Your lead generation strategy is at the core of your sales funnel. If you use Convertful, you are aware of how leads matter for most businesses – especially B2B.
But nothing is easy when it comes to getting and nurturing leads. Quite often, companies that should have known better fall into these common lead generation mistakes that we’re going to talk about a few common lead generation mistakes – and how to avoid them.
Top 9 Worst Lead Generation Mistakes
Not Ensuring Product-Market Fit
Product-Market Fit means that there is a need for your product in the market, i. e., your product solves a real issue that affects a group of people (your target audience). If your product doesn’t match your target audience, no matter how good your advertising is, it’s going to be very difficult to get leads.
This is, however, a common failure in lead generation. Many products are built and only afterwards do the creators consider the needs of the target audience. Before you start developing a product, listen to your target audience on social media, forums, and anywhere else they hang out. Then, start building for the public, and not for yourself.
Building products that your target audience needs will improve your lead generation and your sales.
Buying Contact Lists
When starting out your lead generation strategy, it’s tempting to buy a contact list. After all, it’s a lot faster than building it yourself over time, right?
Well, not really. Bought contact lists are not created with the best interest of the consumers in mind. You’ll find that by purchasing a list, most of your readers will mark you as spam, because they don’t know your product and are not interested.
Buying a list can jeopardize your whole lead generation strategy: if you land in spam very often, or make a first send with a lot of those contacts, your deliverability will be affected.
You need to avoid landing on spam at all costs, as once you do, it’s an uphill battle to fix it. The more your readers mark your emails as spam, the more your new emails will land directly in spam before your readers even see them.
So, build your contact list slowly with an opt-in on your website, or other kinds of ads. You can create all sorts of opt-in screens, pop ups, and more, using Convertful.
Building a contact list organically, and sending to small lists at first, is the best way to go if you want to avoid this huge lead generation mistake.
Using The Same Tactics For Different Products
While your products might be similar, they are going to have different features that distinguish them. These make them appealing to different audiences.
When communicating with different audiences, you should set different lead magnets according to their interests and goals.
Lead magnets are offers that can be created to incite website visitors to sign up for your email marketing. Common offers are discount codes, ebooks and other media content… you can use many tactics to convert website visitors into leads. Just make sure that you’re offering something relevant to that niche and it should work.
Not Using Opt-Ins Properly
Opt-in forms are the best way to attract leads and, if used correctly, can help you increase your sales. A common mistake is to use a random form without taking into account your target audience and the action you want them to take.
Convertful offers you many options, from welcome mats to gamification opt-ins, from gated content to simple pop ups… Think about how you would like to be approached if you were your customers. What attracts them? What are their interests?
Using your opt-in properly is the top tip we can give you for lead generation. Of course, you should A/B test. You can do that within the Convertful platform too!
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Failing To Understand Sales Funnels
When creating content, it’s important to focus on a specific stage of the sales funnel. Users who just found out about your brand want more information about your product – don’t show them content that is fully geared into conversion, or full of “Buy Now” buttons. This approach will likely put the customer off.
At the same time, when a customer is ready to buy, make it easy for them. Take that content and put it in as simple terms as possible.
It is important to optimize your lead generation content for each step of the sales funnel. This will improve your sales process and make it easy to nurture leads.
Ignoring Lead Generation Tools & Analytics
To perform well on lead generation, having the right tool is essential. Convertful allows you to set up opt-ins for lead generation, with many different options that allow you to choose the look and content of your lead acquisition forms.
Convertful can also help you by offering data about your lead acquisition performance: which opt-in works better? How can you maximize clicks? And how many of the clicks resulted in subscriptions?
You can also use A/B testing to see which one of your opt-ins had better results. This, coupled with analytics data, will allow you to improve your offer and avoid or minimize common lead generation mistakes.
Misunderstanding Customer Needs
Your customer pain points should guide your work, especially when it comes to lead generation. If you misunderstand customer needs, you might find yourself trying unsuccessfully to sell a product that doesn’t fix anything for its target audience.
When designing your lead acquisition process, remember to ask your target audience: what is your main struggle? How does your product help users fix it? Focusing on these 2 questions will help you design your lead generation strategy.
Don’t lose sight of these indicators. Your customers’ pain point is what drives them to your solution.
Ignoring Social Media Conversations
More often than not, your target audience will hang out on social media – including LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Reddit…
In order to complement your lead generation efforts on your website and landing pages, social media can give you the key to solving customer issues.
Hang out where your target audience is. Talk to them, exchange ideas to solve their issues, and put out features that match common complaints and/or interests. Wherever your customers are talking about products like yours, this is where you should be.
Not Planning A Set Budget
This one is a mistake that can happen in any marketing channel, but it bears repeating as it is quite important when going for lead generation.
You need to draw your plan, including how much you can spend on each channel and the expected results. Having decided that, you can start your lead generation campaign. Plan your budget according to the channels you’re going to use, and test it often. Maybe some channels need more investing and some could do with less.
Lead generation does not have to be expensive. If you start using Convertful today, you get a free trial for your first opt-in.
Wrapping Up
As is the case with each marketing channel, you need to test and iterate frequently in order to fine tune your practices for each user group. Your opt-ins can always be improved, just like your landing page or email sequences.
In order to avoid these nine lead generation mistakes, the main advice we can give you is to listen to your audience and create lead magnets that match their interests and needs.
Start building only after you know which problem you are going to solve, and not the other way around. You should also build in public, which will make it easier for you to set up a lead generation strategy according to constant feedback.
What do you think? Did we forget anything? You can always use the comment box, or find us on Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn.
How Can Convertful Help You?
Convertful is a lead generation tool that you can use to create forms, optins, popups and more. The templates are easy to use and you can edit them as much as you want to match the look of your website. Try it today!
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