15 Lead Generation Mistakes Marketers Need To Avoid In 2023

Lead generation is the most important goal of any business, according to 91% of B2B marketers. Still, it also tends to be the most challenging one, as indicated by 68% of B2B companies. Moreover, you need to ensure that the steady stream of leads you produce is qualified to become paying customers.

In today’s corporate landscape, you will face fierce competition for your prospects’ attention and their money. A good lead generation strategy is a no-brainer for your business to increase sales, boost your bottom line, and eventually scale as an industry-authority brand.

But how can you create a great lead generation strategy if you don’t know what you should and, more importantly, shouldn’t do? You cannot—and this is why you should read this blog.

Lead Generation

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Here, we will dive into 15 common lead generation mistakes that even the most seasoned marketers make in 2023 so that you can avoid them and grow your business with sales-qualified leads quickly and effectively.

Let’s get started!

» What Is Lead Generation?

What Is Lead Generation

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Lead generation is the process of identifying people interested in your product or service and reaching out to them to interact further, educate them about the benefits of using your product or service and convert them into paying customers. 

» Why Is Lead Generation Important?

You can only convert some leads that come through your sales pipeline into a customer who brings in revenue for your business. This is why keeping up a continuous inflow of new leads through lead generation is essential.

Lead generation helps in:

    • Building Brand Awareness: 

One of the major components of the lead generation process is enlightening your prospects about the features of your product or service. If your potential customers find it useful for themselves, they will more likely tell their friends and acquaintances about your brand. 

This leads to word-of-mouth marketing that boosts brand awareness and creates massive demand for your product or service. 

    • Reaching Target Audience: 

When you do lead generation right, you focus on getting the right people—those who need your product or service and possibly can pay for it, too!). This leads to saving time and resources while boosting sales and revenue.

    • Knowing Your Prospects Better: 

You cannot generate quality leads without knowing about your prospective customers—their problems, wants, and needs, which social media platform they like to hang out on, their revenue-making potentials, and much more. 

Researching your ideal customer persona (ICP) for lead generation acquaints you with such information. It can further help you tailor your product or service to suit their needs best and gain a competitive advantage in sales.


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    • Generating Revenue And Business Opportunities: 

When you use appropriate content and messaging to create an offer that piques the interest of your target audience segments, you increase your chances of catching their attention, making it easier to convert them. The revenue growth potential through lead generation is enormous, particularly when focusing on your target audience’s interests and pain points.

Moreover, you can also land business opportunities with your lead generation efforts. 

Suppose a non-competing brand from a different sector reaches out to you, sees your activities on a social media platform—and proposes to do a collaborative video together. 

This can help you gain access to their audience base (which you may not have thought about targeting earlier) and vice-versa and generate more leads for your business.

This next section covers what you came here for—15 lead generation mistakes you should avoid in 2023. 

» 15 Lead Generation Mistakes Marketers Need To Avoid In 2023

1. Bad Product-Market Fit

You can never sell your product if it is not needed in the market. Therefore, before you launch your offer, you must thoroughly research your target audience and ideal customer persona (ICP) and determine how your product or service can best provide value to them.

In short, you must know what you are selling, who you are selling to, and whether your offer satisfies a particular gap in the market. Boosting your lead generation efforts without assessing your product-market fit will generate drastically low returns.

2. Starting Too Early

This can mean several things.

For starters, your product may be too far ahead of its time and may not satisfy a need in the current market. In such cases, no matter how much traffic you drive to your landing pages, you will see little yield in the form of leads.

Secondly, you may not have hired a robust sales team to nurture and convert incoming leads into paying customers. It is useless to burn your money on lead generation if there aren’t enough salespeople to close them.

And finally, you may not have laid the foundation well enough before starting on your lead generation tactics. The foundation includes everything from:

    • Putting proper communication systems in place, 
    • Setting up automation wherever required, and 
    • Research your target audience thoroughly. 

Laying the groundwork is critical for your lead-generation efforts to be successful.

3. Depending On A Single Source Of Leads

Most brands choose the easier route and rely on a single source for all their leads. This could be emails, YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, webinars, or their website content.

Depending On A Single Source Of Leads

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But this could be harmful in the long run. One email campaign’s success doesn’t ensure that every email will provide similar results. Social media algorithms are changing every week. Meanwhile, website content narrows your reach since not many people will know about your brand. 

The advisable solution here is not to keep all your eggs in one basket but instead, be flexible and always look for different ways to get leads. In today’s modern world, you should have a strong social media presence, website content, and email campaigns to maximize your lead generation efforts. 

4. Use Of Contact Lists

If you have struggled with lead generation up until now, finding out that you can buy whole lists of contacts can feel like a godsend. But please do not step into the trap. Here are a few reasons why you shouldn’t purchase contact lists:

    • You will save time making cold calls to prospects who might not even be a good fit for your company. 
    • Low conversion rates can tax your sales reps and reduce their morale and, consequently, their output.
    • Sending emails to prospects from purchased lists can harm your email deliverability. 
    • Leads from such groups will almost certainly mark you as spam or spam contacts.

