According to a Hubspot report, 61% of marketers consider lead – generation as one of their biggest challenges. With 53% of digital marketers spending their entire digital marketing budget on lead generation, lead generation, and majorly B2B lead generation has become one of the emerging challenges for digital marketers and sales professionals in various multinational companies around the world. Although, it should be noted that the online world over the internet is divided over this issue with a lot of digital marketers constantly changing their opinions on this vital.
In this blog, we shall try to understand leads and lead generation in detail and then discuss the challenges in effective Lead Generation for businesses during 2021.
What is a lead?
A lead is a prospective customer or consumer who has expressed an active interest in purchasing or consuming the services and products sold by your business. The interest can be expressed directly: by call or visit at the business venue or indirectly: through E-Mails, Google search, E-Commerce search, and much more.
What is lead generation?
In simple words, lead generation can be understood as a process in which business owners identify their potential customers who may be interested in consuming their products and services. For eg: – When you visit the Amazon e-commerce website and search for a product you’ll see that advertisements related to that products are filled in almost all of your digital presence over the internet. This to a larger extent explains the process of lead generation.
Against the general belief system, it is not limited to cold calling and emails, it holds much higher importance than that and requires multiple strategies according to the interests, preferences, and demographics of your target audience or customer group.
After understanding what are leads and lead generation in detail, we shall now try to understand the process of lead generation in brief.
Process of lead generation
The lead generation process differs from business to business. There are more traditional ways of generating leads like newspaper, radio, and television advertisements which are done on a larger sample size of customers and do not have a customized approach in alignment with your business.
However, digital mediums of generating leads like social media marketing, website-based marketing, blogs, landing pages with effective calls to action, email marketing, client referrals, client reviews, and testimonials are some of the effective ways of generating digital leads.
So, depending on your business model you can either go with the traditional process of lead generation opt-in for the more effective and customized digital process. As we have understood the process of lead generation in brief we shall now move on towards understanding the challenges in lead generation.
Challenges for lead generation in businesses for 2021
Budgetary limitations of prospective customers
Lead conversion is one of the most daunting tasks in lead generation. It may happen that you can easily find prospective customers interested in your business but cannot convert them into successful customers willing to opt for your products and services due to their budgetary.
For customers like these, you will have to develop free trials and a deep discount strategy for a short or a long period of time depending upon their requirements. The idea is to bring them on board and display the value that you bring to their business.
Rising advertisement costs
If paid search is one of the biggest lead generation mediums for your business, the time has now come for you to become a little conscious. With Covid – 19, competition in the online world is on the rise as both customers and business enterprises are rapidly shifting towards digital promotions and advertising.
If competition is fierce in your type of business and services then you need to make your online advertising more specific by making strategies that yield maximum returns on investment and targeting more specific keywords about your business.
It would also be a good idea to shift towards other forms of digital marketing like content marketing, email marketing, and social media marketing which generate effective and quality leads for your products and services.
Smaller teams and virtual office setups
Another most commonly faced challenge in lead generation is limited human resources and virtual office setups after the pandemic. Having enough people to generate leads has always got its budgetary and human constraints. With layoffs, remote work, and people working part and full – time it becomes complicated to generate manual leads.
But, if it becomes challenging to generate manual leads, you can use several online lead generators available on platforms like Hubspot, LeadBoxer, AeroLeads, and HootSuite. Additionally, you’ll have to find remote tools which promote efficiency and productivity of your sales team. It is also a time to provide an opportunity to your team to widen their skillsets.
Following the crowd and trends (rather than data)
With panic all around, increasing competition, and lowering sales numbers, sales professionals have started working with a herd mentality which has a negative impact on the lead generation aspect for your business. To avoid negative results of following the crowd in an emergency like this it is more desirable to make your decisions based on data, market research, statistics, and analysis.
When you apply your own objectivity to all of these you’ll be able to come out of the herd mindset and effectively contribute to the lead generation process in your business.
Absence of key decision-makers in business
With key decision-makers of your business out of the office, on leave, under mandatory quarantine, on sick leave, or annual leave it becomes imperative to communicate with your potential customers on their behalf. However, the good news is with rising social media-based mediums of communication it becomes very easy to communicate with your senior company management and get back to your potential leads (as all of them are now available digitally very easily) for a quick follow-up or an update on the service quotation or value-added services on purchase.
Some final words…
Finally, lead generations can be a daunting process but if you use the right mediums of communication and database management, tricky things about this can become quite easier for you. If you want someone, to perform all these processes and focus on your business development entirely you can get in touch with our experience digital marketing team at Cuneiform where we can provide you with end – to – end guidance, assistance, and support for the lead generation process of your business.