Leads are a valuable asset for any business. These are contacts who have already shared their information with you—for example, by subscribing to your newsletter or filling out a contact form on your website. The more leads you collect, the more sales and orders you can generate, quite logically. For this reason, I recommend placing a special focus on lead generation in B2B marketing. You can avoid the following 5 mistakes.
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1) You buy email lists instead of generating leads yourself
Admittedly, it's a tempting prospect: getting thousands of contacts at once without doing anything. Reaching that many people—surely that has to be promising? No. It isn't. The main reason is obvious and simple: These people don't know your company and most likely don't want to be in contact with you. Nobody wants to receive spam from a company that randomly bombards them with information. You run the risk of these email contacts associating your company with something negative, and this kind of damage to your image is almost impossible to repair.
Furthermore, purchasing email lists puts you in dangerous legal waters: The new General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) strengthens consumer rights and stipulates that these rights can be better protected and more easily enforced in the future. Specifically, this means that you as a company must prove that a user has given you their express consent to contact them. This change in the law therefore has a significant impact on lead generation .
You can't buy high-quality leads; you have to acquire them yourself. And you can do that with content that truly addresses the interests and needs of your website visitors – inbound marketing is particularly well-suited for this. In exchange for the data, you offer valuable content such as e-books, white papers, or webinars. This way, you collect leads who are genuinely interested in what you have to offer – and can nurture them accordingly to ultimately turn them into customers.
2) Your toolbox leaves something to be desired
There are several efficient methods for lead generation available to you . The more orchestrated you use these tools, the more contacts you will gather. If you neglect this aspect or your toolbox is poorly equipped, you will miss out on many leads. The following tools are essential—you should definitely pay attention to them.
Calls to Action
Some users already know what they want from your website and how to get it. These users are often specifically looking for certain information or products and navigate directly to the relevant pages. They are generally familiar with your website structure and require less assistance. However, most visitors, especially new or undecided visitors, need help getting their bearings. These users may still be in the discovery phase and not know exactly where to find the information they are looking for. This is where targeted calls to action (CTAs) come in. These CTAs are strategically placed requests that encourage visitors to take specific actions, such as filling out a form, downloading a white paper, or signing up for a newsletter. By using CTAs, you direct your website visitors to the pages that are important for generating leads. This makes the next step of contacting you much easier, as users know clearly what is expected of them and how to proceed. I recommend placing calls to action on the pages with the most traffic or where there's the greatest chance of conversion. These pages are often the first places visitors go and therefore offer the greatest potential for generating leads. Use inbound marketing to target CTAs. This method will help you better understand your target audience's needs and behavior and design CTAs for the greatest possible impact. By analyzing user data, you can find out which CTAs are most effective and how to further optimize them to maximize lead generation.
Forms
Your goal is for visitors to voluntarily provide you with contact information. Create the necessary incentives for this. In B2B marketing, a contact form for inquiring about your products or services is often not enough of an incentive because your visitors are still grappling with the problems they're seeking answers to. Start further up the sales funnel and consider what questions your customers are dealing with and what problems your company offers solutions for. Also pay attention to how you design the form: The length and fields are key to whether a user actually completes it (more on this later).
Landing pages
Landing pages are an essential tool for lead generation. They act as targeted points of contact, designed to capture visitors' attention and encourage them to take a specific action, such as filling out a form or downloading a white paper. It's advisable to link each marketing measure and offer to its own landing page. This allows you to present customized content that is precisely tailored to the needs and interests of your target audience. The advantage is obvious: On this page, you can convince potential customers and present your offer in an appealing way. By addressing them specifically and clearly focusing on a specific offer, you can significantly increase the conversion rate. In addition, landing pages offer the opportunity to gain visitors' trust through attractive design and compelling content and motivate them to take the next step in the customer journey. A professionally designed landing page can therefore be a decisive factor in the success of your marketing strategy.
Data analysis
Regular data analysis is crucial for optimizing lead generation. Use analytics tools or platforms like HubSpot, Sistrix, or Google Analytics, which provide you with numerous exciting and helpful metrics that help you better understand user behavior. The better you understand your visitors, the more precisely you can address their needs. And the more needs-oriented your marketing is, the more leads you'll generate.
3) Your most important pages are not optimized
Hardly anyone can constantly optimize every page on a website. However, for india car owner data some pages, the optimization process is definitely worthwhile: These are your most visited pages. Take a look at your website traffic. You'll notice that most visitors come to you via a handful of specific pages. This may, but doesn't have to, be your landing page . If you have a blog, there may be a few particularly popular posts that receive a lot of traffic.
You should give these popular pages special attention. They offer a lot of potential that you can easily exploit. Think about what your users expect when they visit these pages. You could place primary CTAs there and design special offers for these specific pages – the effort is worth it. Interactive elements such as tests or consulting modules have a high chance of being completed. Split testing helps you find out which measures work particularly well and how you can further optimize your inbound marketing.
4) Your forms are not well designed
I'd like to revisit the topic of forms. Suboptimal contact forms are a major hindrance to your lead generation. Unfortunately, there's no magic number for the number of form fields. Instead, consider what type of lead you need: If you only need a name and email address, that's all you should ask for. Then more people will fill out the form. If you also need information like location or phone number, that will make your form longer and more private – you'll gain fewer leads, but these contacts will also be of higher quality. Whether you need more leads or better leads will depend, among other things, on your digital strategy . Also, ask your sales department which contact information is important and useful.
The basic rule in brief: Ask what you need to know, but no more than that. And optimize your form to make it as easy as possible for users to fill out.
5) You don’t blog
Yes, a blog takes work. I don't want to hide that from you. But on the other hand, a corporate blog—even for B2B companies—is a fantastic tool for lead generation. If you don't use this tool, you're missing out on a lot of potential.
The great thing about a blog is that it's a long-term investment. After all, your digital archive grows a little with each post. Valuable content continuously increases traffic, because each blog post is another indexed page on Google. And blog posts are ideal for generating new leads. Simply add a suitable CTA below the post that directs visitors to landing pages with relevant offers such as e-books, white papers, or trial versions.
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