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Lead Generation Not Working? 8 Pitfalls to Avoid in the Lead Generation and Management Process

· Marketing for Leads

Over the last decade, the web has offered up dozens of new ways to generate leads and convert customers. But with detailed targeting capabilities, dozens of social media platforms and ever-changing SEO algorithms, honing in on an effective strategy can be difficult—sometimes impossible, even for the most tech-savvy of brands.

Therefore, we have invited our technical specialist – Richard Moh to talk about the common challenges lead generation efforts may have. If this is the case, you must absolutely change your attitude and behavior to avoid these pitfalls preventing you from generating and managing your leads effectively.

1. Not understand customer preferences.

Customers have different preferences for interaction. Some may decide to walk-in after seeing ads, contact sales advisors they already know, or refer to the dealership after seeing ads. Hence lead gen efforts have to be viewed in an inclusive manner considering impact to other sales channels.

2. Only focusing on one platform.

Facebook optimizes for lowest cost, not best quality. Hence marketers would need to appreciate this in their execution by taking effort in shaping the audience that best converts over time.

3. Not using “lookalike audience”.

Through using lookalike audiences of people that have bought cars in the past, or test driven cars in the past 90 days would provide some form of indication to Facebook on who they should be showing the ads to.

4. Not enabling facebook to learn meaningfully.

Facebook requires 50 leads within 7 days (or other event windows set). During the learning phase, cost per outcome would fluctuate and any changes would cause the ads to re-enter the learning phase. Learning phase is how Facebook learns who to best show your ads to.

5. Running lead gen without taking sales advisors capacity into consideration.

Different sales advisors would have different capacity in attending to leads as they may have other tasks at hand. Hence by increasing lead gen efforts without taking sales capacity into consideration may cause more harm than good.

6. Impatience.

Shaping the audience for each business takes both time and money. This is critical to having the right audience to target, hence incremental improvements would be observed over a period of months, provided monthly ad spend is meaningful and provides baseline information for marketers to act upon.

7. Mismatch of expectations.

Customers may take months to buy a car, whereby dealerships are looking at monthly sales figures as measures to marketing efforts. Taking a pipeline approach to sales as well as effectively lead to sales management is crucial in anticipating potential changes in the sales pipeline over the course of months.

8. Not leveraging lead gen prospects for your marketing efforts.

An example is aftersales. Leads that entered a dealership system can be of 3 types: they buy there and then, they buy from other dealerships, or they buy in the coming months. These types of audience are good for retargeting as well as using it for lookalike to refine aftersales audience.

There are hundreds, if not thousands, of ways to generate leads in today’s digital world, and honing in on the right strategy can take some time. Just be sure to track and measure your efforts, and double back often to reassess and recalibrate. Do that, and avoid these key mistakes, and you’ll be well on your way to success.