Lead Generation Mistakes
Let’s talk about lead generation. If you’re a marketer, you’re well aware of the term, so you know that lead generation is one of the most important aspects of your job.
Bottom line, without leads, you cannot do business. Pretty straightforward, right? Yet lead generation is anything but that.
In fact, countless businesses stumble, struggle and inevitably fold because of the complexities involved in this integral puzzle piece.
Here are some lead generation pitfalls that most companies overlook to give you a greater understanding of this all-important task and how you can do it better.
Lead Generation Barriers
We won’t go into all the work that’s involved before you’ve even gotten to a lead source (spoiler: It’s A LOT!). Instead, this is a rundown of the more common lead acquisition barriers and why most advertisers are doing it wrong:
1.Time-consuming.
Finding a good source for your leads usually only happens after you’ve tested and experimented with a few bad ones. This trial and error methodology can be time-consuming at best and totally futile at worst. Even with good sources, the entire process can take months from start to finish (including contacting the source, negotiating, finalizing legalities, payment settlements, testing and analyzing).
2. No source quality control.
Frequently, companies will run into bad sources. Leads may be irrelevant, uninterested, falsified or even deceased – they’re not helpful, but you’ll still have to pay for them. This all translates to a big fat waste of your time and money.
3. High costs of learning.
The saying ‘You can’t make an omelette without breaking a few eggs’ certainly applies to lead acquisition. In order to get some really quality sources, you’ll first need to test out some bad ones. Unfortunately, there’s no skipping to the head of the line here, and the overall process is long and expensive. Paying employees to weed through the bad seeds for the few quality ones is a major drain on your budget.
4. Lack of information.
You’ve spent about a month finding a good source. The leads are filed and targeted. Now it’s time to measure how well the overall campaign did.
Basic analysis tools measure things like how many customers were generated from X amount of leads or during a given time period.
But…
What about other factors like how frequently emails were sent, the various aspects of the email and how each one affected the outcome of that campaign? There are a million and one variables to be measured, and we’re pretty sure your team won’t be able to calculate them all.
Is Lead Generation Worth it?
In truth, lead generation is a time-consuming task that saps your resources, financially, in terms of the methods and tools used to acquire the leads, and the sheer manpower to implement those methods and tools. To further complicate things, massive amounts of testing are required to decide which methods are effective, which leads are quality and other important factors. Finally, the process of lead cleaning is a whole new flavor of nightmare that you don’t even want to think about.
Not only do each of these steps require time and money, but they involve a certain expertise without which marketers are just stabbing in the dark. So is lead generation worth it? With the help of the Optinize team, it certainly can be. Utilizing cutting edge technology, market savvy techniques and some impressive software that cuts the work in half, you can have quality leads for a fraction of the cost. Discover the Optinize difference now.