Lead generation is one of the most commonly mentioned phrases of inbound marketing. Yet it is often misunderstood. Every marketer can agree that it is worth dealing with this concept but they often have to face difficulties in practice. There are four common lead generation mistakes you are probably committing and it’s impacting your lead conversion funnel.

In the next few minutes, you’ll get to know the most typical mistakes that many marketers commit when it comes to lead generation. Let me introduce you to each one of them.

Mistake #1: Not paying attention to the different stages of the buyer’s journey

Patience is one of the key elements of successful conversion funnel optimization and thus lead generation. You have to accept the fact that not everybody is willing to purchase your products right at that moment. As you might know, the customer buying process has different stages from problem recognition to post-purchase evaluation. Many visitors are might just getting familiar with your products or services as they are at the information search stage. At this point, the different types of lead generation offers might not carry them off their feet yet.

Communication is key. For a good experience, we have to find the right words and seek common understanding. A marketer’s job is to segment their audience and provide different pieces of content to generate leads. Make sure you create at least one piece of content for each stage of the buyer’s journey. By meeting the relevant expectations of the prospects, you can bring them further and further down in the conversion funnel.

At the different stages of the journey and the conversion funnel as well, your audience has different so-called pain points. These are problems that occur during the buyer’s journey and people truly appreciate a solution for them. You, as a marketer, should align the most common pain points to the separate stages of the buyer’s journey. It’s essential to emphasize targeted benefits and the advantages that solve those pain points.

Mistake #2: The lack of nurturing after lead generation

You have successfully generated leads from your prospects. Congratulations! You have taken a big step downwards the conversion funnel but this is not the final step. Personalization is a must at this stage. Customer relationship management (CRM) software can help you collect and store all the necessary data of your leads. It also provides opportunities to segment your target audience. By doing so, you will get an insight into your leads concerning their demographics, interests, and even activities. What a mistake not to utilize these inputs.

Research shows that personalized emails perform better than those that are not personalized. By human nature, we are more attracted and interested in things that are at least slightly familiar to us.

If we, marketers, have the blessing to map what is inside our leads’ heads, then why would we not take advantage of it? 

This leads us to the buyer persona. You have probably heard this term before, but you might not put it into practice. After determining the different target segments, you should think about an in-depth description of each of them.

• How would these personas look like?
• What are they most interested in?
• What do they do in their free time?
• Why are they concerned about certain things?

The answers to these and some similar questions draw the path on which you can approach each particular segment.

Mistake #3: Focusing on the wrong metrics of the conversion funnel

There is an endless amount of metrics and rates that marketers can measure to analyze the conversion funnel. These can highlight very important connections and draw our attention to groundbreaking insights. But at the same time, a vast amount of numbers are often misleading as in several cases we pay attention to the wrong ones. But what metrics should we never leave out when analyzing our lead generation process?

Here you can get familiar with a bunch of the most unmissable ones:

Conversion rate

A conversion is kind of a goal that we expect our visitors to reach. It is calculated by dividing the number of leads and conversions. What can be misleading in connection with this metric is that you have to fully understand your lead-generating process to be able to correctly determine your conversion goals. Once you set your goals, you can successfully optimize your conversion funnel.

Click-through rate

The click-through rate is strongly connected to a CTA or call-to-action button that can raise attention to any activity from downloading a free e-book to making a request for a price. The Click-through rate presents a ratio between the number of clicks and the number of views. When analyzing this rate, you should keep an eye on the most important CTAs or the ones that serve your current digital marketing strategy the best.

Bounce rate

The bounce rate shows the ratio between visitors bouncing back and visitors clicking through. A high bounce rate is generally a bad indicator. We have to acknowledge the real reason for this phenomenon. Visitors are usually turning back because:

• the information provided is not relevant for them
• they are not ready to be at that given stage of the buyer’s journey
• they were distracted for some reason (for example by a noisy landing page)

Our task is to explore the reason for the high bounce rate in the different cases and reformulate our conversion funnel according to it. By measuring the right metrics and evaluating them mindfully, you can develop a progressive lead-generation strategy.

Mistake #4: Too much noise in the lead generation process

We might assume that we can concentrate on the important things, but the truth is way far from this. We can be easily disrupted. During the process of lead generation, several disturbing factors can occur. One of the most common mistakes is strongly connected to the form. Forms are usually for collecting email addresses.

Although we might think that the more information we know about our leads, the more easily we can guide them through the conversion funnel, we are probably wrong. This way of thinking may seem right, but we should not forget about the strong correlation between the length of a form and the willingness of the prospects to provide their data.

A too noisy landing page can also decrease our success in lead generation.

• Do you showcase a busy navigation bar?
• Do you have several CTAs on your landing page?
• Is there too much text?
• Are your CTA buttons visible enough?
• Is your landing page similar enough to your home page and your ads?

These are just a few of many disturbing factors that can stand between you and effective lead generation.

Wrapping Up

Lead generation, as part of a conversion funnel strategy, is one of the key elements of inbound marketing. Although most marketers are trying to utilize this practice to its fullest, there are several common mistakes you should avoid. You can reach your lead generation goals with a well-structured conversion funnel. Make sure you pay attention to the different stages of the buyer’s journey, don’t forget about lead nurturing, focus on the right metrics, and
avoid too much noise. By doing so, you can successfully optimize your lead generation strategy.

This guest blog post was written by Beata Siko. She is a content marketing manager of Capturly.com, a full-scale website analytics tool. Beata is passionate about email marketing and analytics. She loves A/B testing and heat mapping. Connect with her on LinkedIn.