Top 5 Lead Generation Mistakes You Need To Avoid

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Top 5 Lead Generation Mistakes You Need To Avoid

Your lead generation strategy plays a huge role in successfully marketing your brand. In the highly competitive online marketplace, showcasing your products and services may be difficult, particularly if your business lacks a healthy online presence. Unfortunately, too many companies fall short due to poorly structured lead generation campaigns.

Here are the top five mistakes that you should avoid when developing your lead-gen strategy.

1. Ignoring Prospects’ Needs While Promoting Products

Does your product or service address a particular pain point? Does it meet consumers’ demands? If so, then that’s all well and good, but promoting the product by focusing on its features instead of prospects’ or customers’ wants and needs is a huge waste of time, money and effort.

People seek to purchase your product or service because it will likely solve their problems. To increase your leads — and ultimately sales — So to sure to concentrate your marketing efforts on your prospects’ pain points by demonstrating how your product or service adds value by curing them. Then continue to emphasize this message throughout every phase of the buying process.

2. Spending on Inefficient Lead Generation Activities

Overspending on advertising to generate brand awareness among the public — instead of your ideal audience — is an inefficient use of your marketing budget. “General awareness” ads may look nice, but they rarely result in a decent return on investment.

Instead, aim to acquire qualified traffic and leads by developing customer profiles based on your current buyers’ characteristics. Next, target this audience — where they are — with me then, a target that meets their specific challenges.

Spreading a limited budget among a variety of marketing channels is not an effective strategy, either. Not only are you unable to compare results between vastly different channels, but you may not be able to invest enough in each channel to collect an amount of data sufficient to make meaningful decisions for the future.

3. Neglecting to Optimize Top Web Pages for Lead Gen

Not all website pages are created equal. Do your homework to determine the pages through which visitors enter your website in the greatest numbers, then optimize these pages for leads. These will probably include your home page, important landing pages, product description, and optimized blog posts.

Write high-quality, relevant, and easy-to-read content that addresses your prospects’ concerns and shows how your product or service helps solve their problems. Include pertinent keywords and always provide a clear call-to-action (CTA) to get the user to take the desired course of action (such as filling out a form, requesting information, subscribing, or trying a product).

4. Omitting the Calls-to-Action That Generate Leads

CTAs generate leads by asking people to take action. Talking about how your product or service can help prospects without asking them to do anything generally results in them doing nothing. This is a missed opportunity. A relevant call-to-action that promises something of value in exchange for filling out a form or providing an email address helps you collect information while communicating your unique selling points.

Use CTAs to direct website visitors to pages that promote e-books, case studies, free demos and more. Provide your target audience access to downloadable white papers, articles or webinars in exchange for providing an email address or phone number. Offer free consultations or evaluations that necessarily require an email or physical address and/or phone number.

5. Mishandling or Failing to Follow Up on Sales Leads

Are you working with your sales team to define and manage leads? Together, you should set criteria for qualified leads and establish methods for converting them into sales. Problems arise when leads are ignored or managed poorly, and follow-up is neglected. Additionally, focusing on short-term leads while failing to nurture long-term leads means lost sales and reduced profits.

Be sure to develop a good record-keeping system so sales reps can clearly review outstanding leads, dates of their last contacts and other information. Encourage your sales team to designate certain days or times for following up with prospects so this task doesn’t get lost in the day-to-day minutiae.


Aaron WittersheimAUTHOR BIO

Aaron Wittersheim is Chief Operating Officer at Straight North, an Internet marketing agency. He has helped startups, middle-market firms, and Fortune 500 companies improve organizational structure and grow through his expertise in process conception, task automation, and internal project management.

Top 5 Lead Generation Mistakes You Need To Avoid

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