Why Are My Lead Generation Efforts Failing?

We get this statement from our prospective clients all the time. They invested X amount of money with an agency, and the marketing plan looks sound. However, the agency and lead generation program isn’t generating results (or enough results).

Of course, we’re dealing with human beings here, and they can be sometimes unpredictable. However, we also want to minimize the chances of failure, so you don’t waste your investment.

Here are 3 main reasons why lead generation efforts fail and what to do about them:

#1: Improper Targeting

Think of a dart game, where your aim is to hit the bullseye.

Similarly, with any lead generation program, you need to know your target audience and who you are trying to reach. This is probably the single most important factor that will influence success or failure in your lead generation programs.

We’ve covered this in some of our previous posts about audience targeting and defining your ideal customer, but the more you learn about your ideal customer, the more specific you can be with your lead generation programs. If you don’t get this part of your program right, your lead generation program may not succeed

Learn about generating a Buyer Persona with HubSpot’s tools here:

#2: Improper Lead Offers

Using the dart game analogy, you’ve defined your target, now you need to ensure your darts of choice are sharpened for your target.

Lead generation (and inbound marketing) is based on providing the right content offer to the right stage in the Buyer’s Journey for the right target audience. Ensure the lead offer you are using is both compelling and relevant to the target audience you want to reach.

If your lead offer is not aligned with the interests, pain points, fears, needs or desires for your target audience, it’s unlikely it will succeed. You wouldn’t use content designed to close sales for lead generation purposes, for instance.

For example, if you offer HR automation solutions for startups, lead generating content could revolve around “benefits of using HR automation for your business”. You only want to drill down to the specifics when they are more familiar with your business.

#3: Improper Social Promotion Strategy

Going back to defining your target audience, successful lead generation efforts understand more than the challenges, hopes and dreams of their target audience. They also know where their target audience looks for information online (where they ‘hang out’) and optimizes their promotional efforts for these channels.

It’s not just simply creating and pushing out the links to your campaign landing pages, then sitting back and hoping for luck.

There’s a multitude of content promotion strategies out there, like influencer marketing, comments and guest posting, each of which will deserve their own article. For social media promotion, though, focus on these points:

• Choose the right social platform for your target audience. For example, Pinterest’s users are predominantly female and 60% from the US.
• Format your promotional posts for each platform. Details like image sizes, formatting of links; these differ across different social platforms. Use auto-posting services with care as they tend to disregard these details.
• Speak the ‘platform’s’ language. You don’t want to post serious, text-heavy posts on Instagram, or overly lively image captions on LinkedIn, for example.