that you won’t be able to capture these potential leads if you only optimize certain pages on your website.
Make sure that your lead generation pages are fully optimized for mobile as well. By doing this, you will be able to attract not only your blog followers but also those coming from the web. At present, there are 5.22 billion mobile users and still growing so imagine the potential leads that you can get.
Getting lead generation right is important for the success and growth of your business. It all starts with avoiding these 10 lead generation mistakes.
Lead Generation Solutions From airisX
When you have a great product or service, one of the hardest things to do is to find buyers interested in what you’re selling. To fill this gap, airisX offers lead generation – our staff researches your business and target end user, and creates email/contact lists for you to reach out and pitch. We offer lead generation for any business model – B2B, B2C, SaaS, consultancies, outsourcing companies (like ourselves!), ecommerce, etc. We build your email list totally from scratch, or if you already have a list, help you find contact information for pre-targeted companies.