Are You Making These Lead Generation Mistakes? Here's What You Should Avoid

Proper lead generation is imperative to business success. Although challenges make it complex, there are ways to overcome them to generate quality leads.
Reading time: 6 minutes

It is one thing to focus on bringing traffic to your website, but it is another matter when converting the traffic into quality leads. You can have a lot of traffic on your website, but it is no use if you cannot convert them into sales-qualifying leads. 

Having a great lead generation strategy should be at the very core of every business. After all, it’s one of the key components to keeping your sales pipeline full and making sales. 

However, many marketers (about 61%) rank lead generation as their number one challenge. They don’t know where their leads are coming from, they aren’t generating qualified leads, or they aren’t even generating leads.

These are just some common mistakes marketers make when generating leads. Let’s dive deeper into more lead generation mistakes and how you can fix them.

Contents

Lead generation mistakes you need to avoid

Mistake 1: Poor product-market fit

Before you invest tons of money into marketing efforts to generate leads, ask yourself if your product satisfies the targeted market. 

Product market fit is all about knowing who your target audience is and whether your product is able to provide value and solve their problems.

🔨 The fix: Know what you are selling, what you are not, and who your targeted market is. Basically, know your product inside and out. Make sure your product is a strong fit for the market before you ramp up your lead generation efforts. If not, your returns will be fatally low. 

Mistake 2: You’re not generating leads organically

The act of purchasing contact lists is easy and tempting, especially if you’ve been struggling to generate leads. However, it is not encouraged to do so because you’ll end up doing long-term damage to your company. 

Here are some reasons why buying leads aren’t a good idea

  • You’ll waste time making random cold calls to people who aren’t even a right fit for your business
  • Having low conversion rates can take a toll on your SDRs and decrease their productivity
  • Sending emails to leads from purchased lists can harm your email deliverability 
  • Leads from such lists will most likely flag you as spam

Nothing good comes easy. You have to generate your leads organically — these leads must want to hear from you. 

🔨 The fix: To keep your pipeline filled with leads, you need to give them a reason to opt-in. You can do so through gated content or webinars. Use lead capture software to collect these leads’ information so you can nurture them and convert them into customers.

Mistake 3: Using one approach for all your products

If your company has several different products that serve various purposes, you should have a customized approach for each one. 

There is no one-size-fits-all approach for all your products that works for effective lead generation. Furthermore, each product will have different product roadmaps and growths.

🔨 The fix: Craft different marketing strategies for each product — this automatically means that lead generation efforts would differ from product to product.

Mistake 4: You’re not optimizing blog content

Optimizing blog content doesn’t just mean SEO

People who visit your website can be at any stage of the sales journey. Some would be at the awareness stage, some at the buying stage, and some might not even be aware they have a problem that you can solve.

That said, if you adopt a singular approach to your blog content, like having only bottom-of-the-funnel content with CTAs everywhere, you’re not targeting those who are still learning about their problem. 

🔨 The fix: Include a mix of top-of-the-funnel, middle-of-the-funnel, and pain point content with just the right amount of CTAs. The aim of your blog content should be to educate your audience and give them all the information they need so that they wouldn’t even think twice about signing up for your product or service.

Mistake 5: Not making use of lead generation tools

With the ever-evolving technology, tons of lead generation tools can help complement your marketing efforts. 

Are you able to track where your leads came from? What did keyword did they search for before landing on your page? What pages are they looking at on your website?

All these questions you have can be answered if you invested in lead generation tools — and we’re talking about online forms, click-to-call widgets, and even call tracking software.

🔨 The fix: The bottom line is that most companies underestimate the power of using lead generation tools. And, finding the right mix of such tools can even take your lead generation to the next level.  

On another note, automating your sales processes is essential so that your team can focus on other tasks and get things done faster. It all boils down to knowing how best to leverage technology to help you.

Mistake 6: You take your leads’ pain points for granted

More often than not, marketers focus on what they think is most important — promoting and marketing your products or services. 

