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5 Common Demand Generation Mistakes

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86% of marketers consider demand generation a core part of marketing. However, demand generation is much harder today than it was 5 or 10 years ago. In this blog, we will be focusing on common demand generation mistakes and how different types of interactive content can help.

1) Not Qualifying and Segmenting Leads

Not qualifying or segmenting leads is a common marketing mistake. It is a lot easier to send generic messages to all of your leads, irrespective of their needs, interests, and preferences.

According to our research, marketers admit that they expect to waste 26% of their marketing budget on the wrong channels or strategies. Segmentation allows you to find cost-effective marketing channels for a specific audience and will help reduce some of the waste. In fact, Venture Harbour CEO Marcus Taylor said that he saw an 89% sales uplift & a 58% increase in average order value due to marketing segmentation.

One of the challenges here is how to collect valuable and relevant information from your prospects that allows you to segment leads.

Let’s assume you are trying to segment leads for a SaaS business in the sales productivity space. You can create a comparison tool that compares the time and cost of their current sales processes and sales stack vs incorporating your solution and showing the benefit of the SaaS tool to the end customer. In this case, prospects will be more comfortable sharing their information as you will help them optimize their sales.

2) Not Using Lead Scoring and Routing

LEAD SCORING

Scoring your leads can help you focus on the leads that matter most. Spending more effort on leads that have a higher chance of converting can give you a better ROI on your lead generation efforts. Of course, not indulging in lead scoring can lengthen your sales cycle and decrease your sales productivity.

The key point here is to come up with a small set of information that is most indicative of a high-value lead. Many times, companies think they need 10 pieces of information to compute a lead score. However, it’s best to try to get a reasonable score with a few pieces of information about a lead like their marketing budget or the number of employees in a department. This is a good way to determine lead value.

LEAD ROUTING

Once you have scored your leads, you have to route them intelligently. Don’t ask your sales team to call all the leads and don’t put them all in a marketing campaign. Companies with a high lead score should go to an Account Executive or BDR / SDR and automatically get added to a CRM. On the other hand, companies that have a low lead score can be put in a marketing campaign – ideally, one that is personalized for their segment!

3) Having One Size Fits All Long One Page Lead Forms

A lot of marketers struggle with this question. What is the right number of fields to have in a lead generation form?

The key thing you should keep in mind is that the fields should be relevant to the content and recommendations you provide to your end-users. Long one-page forms with too many questions often lead to abandonment. We still see lead forms that have 10 or more fields on one page asking detailed questions about title, function, years in the company, budget, employee count, address, etc, when really 2-4 lead generation fields are sufficient.

4) Only Utilizing Static Content

While static content is important and useful, marketers should add more engaging forms of content to their static content strategy.

In fact, according to the latest interactive content stats, it generates 2x more conversions than static content and can help complement your blog, ebooks, and whitepapers by helping you acquire and qualify leads. The goal is to provide real-time results or recommendations to prospects that are specific to their needs. This allows you to earn their lead information as you immediately give the prospect the value they came looking for.

Suppose you own an ad agency and are looking to generate leads. An ROI calculator can help your prospects estimate their ideal ad spend channel-wise while generating a qualified lead for you. Each result is personalized for the users and answers their questions in real-time.

5) Not Providing Free Resources

Demand generation is all about letting people know what you have to offer and building trust. One of the key reasons inbound marketing works is that it helps you build trust with your audience.

One key insight we have learned at Outgrow is that offering a free resource or a free tool can help your audience engage with your brand, generate value, and build trust before they move further down the funnel. It takes your traditional blog-based inbound marketing to another level as you are adding more value to the end-user helping them understand your core value proposition better. David Skok highlights this clearly in his post The Power of Free.

Say, you are trying to generate leads for a SaaS company that sells email marketing or marketing automation software. An Email Optimization Tool can help your prospects identify ways in which they can improve their email marketing. Moreover, this will help your prospects get an idea about your services and can boost your demand generation efforts. After all, it is hard to build trust before a customer buys. But with this hack, you can change the game!

Conclusion

Demand generation is about providing value to your prospects and leads in order to earn their trust. When prospects are able to identify your value easily, they would want to learn more and would more likely schedule a demo or start a trial.  What other demand generation mistakes or recommendations do you have? Let us know your thoughts in the comments!

Blog post brought to you by Outgrow.co

Published on January 15, 2021

Source: https://www.saastr.com/5-common-demand-generation-mistakes/

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