How to Avoid the Most Common Lead Generation Mistakes

You’re not alone in your lead generation struggles. Nearly 80% of leads don’t result in sales.

While you’re in good company, these mistakes are eating into your digital marketing budget.

Savvy marketers understand that lead generation isn’t a linear process. It’s a journey that takes various twists and turns before ending up at checkout.

How to Avoid the Most Common Lead Generation Mistakes

With a new approach to lead marketing, let’s analyze some common mistakes before taking the next step.

• Avoid Generating Leads at Random

Are you randomly generating leads without a purpose?

What do you plan to do with them once you’ve acquired their contact information?

You need a lead generation strategy before you hit the ground running. The strategy process starts with robust market research.

Market research produces a holistic lead profile, complete with geographical data, annual income, shopping behaviors, and more. This process is the same as creating a customer profile. However, you must identify your targets’ preferred communication channels.

What if you need to generate leads for a retirement insurance company?

Do your target leads prefer Instagram to phone calls? Probably not.

Instead, you would plan a lead generation strategy around cold-calling, email, and PPC advertising. Since more seniors own smartphones, you’ll have to optimize your strategy for mobile devices too.

• Lead Generation Requires Nurturing

Picture your lead as a houseplant.

First, you invest money to acquire the plant. Next, you place it in the window sill. However, the plant died within a few weeks.

What happened?

You forgot to water your plant. Similarly, leads drop off if you don’t nurture them.

Remember, lead generation isn’t linear since leads don’t travel a straight path. Thus, you need a lead generation funnel that captures leads at various stages.

• Lead Nurturing in Action

Suppose you’re generating interest in an upcoming gaming console. You create a sleek landing page and compelling social media campaign to generate a massive email contact list. You plan to promote the console when it’s ready.

After registering, your leads receive an exciting email hyping up the upcoming product. Soon, a week, month, and a year has flown by. Eventually, two years pass since that initial email.

Your console is ready to launch, but there’s a problem: half of your leads dropped off. Worse yet, a quarter of your leads forgot they signed up, prompting them to mark your emails as spam.

You didn’t nurture your leads just like you failed to water your plant.

• Lead Nurturing Ideas

Don’t send one email and run away. Engage your leads with valuable emails relevant to the launch.

For example, you could introduce the creative minds behind the console. Embed demo videos in your emails. Launch a beta program before the big launch.

Lead nurturing sustains interest and anticipation, leading to more social media mentions.

You can also use tools like canddi.com to collect on-page lead data, fine-tuning nurturing strategies in real-time.

• Attract Leads Who Take Action

Don’t just generate leads. Inspire them to buy!

Create a lead generation strategy that speaks to the customer journey. Use market research to understand your leads and maintain interest through consistent outreach.

Kick-start your new strategy today. Don’t forget to follow the blog for more inspiration.