Lead Generation Mistakes Small Business’s Need to Stop Making

For a majority of small business, it is important to generate leads in order to make sales.

Leads are valuable to your small business because they are the people who have indicated organic interest in your business and its content by giving you their information in some way, whether it’s by completing a form to obtain a free incentive like an ebook, completing an online survey, etc.

However, you can’t just expect to get leads by doing nothing. Some entrepreneurs have trouble generating leads that are enough to nourish their sales staff. Others generate loads of leads, but they are not good leads, and your sales staff is having trouble shutting them into customers. Others just don’t have any idea where their prospects are coming from.

These are all common problems entrepreneurs have with lead generation. It’s time to fix them and this article will go over six common lead generation mistakes and how to repair them.

1. You’re Buying Your Leads

If you are having trouble generating prospects, it may be tempting to buy email lists so that you can nourish your sales company with something.

Not only will sending mails to purchased lists damage your email deliverability and IP standing, but there is a high chance the people in your purchased list haven’t heard of your small business, which makes them annoyed and likely to indicate you as spam. That’s why quality email lists are not for sale.

The entire purpose of creating leads is to eventually nurture your leads into clients, whether by email marketing or another marketing tactic.

How to Repair It

Your leads will need to have a way to opt in for themselves; it’s that plain and simple. This means your lead opted to give their information to you in exchange for something valuable, like a free webinar, ebook, deal, etc. Put your focus on creating offers that are valuable for your intended audience in some way, and then place it front and certain on your website.

(Recommended Reading: 100 Fast List Building Methods And Techniques)

A well-nurtured, high quality email list takes time. But it is definitely worth the work and wait (more leads= more profits.) And as soon as you have visitors to email, make sure that you’re writing valuable email content that makes your leads want to open your emails and stay subscribed.

Below is an example of a call-to-action we built for our client, “America’s Surgery Centers”.

2. You Don’t Have Valuable Content For People in Various Stages of the Purchaser’s Journey.

Not everyone who visits your site will be in exactly the exact same stage of their purchaser’s journey. Consider the folks that are landing on your site for the first time. Do you believe they’re ready to find a presentation of your product? Or do you think they’d be inclined to wish to download a bit of content?

Some of your website visitors may be ready to purchase, but most won’t — and you will need to give them the chances to find out more before requesting them take any type of purchase action, and what you are selling.

Creating valuable content to teach and nurture your prospects down the funnel is time consuming, which explains why so often you’ll navigate a business’ site and see nothing but “Buy Now!”

How to Repair It

There’s not just one CTA for everyone who visits your site. You will want to cater to people that are at all stages of the purchaser’s journey using CTAs to maximize your lead conversion rates.

You’ll have to create a variety of offers you can put behind landing page forms that cater to people at different stages. New leads who are just starting to get to know you might be interested in offers like contests, checklists, and ebooks. Leads who are a little further down the funnel might be interested in email courses and kits. Leads even further down might be ready for a demo. Again, it takes time but it is worth the work.

Make sure that you are offering this variety of content on your own site, so there is something for everybody. If you have something for everybody, you’ll see an increase in conversion rates and have well-nurtured leads.

3. You’re Not Using The Top Lead Generation Tools

Do you actually know the people visiting your small business’s website? Do you know what path they take when they get on your website? Do they even have a path or are they just contributing to your high bounce rate? If you’re not able to answer these questions, you are going to have difficulty connecting with your audience and learning what’s working and what’s not working.

You need to be able to answer the above questions. There are some awesome tools out there that can help you convert your leads and learn about your site traffic.

How to Repair It

The secret is finding the ideal mix of tools that’ll provide you the best bang for your buck while providing the proper insight. There are templates and a few tools out there that’ll help you make gen resources that are different you can place on your website.

A form embedding tool will come in handy when it comes to actually collecting information from your site visitors and converting them into leads. You can utilize a CRM tool, like Infusionsoft, that can connect directly to your email list.

