Why Your Lead Generation Strategy Is Falling Flat

As a professional marketer (or business owner forced to wear the marketing hat), there are times when you wonder why the results you’re after are so elusive. You’re grinding out ceaseless effort but still falling short in terms of generating qualified leads and hitting sales targets. This is where you can benefit from a periodic review of your lead generation initiatives, making sure you don’t fall prey to a common affliction among desperate marketers: that when the current mix isn’t working, just do more of it!

Let’s look a couple of common scenarios and see if any of them, or a combination of them, might be plaguing your lead generation efforts:

The Old Favorite

So, because you had your best year ever in 2009, you find yourself still chasing that record by continuing to employ that one and only service that worked for you back then. The only problem is that the online marketing environment has continued to evolve, more competitors are now chomping at your “low-hanging fruit” (we digital marketers just love that term don’t we), and you’re the only one pretending it’s still the last decade.

That favorite pay-to-play referral site just isn’t panning out like it used to, yet you find your spending has increased on it. Maybe the radio ads you religiously contribute to have waned in their reach and effectiveness. It could be that your target audience now hangs out somewhere else but you’ve somehow missed the memo.

Relying solely on “what worked back then” could be keeping you from “what works now”. There are many marketing channels that can drive qualified leads to your sales team and it’s worth the effort to run experiments with various methods.

Social Media Stubbornness

“Facebook Ads can’t possibly work for a B2B company like ours!” If you’ve uttered these words stop reading this article right now and go here for a professional and caring intervention (you can finish the article later). Social Media advertising is constantly refining itself and improving its ability to target the customers you want. It’s very likely that unless it was within the last 2 to 3 months, your Facebook advertising experience is now irrelevant.

The same goes for other platforms. LinkedIn may have been a black hole for ad budget when you last used it 18 months ago, but things have indeed changed. You’ll chuckle now when we tell you how Instagram can be incredibly valuable for your lead gen efforts, but check back in a year and see if that sentiment hasn’t changed.

It’s important to note that none of these social lead strategies are fool-proof; they all require an intimate knowledge of the platforms, targeting, and best practices for ad design and management. The team at LeadGeneration.com is of course happy to assist you as you venture into this type of engagement.

Your PPC Guy is Winging It

If your results are dropping off, and your CPC’s are much higher than they used to be, it doesn’t necessarily mean that your in-house PPC person/staff is doing a bad job – it could be the result of a changing business landscape – but it’s worth investigating nonetheless.

This can also tie back to the first point about relying too heavily on the “old favorite”. Maybe the PPC campaign is performing optimally, but it’s no longer viable to put all eggs in that basket. It might be time to employ a strategic mix of services.

Any credible digital marketing firm that does Paid-Search will provide you an initial complementary analysis and by doing so can display their expertise in the field. It’s then that you’ll get some piece of mind about your current approach, or at least a clear understanding that it’s time to hire someone else.

Does any of this sound familiar?

To optimize your marketing efforts, be sure to incorporate multi-channel solutions. With SEO, paid search marketing, social media marketing and content distribution, there are many methods that can significantly boost your qualified leads. There’s no reason to stick with a losing option.

To get a free consultation and learn more about the multi-channel marketing opportunities that you are missing, visit LeadGeneration.com today.

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