By Are you struggling to meet your marketing KPIs consistently? Are your quarterly marketing campaigns not generating a return on investment? You may be falling for some commonly held beliefs about lead generation.
Once you objectively consider how these myths may influence your strategy, you can right the course and start driving revenue and sales qualified leads.
5 Common Myths About Lead Generation
1. You Can Turn Lead Generation On and Off Like a Faucet
You've established a lead generation process that meets marketing KPIs like you never thought possible. So you think: "that's enough for now. I'll focus elsewhere." You stop paying attention to your pipeline, and it slows to a trickle.
But what's really happening when you do this?
Both potential customers and existing ones see what you're doing. This behavior suggests you don't care about the customer experience or journey — except when it's serving your immediate lead generation needs. This perception transposes onto your whole B2B technology brand.
It gets harder to get your lead generation funnel back up and running each time you do it.
Why? Because it's filled with people who checked out because you did. Many who appear to be in the pipeline are already happy customers of your competitors.
Effective lead generation is a steady and consistent process.
2. You Just Need Better Tactics to Generate Leads
Standalone tactics can work to some extent in non-luxury B2C because your pool of customers is somewhat endless. You just keep expanding your market reach.
But B2B plays by a different set of rules. You're selling to professional decision-makers. That's already a much smaller demographic.
Then you run into further narrowing factors like:
- Do they need it?
- Are they in the market now?
- Is the price point right for them as a startup, established business, etc.?
- Can they justify your product to other decision-makers?
- How has the competition positioned itself?
Reaching these buyers is going to take a lot more than a toolbox of tactics.
The lead generation tips and tricks you learn online can help you build an effective strategy. But standing alone, they're just tactics that only work within a strategic framework.
Creating demand requires that all of your marketing tactics work together. That requires strategy and consistent application of it to continually improve ROI.
3. Cast a Wide Net to Meet Your Marketing KPIs
The wider your net, the less targeted your marketing messages are. You're trying to speak to everyone, so you're connecting with no one. This is a recipe for spending way too much money on lead generation as well as ending up with leads much farther away from becoming customers that you'd like.
Because you're spending money inefficiently, you have less money to focus on the tactics and targets that work, so you'll struggle to meet your marketing KPIs.
Narrow the target and focus on increasing the conversion rate, not just the number of leads. This will result in higher-quality leads and a better return on investment.
4. You'll Automatically Attract the Best Leads With Content
If you subscribe to the benefits of content and inbound marketing like we do, then you believe you can turn your website into a magnet that automatically attracts your ideal customers.
This is true — but it isn’t done in a vacuum. Your marketing strategy should still consider factors like:
- Buyer Persona: Like we said, casting a wide net means less targeted messages and fewer leads. Make sure your content addresses your target customer’s pain points.
- Customer Journey: How do prospects land on your content? What stage of the funnel are they in? Does your content solve their unique problems?
- Testing & Optimization: Look at the traffic on your blogs. What kind of content performs best, and how can you use this data to improve your content strategy and lead generation?
You can create a fast website that has some of the most powerfully written content out there. But your website won't generate leads on its own.
That's why you have multiple marketing KPIs. No one measure determines success. Everything works together systematically according to the strategies, marketing automation, and other B2B technologies you have in place to generate leads.
You must bridge the gap between outbound and inbound strategies to maximize ROI.
5. Good Marketing Stands on Its Own
Marketing is a system that works within a healthy business to generate leads for that business. If that business is unhealthy because of quality control issues, poor customer support, ineffective sales team, or misaligned C-suite initiatives, then all the marketing in the world won't make up for it.
That's not passing the buck. It's the real world.
That's why departments within B2B technology companies must work together, aligning our messaging, investing in sales-enablement content, working toward common goals, and using technology to tear down silos that lead to an inconsistent user experience.
