The competition in the online world is fierce, and it can be pretty difficult for your company to cut through all the unnecessary noise. Building traffic to your site is one of the biggest challenges. It is even more daunting to capture them and convert them into paying customers. You could be making some grave errors in your lead generation tactics. To help you, we have listed some of the common lead generation mistakes that you need to avoid.
Lead Generation Mistakes Marketers Should Avoid
Understand that leads will not simply grow on trees. You have to work hard to generate them. You need to feed your sales funnel consistently to ensure that you have enough revenue to deal with your company’s expenses. Other marketers may collect leads, but they cannot convert them. Watch out for these sales lead generation mistakes so that you can avoid them.
Buying Sales Leads
Perhaps this is one of the biggest lead generation mistakes marketers will commit. If you find it hard to build a lead list, you will undoubtedly be tempted to buy leads from agencies. However, buying leads due to your desperation will lead to a long-term problem. Sending emails on purchased emails will harm your online reputation. It will also be impossible to achieve your desired result in your email marketing campaign. If you randomly send emails to people who are never aware of your business, they will likely brand your company as spam. Moreover, it is also annoying. Quality leads are not like a mushroom that sprout out of nowhere. Your primary purpose in generating leads is to convert them into paying customers eventually. Therefore, the leads you will capture should be aware and interested in your company.
How to Deal with These Lead Generation Mistakes
If you plan to outsource your lead generation strategy, you should never opt for a company that will sell you leads; they need to capture the leads organically. It means that the prospects will have to hand over the information you need willingly. One way to do this is to give them something valuable like downloadable assets, webinars, exclusive content, event, discount codes, etc. If you take these matters personally, focus on offering digital assets that provide solutions to your audience. Another solution for these common lead generation mistakes is understanding that a healthy, opt-in email list will take some time and patience to develop. Also, it is necessary to create a remarkable email that will encourage people to open emails and keep subscribing to your newsletter.
Not Offering Content on The Right Stage of Buyer’s Journey
Understand that you have different audiences, and they have unique reasons for visiting your website. Not all of them will have the same problem, and they will also be in the different stages of the buyer’s journey. If you think that your prospect is visiting your webpage for the first time, your approach should be personalized. How you will reach out to those who are just checking your website should be different from those who are ready to see a product demo. To avoid some lead generation mistakes, you need to acknowledge that some visitors are not yet prepared to buy or acquire your service, while others may be on the later stage of their buyer’s journey. For those who are still gathering more information about you, you should provide them with the information necessary to help them decide.
How to Properly Handle This
As we’ve often mentioned, lead generation does not come with a one-size-fits-all solution. Since you want to improve your CTR (Click-Through Rates), you want to ensure that you are offering the proper CTA to a particular set of audiences. Perhaps a ‘Buy Now’ would work for someone ready to purchase your product. ‘Click Here for More Information’ can be effective for those still researching their options. Consider creating different landing pages for your audiences. Also, when developing your content, be sure that your website will be filled with website assets that help people who are in different stages of the sales funnel. Personalization and Smart CTA would help you take your lead generation a notch higher. Based on the report, a more personalized CTA will increase your conversion rate to at least 42% and fix some of the biggest lead generation mistakes.
Lead Generation Mistakes: Missing Blogs
How many times did you visit a website with a missing blog section or a resource center? A website with no helpful guidelines, tips, and any informative content, lacks the credibility to offer service; it is one of the common lead generation mistakes. Moreover, blogs can help you improve your online presence. You should have a specific team to maintain your blog content and keep refining your content development strategy. They should be great writers and well-versed in the latest SEO techniques.
It is pretty apparent how blogs can help marketers with lead generation, but not many are taking advantage of this. Perhaps they find it challenging to develop content that will rank high on search results. It will also be rare to find a CTA added to their blog content. Perhaps the most significant benefit of a blog is to drive traffic. For instance, if your blog attracts more than ten visits per day, that is 300 visits per month, and there might be a visitor who could be interested in your business.
How to Deal with This
It is pretty simple to generate leads through your blog post, that is, to add a suitable CTA. Usually, these CTA will direct the audience to the landing page that offers the right content to encourage the prospects to opt-in to your mailing list. You can subtly promote your offerings by adding them to the related blog article. You have complete control over how the CTA will appear in your blog post, making it possible to personalize them. Another option is to add a slide-in CTA at the bottom of the post enabling the readers to see the CTA after perusing the content.
Not Using a Good Lead Generation Tool
One of the leading sales lead generation mistakes that marketers will commit is choosing the software based on what they think is the best for them. We’ve already made a rundown of the best lead generation tool in the past article. If a tool can’t help you determine who your audiences are, where they are coming from, and any critical information to understand their purchasing habit, your program is not serving its purpose.
