Lead generation is crucial to keep the sales pipeline full and increase revenue in any business setting. However, with so many moving parts, it’s easy to make mistakes that can cost us dearly.
According to Forbes, an independent survey commissioned by Prospex.ai found that 58% of marketers’ biggest growth-related challenge is generating leads. The chief reason why marketers are behindhand is the insufficiency of appropriate lead generation techniques. What’s on the plate might be too outdated for today’s standard or not polished enough to entice customers and clients into the already cramped virtual market.
Don’t worry, we all make them! In this blog post, we’ll go over some of the most common mistakes made in lead generation. Hopefully, by the end of this blog, you will better understand how to generate leads and avoid making these costly mistakes.
Unclear Process of Qualifying Leads
First from the list is how most businesses qualify leads upon receipt. It indeed gets quite confusing and complicated because numerous factors go into determining whether or not a lead is qualified. Everyone also has their own opinion on the matter, making it very difficult to reach a consensus.
Additionally, the criteria for qualifying leads can change over time. For example, a particular lead considered qualified a year ago may no longer be regarded as qualified today. This scenario becomes tough for sales and marketing teams to keep up with the latest standards, which often results in time wasted on pursuing leads that are not interested in buying what you’re selling.
What should you include in your lead qualification process?
A good lead qualification process should include basic screening details like how curious they are about the products or specific features on your website and if they are looking for more information about your business, to name a few. You should also filter out uninterested parties efficiently and focus your money and time on those more likely to convert, as you already know which lead you will prioritize in your sales funnel. Otherwise, you’ll end up frustrated and burned out.
Inconsistent Lead Nurturing
Generating leads is only the beginning of the customer acquisition process. Once you have a lead, you need to start nurturing it promptly until they are ready to purchase your product or service.
Lead nurturing is the process of developing relationships with buyers at every stage of the sales funnel and delivering targeted content that moves them closer to a purchasing decision. However, it can quickly become a black hole of inconsistency if you’re not careful.
All too often, many businesses drop the ball when it comes to this. For example, they might generate a list of leads and then send out generic emails that provide no value. Or they might try to sell too hard and too fast and end up losing the leads altogether. As a result, leads languish in the system without ever being contacted.
A good lead nurturing strategy can help you turn a cold lead into a qualified, sales-ready prospect. By sending targeted content to your leads at different stages of their buyer’s journey, you can keep them engaged with your brand and move them closer to making a purchase.
These are a few key elements that make up a successful lead nurturing campaign:
Personalization
To effectively nurture your leads, you need to personalize your communications. This means addressing them by name, understanding their specific needs and pain points, and tailoring your content accordingly.
Relevant Content
Sending your leads relevant content is salient to keeping them engaged with your brand. Make sure you segment your leads so you can send them content tailored to their needs and interests.
Timing
The timing of your lead nurturing emails is also important. A good rule of thumb is to send one email per week if you don’t want to bombard your leads with too many emails, or you also don’t want to let too much time go by between messages.
CTA
Every email in your lead nurturing campaign should have a clear call-to-action (CTA). It could be something like “Download our white paper” or “Sign up for a free trial.” Your CTA should be relevant to the lead stage of your buyer’s journey.
Consistency
This is the final key when it comes to lead nurturing. You must ensure that you regularly send out communications (emails, newsletters, blog posts or something else) so your leads don’t forget about you.
Overflowing Call To Action
It is vital to have a crystal clear call to action, but you must also ensure that it doesn’t get too much to the point that your target prospects are bombarded with CTAs all day long and then tune them out. Having too many calls to action can create confusion for customers and keep them from taking any action on your content. Moreover, if you ask for too much information from them, it will delay your conversion assets’ performance.
Regardless of how many content and ads you make, it should all lead and focus on one strategic call to action. For instance, How many CTAs should you include in your emails? If you are unassertive about how far a potential lead is in your sales funnel, two CTAs can be feasible. The first CTA is for taking the desired action, while the second one is for nurturing the lead. On the other hand, the exclusive landing pages should have a single CTA. There are also circumstances where multiple CTAs are needed, such as the support pages where they need to answer several questions without a chatbot or a phone call. You can utilize these pages to showcase great content to your potential leads.
Not Leveraging the Right Social Media Platform
Many businesses make the common mistake of not leveraging the right social media platform for their industry and lead generation efforts. Each social media platform has unique strengths and weaknesses that businesses must consider when determining where to allocate their marketing efforts.
