Lead generation is a vital component of your marketing strategy. Because this marketing process entails capturing and stimulating people’s interest in a specific product or service to develop a sales pipeline. So from helping you boost brand awareness to increasing your company’s bottom line, generating quality traffic plays a crucial role in the B2B marketing process.
Yet, at the same time, this process is considered a key pain point for most businesses around the world. The abundance of digital touchpoints and continually increasing competition complicates the process of identifying, tracking, and engaging with potential clients. However, things aren’t as bad as they might seem at first glance. By implementing a B2B lead generation strategy and avoiding a couple of common mistakes, your company can survive the challenge.
1. Not targeting the right people
It can be challenging to pinpoint who are your customers and whether those target personas are the people visiting your website. Therefore, many companies will cast a wide net and hope to catch as many fish as possible. But by targeting everyone, you’re effectively targeting no one.
To avoid spray marketing, get super clear on potential buyers by creating and working with buyer personas. These identities are not final and can be further refined by analysing data pertaining to your website visitors and campaign results. But by taking such a simple and repeatable action before launching any initiative, your company can generate more leads of value.
For example, many companies are targeting decision-makers across various organisations. However, such a broad term can include many positions, departments and people. By ironing out the pool of individuals and company names who should and should not be included in these specific marketing efforts, your company can increase its return on investment and boost its brand image.
2. Missing or irrelevant landing page
When launching a new marketing campaign, users will need to be directed towards a web page that is meant to transform them into customers. This is the primary purpose of landing pages, which are a vital part of lead generation. Why? Because they offer concise information about a specific topic and encourage a certain action. Yet, when setting up a campaign, 44% of clicks generated by B2B companies direct users to their homepage rather than a particular landing page. By doing this, the odds of a visitor converting drops dramatically. Most likely, this individual will simply leave to find more pertinent information elsewhere rather than have to search for it on your website. This mistake could also hurt your brand credibility if it continually happens.
The best practice in this scenario is to direct traffic towards a relevant landing page whose message matches the advert. Such a simple effort can provide users with a positive interaction with your brand while also guiding them through some objective. Ultimately transforming them from traffic to potential prospects.
3. Non-existent or ineffective call-to-action
You have a strong landing page ready to publish, but did you give your call-to-action a second look? Your CTA is perhaps one of the most crucial aspects of the entire lead generation process. It guides your users and tells them what to do next. However, if that element is missing, it can discourage engagement, make it more difficult to collect customer details and ultimately lower conversion rates. It can also push users into the arms of your competitors.
So before hitting publish, have another look at your CTA. Make sure it is present, difficult to miss and inspires visitors to take action. Go beyond a button that displays “click here” or “submit”, instead use a variety of words that create a sense of urgency, value and trust. When possible, personalise your CTA text to match the type of content shown and the type of visitor (i.e. new versus returning visitors).
4. Weak lead gen forms
Your CTA may lead a user to a form. Forms are a classic way of obtaining a lead’s information. However, there are a few mistakes which can hinder their performance. The first is a form that is too long. Long forms that ask too many questions discourage more than 85% of users from giving you their information. So stick to the basic “need to know” fields. You can always ask for additional information at a later point.
Once you’ve ironed out how many questions you want to ask, consider where to put your form. Avoid placing it at the bottom of a webpage. Why? Because some users, having been attracted by your message, may be solely coming to your page to complete a form and will find it tedious to scroll through text and images to reach their desired goal. So place your lead gen form at the top of the page to increase your form completion rate.
Last but not least, triple-check that your form displays correctly on mobile. Your email or landing page is most likely being opened and viewed on mobile by some of your customers. So ensure that your form can be viewed and completed on mobile devices to quickly boost your form completion rate.
5. Following up too slowly
Sometimes, form completions require companies to take action or follow up with a user. Now, ten years ago, it was acceptable to respond to customer requests within a week. However, those days are unfortunately gone. Such a delayed response time will no longer fly. Customers expect instant solutions at their fingertips. And those who respond within 5 minutes of receiving a lead are the most successful. So today’s companies need to be quicker to react and more responsive than ever before.
To solve this challenge, start by instructing your team to regularly follow through on any lead. Ensure that communication channels are always open and keep in close contact with both new and existing customers to remain at the forefront of their minds. Use functionalities such as triggers and tags to quickly triage priorities and configure actions and content to be shown to specific users. Automating such processes will allow you to focus your energy on what really matters.
Elevate your lead gen strategy
Lead generation is a high priority for most and represents too much of the budget of B2B companies for such efforts to underperform continuously. By defining who you want to reach, where you will direct those users and how you will gather their information and respond, you can elevate your existing lead gen strategy while tackling a common pain point.