Most businesses are making multiple mistakes in regards to their lead generation marketing online. In this article we explore 10 of the most common website lead generation mistakes.
Most businesses need to generate leads online, this is especially true in the B2B sector where the majority of businesses have a longer sales cycle and use their websites to generate important inbound leads for their sales team.
1. Spending on marketing activities that don’t generate ROI
In truth most businesses don’t even measure the return-on-investment (ROI) of their marketing activities accurately. So naturally they spend on marketing activities that don’t generate ROI because they don’t know which marketing activities are actually generating the revenue. Even if they are measuring the leads being generated it is quite rare that the tracking goes all the way through to the revenue generated. Get this right and you’ll have an insight that most don’t and a real competitive advantage.
2. Expecting results with no clear call-to-action
It is surprising how many websites are missing this basic element of good website and landing page design. Website visitors need things very clearly spelled out to them. A clear call-to-action is essential in getting good results from your website, so make sure your calls to action (CTAs) are clear enough.
3. Not collecting the right information
You can’t have a good inbound lead generation campaign if you are not collecting the right information. Make sure you have planned what information you need to collect to be able to be able to assess your leads accurately. Then work out how you'll collect it without putting your leads off.
4. Treating every lead equally
This point leads on neatly from point 3. Treating every lead equally is a waste of your sales teams resources. Some leads are never going to be right to buy your product or services. Others will be right, but are not at the right point in their buying cycle or buying journey to buy from you. You need to collect the right information, so that leads can be scored and treated accordingly.
5. Trying to collect too much information at once
Trying to collect too much information at once is a sure-fire way of putting people off submitting their information. You need to get the balance right. You'll need to collect enough information to be able to assess your leads, but not so much that you put the lead off completing the form.
Progressive profiling is a great solution to this, requesting more information from prospects over multiple downloads to progressively build out their information and understand their sales readiness.
6. Relying on one tactic only
From Google Adwords to SEO, many businesses build up their reliance on a single tactic. It is really important for multiple reasons to build a series of channels that are delivering results for your business. For example if your business is reliant on SEO and suddenly Google changes its algorithms and you are no longer on the front page of Google for your most important key phrases - your leads will dry up.
Likewise Google Adwords may be generating great results for you, but if the prices rise steeply you may be priced out of the market. Ideally you’ll invest in and understand multiple supporting channels. When you get SEO, pay per click, PR, social, content and email marketing all working in combination you’ll have a much more robust marketing programme and more leads to boot.
7. Poor implementation
From design to message if you have poor tactical implementation of your lead generation strategy you won’t get the same level of results that you would if all the elements are implemented correctly. It is common that companies don’t employ the right level of design and creative and don’t realise the significance of this on the results that they are achieving.
8. Failing to nurture leads
If a lead is not ready to buy, they will often be dropped by the sales team. If you calculate the cost of acquiring this lead in the first place, dropping it is a costly decision. Dropping the lead back in to the marketing cycle to nurture the potential customer until they are sales ready is a much more cost effective way of dealing it. Especially when compared with the dropping the opportunity altogether. With marketing automation tools, lead nurturing is now achievable for every business. If you aren’t doing it - you should be.
9. Not communicating your value in your marketing
You’d be surprised how often this is missed. Businesses get hung up communicating their features from great customer service, to the highest powered processor. What they fail to properly communicate is the value that these features deliver to the customer. To get your lead generation working at the level it should be, you need to make sure that you are communicating your value in your marketing.
10. Not measuring, testing and refining
More often than not the lead generation campaign and website is set-up to run then its left without an ongoing cycle of measuring, testing and refining. Lead generation techniques can always be improved, they’ll also be cyclical and affected by competitors activities. A cycle of measurement, testing and refinement is essential to keep improving results and also to recognise both internal and external factors that may be affecting your lead generation activities. It is important that you make this follow-up part of any lead generation campaign that you run.
If any of these mistakes sound familiar - download our Ebook below that gives you 30 tips to increase the leads from your website and digital marketing.