While that’s not wrong, many often get carried away with that until they seemingly miss small but tell-tale signs of what truly troubles your leads. When you do so, you shoot yourself in the foot by not addressing the important things that matter to them.

🔨 The fix: Powerful lead generation comes from acknowledging, understanding, and addressing what troubles your audience. Once you pique their interests, stay on point with continuous marketing and email nurturing efforts. 

Simply put, never lose sight of your leads’ pain points throughout the sales journey, and you will find more quality leads. 

Mistake 7: Not leveraging the right social media platform

Social media has massive exposure, and this is why marketers use social media to help generate traffic and leads. Platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn are widely used and effective social media channels to generate leads. 

Unfortunately, some marketers think that social media isn’t effective in generating leads — and that’s because they’re using the wrong platforms

The emphasis here is on not using the correct social media platform(s). 

For example, if you’re targeting B2B leads, there will be more success on Facebook and LinkedIn as opposed to Pinterest and Instagram.

And if your target audience consists of mainly young adults, Instagram and TikTok would make great channels for exposure.

You get the gist. 

🔨 The fix: It’s all about finding out who your target audience is and where they frequent. Do your research to find out the type of content they like to see and how you’ll be able to get their attention and direct them to your landing page. 

Also, leverage any existing features offered by the social media platform. For example, adding a click-to-call button on your Facebook Ads, or a ‘message’ button on your Instagram profile.

Mistake 8: Not making proper use of lead generation forms

There is a fine line between having a lead capture form that is overly long and one that’s overly short. Many think that the more concise the form is, the better — because your readers would not have to think twice to fill it up. 

Well yes, you end up with many leads, but the quality of the answers is in question.  

Although having a longer lead generation form will give you a smaller pool of leads, you’ll know that those who answer are quality leads. That’s because they’re willing to spend time to fill-up the form. 

But you’ll only have a handful of them and it’s not sustainable in the long run.

🔨 The fix: It’s not to say that shorter forms will only generate bad leads, and longer forms will only generate good leads. That said, find the right balance so you get a reasonable tradeoff between the quantity and quality of your generated leads. 

Also, rope in your sales team to discuss relevant questions you should be including in these forms. 

Last but not least, bear in mind that your audience is concerned about their privacy. After all, you are collecting data about them. You have to convince them that the gathered information is solely for your marketing purposes. Make this clear.

Mistake 9: Not using your budget wisely

Every company sets aside a certain amount to work with for marketing purposes. Whether you have a small sum to work with or a never-ending budget, you should spend your budget wisely. 

Don’t spend too much on one channel, because you’re not maximizing your lead generation efforts. On the other hand, you shouldn’t spread your resources out too thinly on many channels. You’ll end up with very little everywhere, which will not help you draw any meaningful conclusions. 

🔨 The fix: Pinpoint effective channels and invest in them, but don’t neglect the rest. For example, if you’ve been generating lots of leads from LinkedIn, pump more budget into that platform, while still setting some money aside for Facebook Ads.

By investing more in channels that work for you, and still allocating budget to new territories, this gives you better insight into what definitely ‘sticks’ for your business and still casts a wide net to generate leads from elsewhere.

What’s next?

In a perfect world, leads would be easy to come by and conversion rates are sky-high. Unfortunately, the reality is that we have to be patient, sow our seeds in the right soil, and water them diligently for them to grow.

Also, as we’ve covered in this article, many successful lead generation strategies require balance. Too much of a good thing is still a bad thing. 

We hope that this article has helped you understand some of the common lead generation mistakes many marketers are making. Whether or not you’ve made any of these mistakes, what’s important is to learn from them. 

If you’d like to see more sales and marketing tips, check out our blog!

Picture of Jason Chow
Jason Chow

Jason has spent over seven years as an Outreach Manager. He loves building relationships with new people and that’s helped him form a strong network of companies, website owners, freelancers, and entrepreneurs.

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