Organic lead generation is difficult but can be far more rewarding for your business. You must give them a reason to opt in to convert your website visitors or social media channel subscribers into leads. 

You can do that with gated content, like asking them to download an eBook and collect their contact information with lead capture software so that you can later convert them into paying customers.

5. Single Communication Approach For All Customers

There are no “one-size-fits-all” strategies for communicating with your target audience. In today’s digital landscape, brands can communicate via chat apps, emails, social media, and other channels. However, if you only use one method of communication, you will miss out on possible leads.

The advisable solution is to incorporate two to three communication channels in your lead generation strategy. For example, if you are emailing your customers about new launch offers, you can also communicate with them via WhatsApp or target them with ads on Instagram or Facebook.

One great example of this is how Peppertype AI uses its emails to direct subscribers to its website. Their welcome email also features a YouTube video showing users how to maximize their full array of features.

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6. Measuring The Wrong KPIs

When it comes to lead generation, there can be several key performance indicators (KPIs) to measure and gauge if your lead generation efforts are taking your company in the right direction.

However, that’s where the problem is—which ones should you measure?

Followers you’ve gained on a social media channel or impressions you have garnered on a video can boost your vanity, but they do nothing for sales.

Here are some real KPIs you should be monitoring:

    • Click-Through Rate (CTR): Impressions or engagements do not indicate the effectiveness of your lead generation ads—the number of people who click through does. Therefore, track your click-through rate and, ideally, count the number of leads that convert to your opt-in.
    • Form Sign-Ups: These indicate how many individuals have “taken action.” Such desired actions include:
      1. Subscribing to receive a lead magnet.
      2. Filling out a communication form.
      3. Registering for a webinar.  
    • Cost Per Lead/Acquisition (CPL/CPA): You must track your finances to run an effective lead generation campaign. You must understand the worth of your leads and the cost of acquiring them. Otherwise, you risk paying more for leads than they are worth, leading you to incur more financial losses than you can handle.
    • Sales And ROI: It is essential to know how many people are successfully getting your products/services sold to—and how much money you’re getting in return for the investments you make in your lead generation efforts. 

7. Failing To Optimize Blog Content

No, your blogs are not just good for SEO or drawing traffic to your website—if optimized properly, your blogs can act as great lead-generation tools.

Your blogs are the perfect place to showcase your subject matter expertise and foster brand trust amongst your prospects. Consequently, someone who’s read your blog is very likely to convert, provided with a push in the right direction. 

Well-positioned CTAs can do the trick here. You can ask your reader to sign up for your newsletter, highlight the best features of your product/service, or link landing pages to get them to fill out your lead capture forms.

One great example of this is HubSpot and its “Smart CTAs.” HubSpot website visitors are shown different CTA versions based on where they are in their buying process. This ensures that no matter who your visitor is, they are always being pushed toward conversion.

Smart CTAs

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Your blog content must, therefore, be an assortment of top-of-the-funnel, middle-of-the-funnel, and bottom-of-the-funnel content. This will help you educate your audience and provide them with all the information they require, so they will not hesitate to join up for your product or service.

8. Relying On Tricks And Not On Your Foundations

It is 2023, and you can find many lead-generation tips, tricks, and hacks all around, but they don’t work wonders unless you have a strong foundation.

You need to have the core elements of your lead generation strategy sorted out before applying these tricks to get those couple of extra leads. You must create synergy between your existing processes and work on aligning the marketing and sales teams to see good results. 

Moreover, you also need to employ lead generation tools to maximize your ROI from audience research and automate repetitive workflows.

You must focus on the big picture for an optimized lead generation process.

9. Confusing CTAs

You may be doing everything right—but if your CTA is not powerful and direct enough to push your prospects to take a desired course of action, your lead generation efforts will fall flat compared to your competitors.

Confusing CTAs

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Most marketers try to be clever and end up with a bland, or worse, misleading call-to-action that acts as a deal-breaker to the prospects, who leave before completing this last desired step to conversion.  

Remember to communicate the exact value in your CTA. Your potential leads must be well aware of what they get when clicking on that CTA button. Ensure that you communicate a single message in your CTA because multiple messages can confuse your readers.

10. SEO Mistakes

SEO mistakes can jeopardize your lead generation strategy. 59% of B2B marketers think SEO has the biggest impact on lead generation goals. For example, using the wrong keywords can make reading your content challenging or boring. In the worst-case scenario, your content will be incomprehensible to prospective customers.

Technical jargon is different for different topics, and to target the right people who may be interested in your product/service, you need to get your keywords right. In addition, ignoring quality backlinking chances reduces your site’s relevance and domain authority. 

Furthermore, mobile optimization is important to your marketing and lead generation strategy. A mobile-friendly website is more responsive and loads faster, which helps with search engine ranking and lowers the bounce rate, an important element in user interaction. 

Thus, improving your SEO strategy will drive more qualified leads to your website. 