How to Address This Problem?
The trick is to find the best tool that offers comprehensive information while giving you immense value for your money. There are several templates and tools to choose from, and you might find it overwhelming. Start looking for a template that allows you to create an array of clickable CTA. You will use them to develop a button that the audience will click and redirect them to your landing page. A tool that allows you to embed a form can also be helpful for your lead generation strategy. It can help you capture the information of your prospects and convert them into customers. You should also have a data insight tool and a lead capture program to fix these sales lead generation mistakes.
Incorrect Testing Process
Perhaps you were told to continue testing and improving your website. However, most marketers will use the test result to certify their theory. They will focus too much on it, not realizing that the data can help them develop something far better. In this stage, understanding where you went wrong is far better than understanding the right things you did. Usually, during the brainstorming with the team, someone will suggest a possible solution that can improve the specific section of your website. For instance, they may suggest that removing an element can reduce distraction and improve the traffic on your site. Unfortunately, they will mostly limit their data testing to reach the conclusion they want.
How to Address This
One important step to fix these biggest lead generation mistakes is to concentrate on discussions that compare the actions and not the ones that validate the actions. Testing is not whether your plan A or plan B works; it is how well they work, then you compare the results. It means that you need to treat every plan the same way, whether you think it will be viable or not. Do not treat this testing personally; instead, you should push a more holistic strategy. Before the brainstorming, be sure to keep your ego in check. Avoid finger-pointing and just focus on the data and the system.
Non-optimized Pages
There’s a chance that your website has multiple pages, and you need to treat them differently. If you analyze your organic traffic, you will realize that it mostly comes from specific pages. Perhaps it is on your webpage, blog page, or contact us page. With high traffic being attracted by those pages, you don’t want to treat them like the other pages of your site. It is a must that you take advantage of this opportunity and capture the people landing on that page. Unfortunately, one of the lead generation mistakes that marketers will commit is creating non-optimized content on pages that attract traffic.
How To Deal with This
Start by determining the top-performing pages of your website. You can use different tools that will provide insights into your organic traffic. Start optimizing the content of those web pages according to your lead gen strategy. For instance, you can add a strong CTA on the visible part of the web page. Use heatmap tools to determine the section receiving the highest engagement rate. Be sure that the placement of the CTA button will appear naturally. Another effective way to optimize a page that is generating high traffic is to add a special offer. It can be time-consuming, but it will be pretty effective in generating the leads that you can direct into your sales funnel.
Optimizing Only the Top Page
We’ve mentioned above that it is necessary to optimize the top-performing pages of your website. However, it does not mean that you should already ignore the pages generating less traffic. It is pretty tempting to invest all your time, effort, and energy in managing the top pages of your website; however, you could be committing one of the biggest lead generation mistakes. The higher the traffic is, the more enormous the potential will be.
Therefore, it only makes sense that you pay attention to them. Unfortunately, the pages that often attract the higher traffic will usually be pages that tackle the broader subject. Look for the topic clusters and blog posts that are not receiving enough attention but have a more straightforward lead conversion path. A blog post that receives lesser traffic but a higher conversion rate is better compared to a blog post with 100,000 views but with only 1% conversion.
How to Handle This?
To fix these common lead generation mistakes, you need to find a post that offers a higher conversion rate. Look for a data tracking or monitoring tool and look for the report that features the conversion rate of each post. It will help you understand how each post is performing. Your data insight should be more than just organic traffic. You need to be aware of which post is capturing a good number of contacts. It will help you understand how your traffic plays a role in your lead generation campaign.
Poor Social Media Marketing
While social media is used for brand awareness and traffic generation, it can also be used as an affordable lead generation tool. If you think that it is not helping you capture high-value leads, you are not using this platform properly. One of the sales lead generation mistakes is that you are not communicating well with your audience, or you are not talking about subjects that interest them. If you are making your social media just to promote your latest eBook, then don’t expect it to produce your desired result.
How to Address This?
Try to share your blog posts on your social media account. Look for the articles or content that receives the highest lead generation rate. You can also encourage your audience to share their contact information by providing them with a discount or exclusive deal as an exchange. Some marketers noticed a considerable improvement in their lead list by linking a social media post to their landing page. Take advantage of each social media feature that will help you capture leads.
There are several more lead generation mistakes that marketers unintentionally commit. If you plan to hire an agency and you want to boost your email list with a quality lead list, look for an agency that offers an organic approach. They should have a comprehensive and systematic method that provides a long-term result.
