Marketers spend half of their budgets on lead generation. That’s why budget allocation for anything that can lead to more conversion-worthy leads is important and on the rise.
Aiding in this quest are plenty of tools and applications in the market, helping businesses in building good quality targeted leads. But mistakes can be made during the process that can affect the results of a lead generation campaign. This could occur no matter how young, old, small or big a company/business may be.
To avoid rookie mistakes, we’ve compiled the five most common mistakes when doing lead generation:
1. Leads aren’t being generated organically
Do you buy contacts?
If so, stop now! Buying contacts is never a good idea. Along with affecting the performance of your emails, you’re also harming the reputation of your brand.
What needs to be done?
Build organic lists!
While it may not be easy, the purpose of lead generation is to generate quality leads by building a list of people who are genuinely interested in your company and your services. You can then nurture those leads and increase your sales once you have a list of quality leads.
Solution:
Plain and simple, your leads must opt-in. In other words, your contacts choose to provide you with their information in exchange for something valuable, such as a content offer, a webinar, or an event.
Make offers that your target audience will find valuable, and then package that value and place it behind a lead capture form.
It takes time to build a healthy, opt-in email list, but it pays off handsomely in the long run. Make sure you create compelling email content once you have people to email so people will want to open and stay subscribed to your emails.
2. Content that doesn’t provide value
B2B lead generation systems continue to face content challenges. Marketers tend to have difficulty mastering the art of creating content that is relevant, engaging, and profoundly applicable.
Users’ requirements are constantly changing, contributing to this difficulty. Content-driven businesses typically do not ensure that their content resonates well with their readers.
Many marketers fail to check the performance of their campaign before sending out another similar piece of content. This sloppiness will discourage imminent clients from trying your brand, which will result in leads dropping out instead of moving forward.
Solution:
Simple content tweaks can positively impact lead conversion rates and actively move prospects toward taking the next step. If you monitor your content regularly, you will be able to identify pages with low performance and optimize or replace them.
You can accomplish this in two simple ways:
- Measurements should be integrated directly into the pipeline process. By utilizing such tools, marketers can create high-quality content that is more effective at converting prospects.
- Take advantage of programming tools that provide insight into your existing customer base. By knowing which content converts your reader, what pain points needs to be addressed, and what can entice them, you can create more effective content.
3. The leads you generate are not segmented
Having as many leads as possible is great, but keep in mind that a smart, laser-focused approach is just as important. If you segment your leads and approach them with more relevant messages and offers, you will get better results and more conversions.
The stats will reflect a lack of segmentation. Emails that lack personalization do not receive as many open and read rates as those that are segmented.
Solution:
You need to enrich your list to segment. Start by creating basic segments. To illustrate how you can segment your leads, here are a few examples:
- Geographically: Lists can be segmented by regions, cities, or countries. If you want to reflect on cultural differences, you can modify your email copy, or you can simply deliver your message according to the time zone.
- Based on company size: Various messages are appropriate to reach out to companies at the small, medium, and enterprise levels. Remember that one-man companies have a smaller budget and much different needs and desires than larger companies.
You can create deeper and more sophisticated segments once you are familiar with basic segmentation. Once you start segmenting your leads, you will see a higher open, click-through and conversion rate.
4. You don’t use the best lead generation tools
Do you know who the people are who visit your website? If they get there, what do they do, or what do they do before and after certain actions? If you aren’t able to answer these questions, then you won’t be able to connect with the people who visit your site or learn what resonates with them.
You can and should answer these questions, but you need the right tools to do so. Your website visitors can be converted into leads by using some excellent tools out there.
Solution:
The trick is finding the right combination of tools that will give you the most insight and the most value for your dollar. You can create a variety of lead generation assets to put on your site with a variety of tools and templates available online.
5. Insufficient follow-up
This mistake is made by most B2B companies. Frequently, B2B marketers ignore the prospects that have already transitioned through the sales pipeline in favour of acquiring new leads.
In the past, this slow or inadequate follow-up was fine. It was acceptable earlier to respond to a lead in three or four days and to prepare a quote in a week.
It has been a long time since those days. B2B companies today provide much better customer service. Customer expectations have risen as a result. Due to this, even old-school B2B professionals need to evolve and start responding quickly to leads. Without this, qualified leads will be lost.
Solution:
Make sure your team follows up on every lead consistently. Contact leads regularly to guarantee that you remain at the top of their minds throughout. Following up with leads as they move down the funnel can be automated using marketing and sales tools.
If you do this, you will never miss an opportunity. Companies that follow up within five minutes of receiving a lead are likely to succeed.
Conclusion
B2B industries place too much emphasis on lead generation. For it to underperform, it represents a significant portion of their marketing budget.
It’s worth taking a closer look at each pieces of your marketing campaigns, no matter where you are in the process. Understanding the common mistakes may help you improve your marketing.