Every organization needs to generate leads to bring in new business. However, marketing teams can often struggle with bringing in a regular supply of new, high-quality leads. To help you out, we compiled our top five lead generation mistakes to avoid and how to address them.

1. Only offering content for prospects in one stage of the buyer’s journey. You will likely have visitors come to your site that are all in different stages of the buyer’s journey. Some may be visiting for the first time and will want general information about your product and industry. Others may be in the middle of their journey and would benefit from a high-level video or guide on what your products or services have to offer. Finally, there are visitors who are ready to buy but need more a more in-depth demonstration before making a purchase. It’s important to cater to all potential customers by offering different types of content on your website.

2. Not using blogging to its full potential. Blogging has huge lead generation benefits, so take advantage of them. If you aren’t blogging, consider starting out with one post per week. If you already have a blog, ensure you’re including calls to action (CTAs) on your blog that leads to valuable gated content for your target audience. Through your CTAs, guide your readers to landing pages that promote content such as eBooks, whitepapers or webinars. Make sure you promote your content by blogging about topics that are similar to your other assets. For example, if you have an eBook on how to grow your own produce, you could write a blog on the top 10 tools every gardener needs.

3. Not optimizing your top webpages for lead generation. Not every page of your website is created the same, and they shouldn’t be prioritized the same either. It’s likely that many of your visitors land on a few specific pages, maybe your homepage or About Us page, for example. It’s important to hone in on those pages and make it as easy as possible for conversion to occur. Start by determining which of your webpages accrue the most traffic and begin optimizing the top three pages for leads. Ensure that you create CTAs that grab your visitors’ attention but also make sense in the context of the page.

4. Not connecting with your sales team. For lead generation efforts to truly succeed, marketing teams must be on the same page with their sales team. It’s important to mutually define what a lead is and establish how to work together to achieve lead-related goals. Through open communication, you can determine what kind of leads your sales team needs for conversions and how your marketing team can best achieve that.

5. Creating forms that are too long or too short. Finding the perfect form length can be a struggle for many marketers. If you make your forms too short, your visitors will be more likely to fill it out. While this is great for overall leads, the quality of information you collect may be lower. If your form is too long, your visitors may not be willing to fill out the form at all, generating less leads overall. There isn’t a “perfect” form length, but you can optimize your form length based on your goals. If you need more leads, try making your forms shorter. If you need higher quality leads, try making your forms longer. As a rule of thumb, shorter forms will likely yield more leads, and longer forms will give you fewer leads but higher quality ones.

Happy Marketing!