The 10 Most Common Mistakes Lead-Generation Marketers Make

The process of generating leads is filled with decisions, nuances and pressures, so it’s no surprise that marketers have many ways to go wrong.

It’s also no surprise that when we cast our net for experts who could point out the most common mistakes lead-gen marketers make, we were overwhelmed with a boatload of responses.

“We live in a crazy, busy world,” says Drew Stevens, Ph.D., president of Stevens Consulting Group. “As such, many marketers are moving as quickly as consumers. The concern, however, is that many marketers make a series of errors when attempting to capture the attention of the consumers they desire to reach.”

To help lead-generation marketers avoid some of the most common pitfalls, here is a list of the top 10 mistakes they make, along with insights straight from the experts.

1) Not closing the loop: “The mistake we often see is that marketers do not close the loop on the lead-acquisition process,” says Alain Paquin, president of cross-channel marketing firm Whatsnexx. “The right approach is to make sure that the initial interest from any individual automatically leads to the other steps of the sales process until closing — qualification, scoring, nurturing, etc. The truth is that a lot of marketers don’t have a clear acquisition-to-closing strategy and therefore cannot efficiently work on optimizing it and improve results. In other words: Know your funnel.”

“The thing is that lead generation isn’t the end goal, it’s just a step along the way to the true end goal, which is a profitable customer relationship,” says Danny Iny, marketing education expert with Firepole Marketing and author of “Naked Marketing.” “If you’re too aggressive on the lead-generation side, you could be wasting relationship capital and creating a situation where sales conversations are hamstrung by the expectations that you’ve created.”

2) Not properly tracking your performance: “Web analytics are very useful for tracking activity, but lead-generation marketers need to track results,” says Jason Long, revenue engineer for revenue marketing agency The Pedowitz Group. “Make sure you are tracking the metrics that really matter in lead generation, like form abandonment rates, click-through rates, lead-to-opportunity conversion rates, etc.”

3) Not knowing your target: “It’s easy to get blinded by the flashing lights of lead sources that are working well for some other people and chase after them in hopes that you’ll hit the lead-generation jackpot, without ever thinking about whether these are the people that are right for your business,” says Iny. “Leads are people, after all, and feeding the wrong people into your funnel is a recipe for business disaster, wasting enormous amounts of resources chasing and supporting large volumes of people that aren’t particularly interested or well-suited to your business.”

4) Not testing: “How do you know which of your marketing efforts are yielding the best results?” asks Ron Cappello, CEO of brand strategy, marketing and design firm Infinia Group. “Was it the poster outside your store, the email newsletter or the new website design? Incorporate changes to your marketing strategy one at a time so you can determine which approaches have the greatest impact. When you find something that works, stick with it and put more resources behind it.”

5) Not checking your work: “With the myriad of useful tools available in the technology world, some marketers become quite lethargic in checking work,” says Stevens. “While spell-check in word-processing software is useful, it is not the best method for review. All lead-generation campaigns must be checked for spelling and grammar. This includes spelling the person’s name correctly.”

6) Including too many calls to action: “You spend time and money getting prospects to your landing page, and instead of providing them with a targeted offer that matches your ad copy, you send them to the home page or product page and bombard them with offers,” says Long. “Make sure each campaign has a specific purpose and success path for your prospects to follow to minimize abandonment.”

7) Focusing on yourself instead of your customers: “It’s essential to first consider what individuals are interested in, at that moment, before pushing the messages that the brand wants to communicate,” says John Kottcamp, chief strategy and marketing officer of customer experience management firm Tahzoo.