11. Not Addressing The Pain Points Of Your Target Audience Sufficiently.

Your customer may not be aware of the problems that are stopping them from skyrocketing their business growth. As a marketer, it is your job to enlighten them without assuming or generalizing these pain points.

The key to effective lead generation is recognizing, comprehending, and addressing your audience’s problems. Making them aware is step one, followed by positioning your product/service as the solution. 

Once you have piqued their attention with a tailor-made offer, you can keep up the momentum with ongoing marketing and email nurturing efforts as you see fit. 

In short, you must always remember the real pain points of your ICP (Ideal Customer Persona) throughout the sales process and strive to align the USP of your product/service to best solve those problems. This will help you discover more quality leads. 

12. Putting No Systems In Place

Lead generation is not a one-time thing—you must consistently dedicate time and resources to keep a steady stream of quality leads inflowing. This means you need to put systems in place.

Systems streamline your workflows and provide you and your team with actionable steps to convert your website visitors into leads for your sales pipeline.

Systems help you:

    • Improve Lead Quality: Once you systemize tracking leads from their sources, you can determine which sources deliver the best quality leads and double down on marketing your brand through those channels.
    • Decrease Cost Per Lead: Systems help you identify what works and what doesn’t, and in many cases, allows you to see where you are losing money in the lead generation process so that you can curtail those efforts and reduce your cost per lead while increasing your ROI.
    • Enable Scalability: This is the biggest benefit—systems give you a reliable framework to focus on and replicate when more leads start coming in. Since there is already a blueprint available at your fingertips that shows you actionable steps to nurture and convert leads, it makes the work much easier for you and your team, thereby, ensuring greater productivity and probability for success.

13. Not Maximizing The Potential Of Lead Generation Forms.

Your lead capture forms are the easiest lead generation tools at your disposal—if you use them wisely.

You can maximize the potential of your lead capture forms by following a few branded practices: 

    • Assess which stage your prospects are at in their buyer’s journey, and curate different lead generation forms for different landing pages on your website accordingly. This prevents you from being too intrusive.
    • While longer forms needing more qualifying information may give you quality leads, most leads prefer filling up a shorter form. It is, therefore, essential to balance your contact information needs with audience preferences. Lead capture forms with 3-4 form fields generally do well. 
    • You must also position your lead generation forms right on your landing page. Usually, putting them above the fold, besides some customer testimonials, usually creates a positive association and increases the chances of your prospects filling up the forms.
    • Display privacy policy wherever needed. Privacy regulations may vary depending on location, which is why it is important to include your privacy terms in your lead generation forms. It should be very clear what your prospects are consenting to.

Not Maximizing The Potential Of Lead Generation Forms

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You should rope in your sales team to discuss what questions you must include in these forms, i.e., the questions that will best help them qualify the leads quickly and effectively.

14. Failing To Deliver Promised Value In Lead Magnets

Using lead magnets is also a great tactic to generate leads. But it can backfire if they do not provide the promised value to your prospects.

Once you lose their trust, you can be sure they will never return to you for purchase. Therefore, you must ensure that your eBook, case study, or whatever gated content piece you use as a lead magnet provides great value.

Many marketers think that if they give everything away, why will the lead pay money and become a customer? It is essential to remember that leads convert into customers because they see the value of your expertise and realize that you can do the job much better than them.

Converting your prospects on the first landing page is just the beginning. How many emails you receive makes no difference if people lose trust in you the instant they opt-in. 

What counts is whether they trust you enough to continue reading your emails, join up for a trial, and eventually become customers. 

15. Going Overboard With Your Marketing Budget

Setting a marketing budget is like walking on a tightrope: spending too much can burn a hole in your pocket, but spending too little will deter you from achieving your brand awareness or demand generation goals. What’s the solution?

You need to define your marketing budget based on the company you run and the business needs you hope marketing serves. For example, if you are a small to medium-sized business, you should allocate 7%-12% of your business revenue to marketing. 

However, if you are newly launching, you should fix a marketing budget in the first year (you may be able to cover only one campaign, so make it your best one!).

Marketing is often a complex endeavor, but thanks to new developments in attribution, you can accurately identify and invest in specific channels and campaigns that generate higher ROI.

» Wrapping Up!

There are many ways to generate leads, and what might work for one business might not work for the other. The only way to discover is to experiment continuously until you figure out the perfect combination for your business. 

Lead generation is a long-term game and requires much patience and perseverance. However, building a strategy that brings in steady leads and keeps your sales pipeline ever-flowing is too enticing a reward to ignore.

Remember that lead generation is the beginning of fostering trust and building a long-lasting relationship with your lead so that they convert into paying customers and into brand evangelists. The key is to keep adapting to your target audience’s wants and needs and truly help them with your products and services.


Author’s Bio: Sapna Singhal

Sapna is a Freelance Content Writer who specializes in writing data-driven blog posts around B2B Marketing and SaaS. She writes content that only generates millions of traffic but also helps clients double down on their revenue. When she’s not writing, you can find her chit-chatting with her sisters or reading books!

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