Why Many Lead Generation Campaigns Fail And What You Can Do To Avoid It

Have you ever had a lead generation campaign fail?  Probably you have, most of us have.

Failure is not such a bad thing though.  Obviously you’d rather be successful, but failure can actually be a good thing if you can learn from it.

So lets talk about why many lead generation campaigns fail and what you can learn from it so that you avoid failing again.

1)  Failure To Target Your Efforts

If you’re just throwing the widest possible net, you’re unlikely to catch the fish you want.  Plus you’ll end up sorting through a ton of fish that will never do you any good.

The problem with this strategy, or lack of strategy, is that you’ll waste a lot of time on prospects that will never become customers. And as we all know, our time is limited so we must be putting it to good use working on prospects that at least have a chance to become customers.

When you create a targeted lead generation strategy, you focus your efforts on the prospects that have a much better chance of becoming customers.

So, you ask, how do we target an online lead generation campaign?

We start by building personas.   A persona is a tool that helps us figure out what our ideal customer is looking for.  They’re not looking for your product or service, they’re looking for solutions to a problem that they have. Hopefully your product or service will solve that problem for them.

We want to paint a picture of our ideal prospect when we build our persona. When we really know them we can identify offers that will motivate them to act.  How old are they?  Who do they report to?  What are their responsibilities?  How do they spend their workday? What are their biggest work challenges?  What are the problems they have that can be solved by your product or service?

When we answer these questions we can identify how we can solve their business problems and move them into our sales funnel.  If we’re just throwing out general content that doesn’t solve a problem for our prospect, it’s a lot less likely that we will get a lead and an eventual customer.

2)  Failure To Use Calls To Action

If you’re depending on the contact us link at the bottom of your home page to get your leads, I can guarantee that you are failing at online lead generation.

You need to create lead generation campaign specific calls to action that offer content with solutions for your targeted prospect.

Your call to action needs to be clear and convey a benefit to the user.  Why should they click it?  What will it do for them?  Always convey when benefit the prospect will receive from whatever it is that you are offering them.

The benefit presented needs to outweigh the prospect’s concern for giving up their data.  These days data is currency and every prospect will view the call to action and weigh it in their head, just as they do when they make a purchase for cash.  Giving up their data is a s much of a transaction as purchasing  something in a store.  They will decide if your offer has value for them.  So give them that value with benefits.

If your call to action is clear and benefit heavy, you’ll get conversions.

3) Failure To Use Landing Pages

If you’re just sending your prospects to your home page you’re wasting your time.  If you have taken the effort to create a targeted persona and a benefit laden call to action, you must use a landing page to get that conversion.

You don’t want to distract the prospect with any content or links other than the ones that will get them to fill out that form and become a lead for you.  Focus them on the task at hand and get the conversion.

Use a benefit heavy headline.  Tell them what this wonderful thing that they have shown interest in will do for them.  Reinforce it with another benefit as a sub headline.

Show them a picture and give them some quick bullet points about how it will help them and what problems it will solve for them.

Give them a clear and easy to fill out form.  Ask for as little data as possible.  Every field you add to your form will reduce the number of form fills by 5% or more.  Keep it simple and only ask for data that you must have to continue.  There are so many sources for data out there today.  LinkedIn alone is a treasure trove of data about your prospects.

So there are 3 reasons why lead generation campaigns fail and what you can do to avoid failure.  Please share this article. Feel free to comment below with any questions or ideas you have on how to make lead generation campaigns more successful.