One of the trickiest parts of growing your business is creating a lead generation strategy that works for you. Here are four lead generation mistakes to stay away from and how to avoid them if you want your business to excel.

One of the trickiest parts of growing your business is creating a lead generation strategy that works for you. It’s hard to get the traffic you want without a proper plan in place, but it’s essential if you’re going to succeed.

According to HubSpot, 63% of marketers say that lead generation is their business’s greatest marketing challenge. Tons of brands struggle to figure out how they can better cater to their audience in order to grow their platform.

Leads are important because these are potential customers who have a genuine interest in your brand and its content. You already know they’re interested in learning more, so all you have to do is give them a gentle nudge in the right direction.

Here are four common lead generation mistakes and how to avoid them if you want your business to excel.

1. Disregarding CTAs

Your call to action (CTA) is the most valuable part of your content marketing. New visitors don’t know what the next step to take is and have to guess on their own. CTAs exist to help you lead your traffic where you want them to go, which may then turn into conversions. Whether the goal is to capture email addresses or increase engagement, a well-crafted CTA can help you accomplish that.

The fix: Strategically place CTAs on your website and throughout your content where it makes sense. For blog posts, a CTA is commonly placed near the end, once the user is more informed about the topic they were researching. It’s also common to sprinkle one or two CTAs throughout lengthy blog posts.

If you have a lead magnet to offer, you can place options on different parts of your website, such as the homepage, sidebar or header. Give commands to users through your CTAs using actionable, exciting language rather than the boring “Submit” or “Sign up now.”

2. Ignoring social media

There are more than 2 billion social media users across the globe, a huge percentage of which talks about their favorite brands and products online. Social media is a great way for users to tell brands exactly what they think about their services and content. It opens a gateway of communication that allows you to optimize your brand to fit your target audience’s needs.

The fix: Choose two or three platforms to grow your business on. That way, you can work on building a solid following on just a few channels, rather than trying to manage numerous outlets. Optimize your social media accounts to match the brand image and tone of your business so that everything’s cohesive and true to your brand’s representation.

Follow popular hashtags within your industry so you’re up to date on trends and hot topics. This will give you great ideas for future content your audience will love. Are there questions your audience is asking that you’d be able to help them out with? Reply to them to start the conversation. Once that trust is built, lead them back to your best-performing content. It’s a great way for them to receive a solution and for you to build your lead generation.

3. Having a complicated contact form

It’s a turnoff when you want to get that juicy lead magnet, but what’s staring you in the face is a contact form with 12 fields. It’s easy to bet that a majority of users don’t have the patience for that and will quickly pass on your incentive and move on to something else.

The less complicated you make it for users to connect with your brand, the better your lead generation will be. HubSpot found that 49.7% of marketers consider forms their highest-converting lead generation tool.

The fix: Create simple contact forms with a responsive design that won’t frustrate users. Refrain from trying to obtain their name, email, address, phone number and other information you don’t need right away. That comes further down the conversion funnel.

For now, your focus is on acquiring customers in an easy way, and a simple form will help you achieve that. Ask for no more than three things from users when they first sign up.

4. Failing to nurture leads

The point of lead generation is that you aren’t just acquiring leads. You also must nurture them so they become repeat customers. Repeat customers are responsible for generating 40% of a business’s revenue. You are doing something wrong if you aren’t focusing on how to cater to existing customers.

The fix: Once you acquire leads, nurture them like newborn puppies. Continue catering to their needs by figuring out how your brand can further provide for them and present a solution to their problems. Set up an automated email campaign specifically for existing customers so that they hear from you periodically and their interest in your business lasts. Offer them exclusive discounts, promo codes or content to show them their loyalty is appreciated.

It can be difficult to come up with substantial leads and traffic when there is so much competition and content already out there. However, if you know what mistakes to avoid, you’ll be on your way to an optimized strategy that constantly brings in new leads and guides them to the content you want.

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This article was originally posted on – https://www.business.com/articles/lead-generation-mistakes/