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Lead generation is a primary marketing goal for almost any business, yet many companies struggle to find a way to actively produce high-quality leads through their websites. Here are some of the most common mistakes we come across:
Not focusing on the buyer persona’s need
It can be easy to focus on the features of your company’s product or service, but if you aren’t writing content that shows how you understand your buyer persona’s needs and how your solution solves their problems, you will never be able to create a strong connection with your potential customers and be lost in the noise of their research.
Any content that you create for your website should be written with a specific buyer persona in mind. If you haven’t taken the time to produce a full buyer persona, your marketing will suffer. Buyer personas allow you to dig deeper into who you are targeting. From what drives their decision-making process, to the format of the content they prefer, you can gather so much insight from a detailed buyer persona you really cannot afford to skip this step of your marketing strategy.
Not creating content for each stage of the buyer’s journey
Take a look at the conversion paths you have across your website, do you have a way of capturing leads during their awareness and consideration stages of the buyer’s journey or are they all decision stage “speak to our sales team/get in touch” call-to-actions?
The majority of visitors to your website will be in the research stage of their buyer’s journey, looking for information about their problem and ways to solve it – but if all your content is pushing your solution for a problem they may not fully understand yet, they will become overwhelmed and move onto the next Google result.
By understanding the questions that your buyer personas are asking at each stage of the buyer’s journey you can help educate them through their decision process, allowing them to see how your company understands their needs and create a connection with them before they even know they need your solution.
By doing this effectively, you can create content offers for each stage of your buyer’s journey with tools or templates that help with the initial problems and capture these leads much earlier on and nurture them into highly qualified leads for your sales team through email automation and retargeting.
Not nurturing leads
You have done the hard work of capturing leads, but what are you doing with all this data?
Sending the occasional email blast or attempted follow-up call isn’t going to cut it. Email automation is such a powerful tool for helping guide leads through to sales qualified leads without manual intervention and can make a huge impact on your lead to customer conversion rates.
In the fast-paced world we live in, users do not want to wait 24 hours for a manual reply for a brochure request. Email automation allows you to instantly follow up on content download requests and then trickle further educational content direct to their inbox, driving them towards the next step you wish them to take.
Not using dedicated landing pages
Creating well designed, targeted landing pages are essential for any business that wishes to generate leads through their website. Not only does it allow you to remove any distractions, such as the website navigation, it also allows you to be completely focused on the action you would like the user to take, be it a content offer download or get in touch form. By creating dedicated landing pages you can tailor your messaging to the buyer persona’s needs and their problem you are addressing to allow for a smooth conversion path.
The average conversion rate for a website will typically be 2%; however, landing pages convert at 20% – so if you are relying on a sidebar form fill out on a blog or footer forms alone to drive leads through your website, moving to dedicated landing pages could be a quick win to increase your lead generation without increasing your traffic.
Not following landing page best practices
You don’t need to reinvent the wheel to produce effective landing pages. There are some tried and tested features you should start with for predictable results. Do a quick check of your landing pages and see if:
- There is a clear heading, stating directly who your offer is for and the benefits of downloading the content offer
- The copy of the landing page is easy to scan, with bullet points and white spacing
- There is one clear call-to-action for the user to take
- The form is above the fold and encapsulated to help it stand out on the page
- The form length reflects the value of the content they will receive
Not optimising for mobile
Some B2B businesses may be under the impression that users will only be visiting the website on desktops, you are selling to other businesses after all, but ignoring the movement to mobile-first design can cost your website dearly. From a user perspective, any website that hasn’t been optimised for mobile will instantly feel dated and can harm the perception of your business in seconds, let alone the impact it has in your Google rankings.
Not conveying credibility on your event registration page
Events are a great way for B2B businesses to generate leads, however, if you aren’t communicating why your business is a thought leader and expert in the topic area, why would anyone give up their time to attend?
Simply showing the face of your speakers with a short bio that conveys your qualifications and expertise can really help to provide credibility to your event. Using quotes from previous attendees for social proof and also including a sense of urgency will all help to improve your sign up rates.
Not optimising your website’s top pages for lead generation
If you aren’t looking at the top performing pages of your website and analysing the conversion paths to optimise these high-traffic pages for lead generation you’ll be suffering from a “leaky bucket”. Driving high-quality traffic is no easy feat, so be sure to make the most of the pages with the highest traffic by having very clear call-to-action to what you want the user to do next.
Not using pop-ups
When pop-ups are used effectively, they can be an amazing lead generation tool for your website. Start with a newsletter or blog subscription pop up on your blog and start testing different content offers on specific pages to start capturing more leads with minimal effort.
Investing in the wrong marketing channels
It can be very tempting to throw money at a lead generation problem, but switching on paid search or social ads isn’t always the solution. If you haven’t done enough research into the content that will resonate with your buyer personas, you can end up wasting money on the wrong keywords or wrong marketing channels, which can be a very costly mistake.
Another mistake we often see is not looking at the cost per acquisition through to the customer. You may be getting cheap cost per leads through Facebook advertising for example, but if none of these leads then go on to become customers its important to stop and reevaluate your targeting and messaging to produce higher qualified leads with your budget.
This also goes for purchasing leads, a favourite traditional B2B marketing lead generation technique. By measuring the conversion rate of these leads and resources invested in following these up, you can see the true ROI of this tactic. By following an inbound marketing strategy you will be able to drive a higher quality of leads for your business at a fraction of the cost and reduce the time your sales team have to make cold calls.
Not optimising campaigns
The final mistake we often see is a heavy reliance on short marketing campaigns which can be a huge resource sink. The time and investment to produce a new marketing campaign can be costly and if this is only for a short time period it can be difficult for marketers to conclude any learnings. By looking to create more evergreen campaigns, again focusing on the pain points of your buyer personas, you can have a number of campaigns running at any one time consistently capturing high-quality leads and can be optimised and updated regularly in less time than starting from scratch every quarter.
If any of these mistakes sound familiar, now’s your chance to make a change. By reviewing your lead generation strategy you can start to see any gaps and implement some best practices that will help you start saving time and producing higher quality leads to grow your business.
Ready to take the next step? We help B2B business create high performing lead generation strategies that convert through our proven growth formula. Book a call today to find out more:
