Remember Susan Gale? She said the first step is always the hardest. I don’t know about other contexts, but in the marketing context, she’s totally right. A sales process is complicated and begins with generating leads. Your sales reps need qualified leads being served to show their competence.
Now despite there being so many workarounds and influencing skills for successful sales in place, lead generation is still largely unexplored. There’s no right strategy, and there’s no wrong strategy. There are only strategies, which work and which don’t.
Avoiding mistakes
My belief is the best way to get a clue of the right strategies is to avoid making mistakes. Mistakes are of different types; some are easy to avoid while some are not. I’ll discuss them in this article.
#Mistake 1: Pressurizing clients
In my fifteen years of experience as a digital marketer in Toronto, I’ve seen it on many occasions that lead generation is all about how you are approaching a potential client. If you can pursue a prospective lead to believe you can offer him the best service, the chances of closing the sale would go up.
Unfortunately, this is not what most marketers do. What they do instead hurt the sales prospect. They begin by showing off their past achievements – when the lead doesn’t leave a warm response, they resort to a coercing tone, which the lead finds annoying.
Always remember the pro-choice formula. Future clients should look at you as a suitable choice from a pool of choices. It shouldn’t be a compulsion for them.
#Mistake 2: Discarding a strategy quickly
This mistake occurs due to impatience and a predilection for shortcuts. Once you adopt a strategy, you should wait to see its end. Just because a strategy is not giving satisfactory result in the short term, doesn’t mean you should discard it.
The main problem with quickly abandoning a strategy is the resource and time you’ve spent to pad it out go to complete waste. You don’t want that, do you? Besides, when a strategy doesn’t work, it implicates there was something wrong with its application or with the strategy itself. To find out the real reason, you need to continue applying it.
Sticking to the strategy is a win-win situation for you. In the long run, the strategy might yield favorable outcomes. If it doesn’t, then you could at least figure out the shortcomings, and work on them. In case you are losing out on revenue, go for A/B testing. The alternative version of the site could fetch you an impressive ROI.
#Mistake 3: Landing page integration
It’s hard to identify this as a mistake. Everybody in the industry knows the importance of a landing page and the CTA buttons on it. To pull in sufficient numbers of qualified leads, they work on the landing page. Their work includes designing the landing page, customizing the page in accordance with the product/service on offer, and putting attractive call-to-action buttons on it. But many of them don’t integrate the page with other crucial pages on the website.
That’s a grave mistake. Interlinking gives your landing page remarkable visibility. You could save a truckload of money if you link the landing page to individual blog posts, especially the ones that generate huge shares. Embed links with videos because multimedia content can trigger sharing. Make sure the landing page link is naturally inserted. As you link the landing page to other pages, site visitors move to the landing page from those pages, resulting in an increased retention rate.
#Mistake 4: Not knowing the audiences
For a successful lead generation strategy, knowing the audience is a must. Broad messages are often untargeted. The campaigns, which deliver such messages fall flat on the ground, and the marketers end up sitting in a facepalm mode.
The advantage of sending targeted messages is the ROI. You know which message will hit whom. AdWords is not of help because ad snippets will always be clicked by people, who won’t purchase. To be able to send targeted messages, you need to know your audiences. That’s possible only through data, which custom tools for analytics can provide you.
If you want to go on a deeper level, beyond mundane details such as demographics and bounce rate, take site visitors seriously, interact with them and insist them to leave comments. Their comments can help you know them better. Newsletter subscription and email marketing are two other viable ways to increase the headcounts of audiences, with whom you are familiar. If it’s a strictly B2B marketing scenario, then business summits, industrial conferences and webinars can be of help.
When you avoid them
You’ll notice a change in your lead generation results. Don’t expect the change to occur overnight. It may be slow, but it will be steady.
