Lead generation is the lifeline of any business. 

Some marketers have trouble generating enough leads to feed their business; while others may generate plenty of leads but they are not quality leads. Both paths lead to nowhere.

In this short post, we'll go through 5 common problems marketers face during lead generation and how to avoid them.

Knowing your audience is extremely important in marketing. Even if you believe that every person can be a potential buyer, if you're spending huge advertising budgets on the wrong people, you'll almost never run profitable campaigns. If you're a organic marketer on Facebook, you're going to spend hours and hours talking to potential leads that will not get you the sales you need.

Therefore, be clear on creating your ideal customer or buyer persona. This allows you to better understand the needs and wants of your customers. Taking this simple, repeatable approach to customer connection will help generate quality leads instead of casting your net to a general audience and hoping for the best. 

Avoid one of the biggest digital marketing mistakes of emphasizing only your products and neglecting that all-important customer interaction.

Always ask yourself the question "What's in it for me?" from the customer's point of view. You may post impressive content, but if it doesn't connect with the customer, it does not create value for the customer. 

A mistake marketers make is showing the features of the product rather than the value it brings. The customer isn't all concerned about all the amazing features of the product; instead all the customer cares about is solving their pain points. 

So that is what you have to focus on. You have to align your ideal customers' pain points to your product and how your product can benefit them. If you can get that marketing message right, it'll create value and connection to your customer.

A call-to-action is probably the most important feature of your lead generation campaign. Without a CTA, your audience cannot be converted into leads.

Marketing is all about guiding your customer on a buyer's journey. 

Be direct and drive your leads on their journey. They need your guidance to take action. 

The best analogy I can think of is that a lot of organic marketers make the mistake of "asking to get married on the first date". 

They expect to extract all these personal information in the first conversation or first touch point. Instead, it may put people off for being intrusive by asking too many questions up front.

The best way is to figure out how much information you require based on the value you're about to give away. Start out with a small ask before gaining for more information as you build trust with the customer on this  journey.

The danger of giving up too soon on your prospects is that you lose leads who may have been great clients - they just weren’t ready yet.

Take the time and focus on developing relationships through building consistent contact to create trust and familiarity. 

If you do this right, it will impact your conversion rate with your prospects and your efforts will show up in your results.

Lead generation takes time. It’s not going to happen overnight, and it’s likely going to be a lot of trial and error. 

There are plenty more lead generation mistakes we could add to this list, but these are some of the most important ones we see marketers make every day. We hope this post will help you prioritize where to focus your time and resources.