For example, LinkedIn is great for B2B lead generation because it allows users to connect with other professionals in their industry. However, Facebook is better for B2C lead generation because it has a more extensive user base and will enable businesses to target potential customers more precisely. Twitter is good for real-time engagement and customer relationships, while Google+ allows businesses to create custom audiences based on interests and demographics. And if your target audience consists mainly of young adults, Instagram and emerging TikTok would be great exposure channels.
Only Using One Lead Source
It’s easy to get comfortable with your lead sources if they primarily work well. But don’t let yourself get too complacent. Generating leads from a single source isn’t going to help your campaign and will just reduce your conversion rates down. To avoid this happening, make sure to have a diverse mix of lead sources. Try out as many different approaches as possible and see which ones work best for your business.
For instance, you can generate leads from social media sites like LinkedIn, Twitter and Instagram and explore multiple channels like websites and 3rd party databases at the same time. You can also tap into other ad strategies on Facebook, such as Facebook lead ads to collect potential leads with forms to fill out without leaving the platform and target your advertising prospects more effectively. You can extract more data from your diverse lead sources by doing all of these.
Not Optimizing Pages for Mobile Use
Mobile use has surpassed desktop use for internet access. There are over 5.22 billion growing mobile users worldwide, so it is now more important than ever to ensure that you optimize your website pages and all its content for mobile users. In addition, more and more people are also using their mobile devices to search for products and services online; that’s why your lead generation pages need to have a responsive design where your page will automatically adjust to fit the screen size of whatever device they are using.
Tips for Optimizing Your Lead Generation Pages for Mobile
- Keep the design simple and easy to navigate because too much clutter will turn users away.
- Make sure the call-to-action is prominently displayed and easy to find, and the buttons and links are at the right size and easily clickable.
- Use large, easily readable font sizes.
- Include plenty of white space to avoid overwhelming users.
- Consider using a single-column layout to make it easy for users to scroll through your content.
- Enable your website’s mobile-specific features.
- Reduce the loading time for your mobile landing page. No customer will waste time waiting before getting what they are searching for.
- Beware of long and tedious forms. When users encounter an intimidating form to fill out while navigating on their phones, they would likely think such a form is not worth it.
- Keep in mind that you thoroughly test your pages on all different models of mobile devices before launching them.
By following these tips, you can surely materialize your lead generation pages as fully optimized mobile-friendly use, making it more likely that they will take the desired action to sign up.
Ignoring the Pain Points
While there is nothing wrong with showcasing the features and benefits of your products and services, you might be able to create more excellent value by removing any obstacles that limit them from moving to the next step of your sales funnel.
Customers come to you because they want to resolve their problems. These are what you call “pain points”, and you also need to address them. If you don’t highlight them, they will not be motivated to take your goals seriously and take any action.
And to better understand it, there are four primary categories of customer pain points:
Financial
The most common concern of customers is these pain points. It has something to do with customers experiencing financial strain because they feel like their current solution needs an excessive amount of money to attain. Some examples are membership fees, subscription plans, or repeat purchases that cost high.
Productivity
This pain point deals with efficiency problems as many consumers tend to shy away from complicated solutions. If they experience inconvenience in their buying process, such as if it takes too much time or while using the product, they would likely abandon it. The best way to resolve this is to offer a solution that balances convenience, time and comfort.
Process
This type of pain point occurs when a potential customer feels like they must make their internal processes more efficient. It also refers to how businesses interact using different methods and procedures.
Support
Customers who tend to feel that they haven’t been getting proper help during a sales process can relate to this pain point. It might include delayed reaction to customers, lack of knowledge about the product, and unavailability from the preferred channels. It could have a terrible effect on customer loyalty and retention.
Being able to explain your customer’s pain points can help you and your sales and marketing campaign. If you’re marketing, it will permit you to market your service properly in an appealing manner. If such focus is on your sales team, they can tailor their pitch and adjust it to realize your product or service is the right choice.
To summarize, here’s the complete list of the common mistakes businesses make when generating leads:
- Unclear Process of Qualifying Leads
- Inconsistent Lead Nurturing
- Overflowing Call To Action
- Not Leveraging the right Social Media Platform
- Only using one Lead Source
- Not Optimizing Pages for Mobile Use
- Ignoring the Pain Points
Conclusion
It’s undeniable that generating leads is a process that takes time and effort. By avoiding the common mistakes listed in this blog, you can improve your chances of success. Remember to focus on quality leads and always strive to provide value to your potential customers. For best results, invest in the right marketing team which you can outsource from The Lead Enquiry’s trusted service provider partners.
We hope this article has helped you understand what to and should not do in lead generation and has given you some ideas on improving your process.
