The Hidden Scams of Generating Sales Leads

At some point, relying on your circle of friends and family and referrals to make new sales becomes insufficient to enable you grow your business. As such, you have to put in some money and/or effort in generating sales leads. However, you must watch out for the growing number of lead generation scams.

How to identify lead generation scams

Focusing in vanity exercises

Some marketing activities, though important, do not produce any ROI.  Granted, you need to use marketing activities to enable you persuade prospects that you are the best and/or your product/service is worth their money. Choosing the wrong lead generation techniques will see you spend money on “useless” activities such as excessive image advertising and graphic design, or sending out messages to the wrong audiences. As such, your lead generation efforts are better off targeted at a small audience that is most likely to convert, rather than broadcasting to a large audience that might not be interested.

Poor planning

Planning is essential in lead generation, just like in all your day-to-day business operations. On one hand, planning enables you to choose the marketing and sales lead generation tactics that will work best for your business. On the other hand, it enables you to carry out your lead generation as a continuous process that responds to the changing marketing environment – not as a one-time event. Planning ensures that you send out the right message and at the right frequency. You need to carefully plan, measure, and test the different lead generation techniques to ensure that they are working for your business.    

Proper integration of the various marketing tactics

Different prospects require different levels of convincing before they can engage you. For instance, some prospects would be satisfied with just reading a white paper or simply attending a seminar; whereas others would rather do both before they are persuaded to contact you. Generating sales leads requires multiple steps to convince prospects to buy into your product/service.  This multi-step process requires the use a variety of marketing tactics. However, all the tactics have to be integrated properly to ensure that the message you are trying to convey is consistent at every step. In addition, it ensures that you have the right mix of offers at any given time.

Host and Ghost scams

This refers to affiliate campaigns that design email and banner ads to mislead audiences into host and post co-registrations. To identify such scams, you should look at landing pages that have little or no impressions, even though they boast of a high number leads/conversions

The key to generating sales leads for your website

The greatest lead generation scams usually offer empty promises, whereby any leads generated cannot be nurtured into sales. Website lead generation requires you to offer a value proposition that visitors would find hard to resist. 

According to this Free eBook 5 Keys To Generate Leads On Your Website, the key to attaining this goal is by providing relevant and informative content offers that will enable your prospects to better understand their needs, as well as how your products/services could help them fulfill those needs. As such, you can easily become an authority within your specific niche, from whom prospects seek guidance.