Also using an analytic tool is important to monitor your bounce rate, your leads’ website paths, and much more. We recommend Google Analytics.

(Recommended Reading: Digital Marketing Metrics)

4. You’re Not Optimizing Your Top Pages

When you study your website’s traffic path, you will likely discover that the huge majority of your traffic goes to  specific pages- like your homepage; your “Contact Us” page; a couple of popular blog posts; etc. Why would you treat these top pages like any other page? These pages should be optimized to convert your leads. Provide opportunities for these to people to convert on your top pages.

How to Repair It

Figure out which pages on your website are the for traffic (we recommend 4-5.) If you use Google Analytics, go to Behavior Reports, click “Site Content” and then “All Pages“.  Pay close attention to the Page Views column.

Then, optimize those pages. Creating exceptional offers for your pages and gating them behind forms is another way to improve your conversion rate. It is time consuming, but well worth it in the long run for your small business.

Note: Based on eyetracking research, it is found our natural eye route starts in the top left-hand corner of a website and moves on from there.

5. You Don’t Have A Social Media Strategy for Lead Generation

Even though social media is best effective for advertising metrics, like traffic and brand awareness, it can still be a helpful source for lead generation. If you’re using social media and you’re finding that it is not generating your small business many leads, you may not be using it strategically.

As Jeremy White, a serial entrepreneur and conversion consultant, wrote, “It’s not that you can’t get leads on social media; it’s that we’re not taking what’s there.” To put it differently, you may be doing it wrong.

Posting your new ebooks to all of your social media channels is not an effective social media strategy. Don’t expect doing just that to bring your small business a ton of leads.

How to Repair It

One way to generate leads from media is to “randomly” post links to offers and articles that have generated a a lot of leads in the past.

Another way is to link to landing pages for blog offers and articles that have performed for lead generation. Just be sure that your post clearly implies that you are sending the reader to a landing page. You’ll also want to make sure your post copy motivates leads to actually click on the link.

Each social network is different when it comes to communicating. Here’s how you should utilize the top three: Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn.

On Facebook: There are a variety of great ways to create leads from Facebook. One way is using the attribute available for Pages. This feature allows you to place a CTA button, which can help drive traffic to lead generation forms like contact sheets and landing pages.

On LinkedIn: B2B companies are able to benefit from the understanding that LinkedIn is the most sophisticated of social programs, and also a place where B2B relationships are most likely to be built. Like on Facebook, you can print your content to your business ‘Facebook Page alongside a image along with copy.Striking a balance between asking too little and too much is a problem marketers criticism with.

On Twitter: Your tweets should contain a value proposition, a brief URL linking to the landing page with a form, and a picture to guarantee the post stands out.

(Recommended Reading: 22 Ways To Market on Social Media)

6. Your Form is Too Long or Too Short

How long should your lead capture forms be? Finding a balance between asking too much and too little on your form is a common problem. A short form is quick and most leads will be more willing to fill it out rather than a long form. But the quality of your email list may not be what you want if your form is short. But if your form is too long, you’ll end up getting less leads. What is the magic “number” to having the “just right” form?

How to Repair It

We can’t necessarily answer that question for your business. You can not possibly know how many form fields you can use without tests and doing conversion research. You need to compare the ROI of information with the ROI of conversions that are increased. How much does having a telephone number actually help the sales staff? Is it enough to justify an expected decrease in conversions?

Your sales team will have a good idea of what information you need to close deals with leads. Be open to help from your sales team on making a decision.

Ask them if they necessarily need a phone number for the purpose of your form. Do you really need their last name? Again, ask them if they can just go without their last name. If it’s important to have for a quality lead, then do include it in your form.

Need inspiration? Check out our landing page for we built United Women’s Lacrosse League for this year’s season. Since they were just looking to target their already online fans, we only asked for an email and later in the nurturing email series collected more information.

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Have questions about lead generation? Do not hesitate to ask and we will answer your question during our next Webcast Wednesday.