Everyone makes mistakes. It’s only natural. Over the course of your life, you’re going to miss crucial work deadlines, forget your significant other’s birthday (good luck making up for that one), and send texts to the wrong person (always makes for an awkward situation). Humans are imperfect; there’s no getting around it.
But when it comes to your lead generation strategy, you can’t really afford to make mistakes, or at least not too often. After all, leads are the cornerstone of any thriving business. A powerful lead generation strategy will spark interest in your products or services and boost sales.
To help you drive traffic to your website and generate qualified leads, we’re laying out four common lead generation mistakes and how you can avoid them.
Mistake #1: Content Doesn't Resonate With Your Target Audience
Content can either boost your lead generation or halt progress entirely. Blogs, emails, white papers, guides, and other content forms should answer your potential customers’ questions and help them make informed buying decisions. You should create targeted, relevant, and compelling content that speaks to prospects’ concerns and covers their topics of interest. If your content doesn’t resonate with your target audience, your website won’t have the stickiness and appeal it requires for a healthy and robust leads pipeline.
If you want to form a connection with your target audience through content, you need to gain a deeper understanding of your ideal customers. Your sales team can help you discover what your potential customers need and want. Pick their brain about their recent conversations with prospects and the pain points, fears, interests, motivations, complaints and success stories they’ve uncovered.
Use all of this gathered data to create and enrich your buyer personas. Buyer personas - or fictional representations of your ideal customers based on real data and market research on your existing customers - enable you to create content that is more relatable and impactful. As you think of future blog topics, social media posts, and email workflows, always keep your buyer personas top of mind and make sure your content delivers significant value to them.
Mistake #2: You Want Something for Nothing
Life would be grand if your contacts handed over their contact information, made a purchase and became customers for life without you having to do anything. But that’s not how marketing works (we’ll keep holding our breath though).
If you want a potential customer to provide their email address, phone number, favorite flavor of ice cream, or what have you, you have to give them something of value in return. If you don’t, you’ll get nothing.
Whether it’s a webinar, white paper, case study or a video of a cartwheeling rabbit (we’d so watch that), offer your prospects something for free. It can be anything, as long as it delivers significant value to your ideal customer (don’t forget to keep those buyer personas in mind when developing your offer).
Mistake #3: You Ask For Too Much Information
On a first date, you wouldn’t want to be badgered for personal information or hear any of these dreaded questions:
- Where do you see this going?
- How many kids are you thinking of having?
- Would you marry me?
The same goes for your marketing efforts. Asking for too much information right off the bat can scare away potential customers and hurt your lead generation. Start off slowly and ask for the bare essentials: their name, email address, phone number, and maybe even their job or location. Once you’ve generated and nurtured a qualified lead, gained their trust, and convinced them to keep coming back for more content, then, and only then, ask for more information.
Mistake #4: You Suffer From An Overabundance of CTAs
We’ve all been in that tough spot at a restaurant, trying to decide whether we should order the filet mignon or the chicken fried chicken (or is that just me?). Too many choices can cause indecision, confusion and frustration - all emotions you don’t want your potential customers feeling when they’re reading your blog post, email or any content at all.
Presenting too many choices leads to customer paralysis. Should they try your free demo, schedule a consultation, view your product list, or ignore all of the above actions and check out your competitor’s site which is far less intimidating?
Avoid this scenario and limit the number of CTAs on any given page. Choose a primary CTA and possibly a secondary CTA, but refrain from going overboard. Your potential customers like variety but too many options could convince them to look elsewhere.
We can all agree lead generation is pretty darn important. If you want to have a successful and lucrative business, you need leads...and scores of them. Supercharge your sales lead pipeline by avoiding these mistakes and place yourself one step closer to turning those prospects into customers.
