To remain successful, staying agile and adaptable to challenges is now more important than ever. Recognising those challenges is the first step towards adapting and overcoming it. Let’s explore the primary obstacles that businesses face when attempting to generate new leads and discuss potential strategies to overcome them.
Marketing professionals identified Generating Quality Leads as their greatest challenge of their overall digital marketing strategy.
Source: The State of MarTech 2021. Conducted by Ascend2 and SharpSpring.
Challenge 1. Adapting to Changing Consumer Behavior
Consumer behaviour is continuously evolving, influenced by factors such as technology advancements, social media, and changing preferences. By adopting automation, for example, in targeted campaigns, you no longer have to worry about messaging, target audiences, or making constant adjustments to achieve campaign goals. That frees up more time to focus on more important things, like innovation.
Read more about a set of features which will allow you to understand leads and manage your sales pipeline.
Challenge 2. Standing out in Growing Competition
As more businesses recognise the importance of lead generation, competition in the market has intensified. Standing out from the crowd and capturing the attention of potential customers has now become more challenging than ever.
Here are some ways you can generate leads more effectively than your competitors:
- Know your ideal customer
- Plan buyer’s journey
- Implement lead nurturing strategies
- Set up sales team alerts
- Consistent social media posting
- Analyse reports
Challenge 3. Navigating in Privacy and Data Protection Regulations
The implementation of stricter privacy regulations, such as the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) as well as App Tracking Transparency (ATT) framework, has made it more difficult to collect and use customer data for lead generation purposes. Businesses must navigate these regulations while ensuring compliance and respecting the privacy preferences of their leads.
Challenge 4. Personalising Messages to Overcome Information Overload
With an abundance of information available online, and a shortening attention span, consumers are becoming more selective about the content they consume and the forms they fill out. The nature of attention is based on selective filtering, when only high-priority stimuli are getting recognised by the brain. Cutting through the noise and providing valuable (need-satisfying), personalised content that captures the interest of leads has become crucial.
Microsoft found that since the year 2000 (when the mobile revolution began) the average attention span dropped from 12 seconds to 8 seconds.
Source: Time, 2015
Challenge 5. Coordinating Multichannel Marketing
Challenge 6. Ensuring Lead Quality
Lead quality supposes that leads are genuinely interested and have the potential to convert into customers, and it is a persistent challenge for businesses. In the opposite case, low quality leads can result in wasted resources, as the company would need to invest additional effort in filtering out irrelevant leads and instead focus on finding leads that are more likely to convert.
Overall, CRM and marketing automation platforms help businesses manage and understand leads, track interactions, nurture relationships, personalise marketing efforts, and gain valuable insights, all of which contribute to acquiring and retaining quality leads.
Challenge 7. Measuring and Analysing ROI
Determining the ROI of lead generation efforts is vital for optimising marketing strategies. However, accurately measuring and attributing leads to specific marketing campaigns or channels can be challenging, especially in a multichannel marketing environment.
By leveraging marketing automation and CRM software, businesses can streamline data collection, track lead generation and conversions, analyse campaign performance, and gain insights into customer behaviour. This data-driven approach enables marketers to make informed decisions and optimise their strategies for improved business outcomes.
What's next for you?
The digital era brought not only opportunities of reaching out to potential customers but also questioned businesses on their ability to adapt to this new environment. Without doubt, the ability of utilising digital tools and communicating with your clients digitally are the core expertise to grow for the majority of companies.
“Lead Gen and CRM”, as a marketing automation and CRM platform powered by OpenMinds, have helped numerous clients to discover effective ways of lead generation and lead nurturing in countries such as Malaysia, Thailand, and Indonesia. Reach out to our team to understand how you can boost your lead generation strategy and make sure your business stays on top of opportunities.