With most people taking on a linear approach to lead generation that is completely dead, The Brains Marketing [1] have developed a strategy which will help supercharge your efforts in the new year and beyond. Combining a unique blend of personalisation, automation and creative strategy, this insight will give you the opportunity to prosper and help grow your business. 

Here are 5 top mistakes people tend to make, and how you can improve your efforts: 

1 Not creating personas for each type of potential customer 

Personas are prospects who have been segmented into target audiences based on their goals, motivations, and lifestyle. We always recommend defining personas before creating any marketing campaign, as this allows you to create campaign assets and messaging that is uniquely designed to appeal to your prospect's sensibilities.

How to put personas together: 

• Basic profiling information: Age, gender, location
• Professional information: Job title, seniority, years of experience, career level, sector, industry
• Personal information: Living situation, kids yes/no, hobbies, interests, causes 
• Motivations: Personal and professional goals and objectives, drives, ambitions and objections

Top tip: Don't apply more than 3 main personas to any lead generation campaign. It becomes too complicated to manage campaigns with many personas and you can take your targeting too granular, adding cost and complexity to the campaign.

2 Failing to target the right people 

Arguably, effective targeting is the single most important part of a lead generation campaign. You need to ensure you are marketing to an interested audience, taking into consideration your persona groups and excluding anyone who does not meet the targeting criteria that you set. You could create highly impactful content, but if you are not showing it to the right audience, they will not convert. 

Here are some factors to consider when planning the targeting for each channel.

LinkedIn	Facebook
Sector	Age
Industry	Gender
Job Title	Location
Years in Job	Relationship status
Interests	Hobbies
Groups	Interests
Location	Groups

Remember that you can also set exclusions based on criteria, as well as manually adding any contacts to the exclusion list that you do not wish to contact, such as existing, lapsed, or previous clients/customers, or competitors.

3. Not developing a content strategy

As they say, content is king and so many people don't get this right in lead generation. It's important that you define targeting and persona groups before creating your content strategy. This is because you can't design impactful content unless you know who you are creating it for. Your lead generation content strategy is intended to:  

• Attract potential prospects
• Convince them to exchange their contact details in exchange for information
• Convert them from leads into sales qualified leads, ready for your sales team to call
• With your personas and targeting in mind, design content that is likely to appeal to your audience, answer their objections, and appeal to their motivations. We call these lead magnets, an incentive offered to prospects in exchange for their contact information, such as a free PDF download, a report, eBook, whitepaper or video

Have a think about what sort of topic would be most impactful for your lead magnets - what are your competitors already offering? What sort of information is freely available? If your prospects were to ask you one question about your products or services, what is it likely to be? 

Here are some tips to help you design your content strategy:

1. Create distinct content for each persona group
2. Provide at least three ad variants per persona so you can test different messaging and quickly update less successful variants or move budget to the best performing ad group
3. Offer an irresistible asset as your lead magnet, one your prospects can't get anywhere else and would happily exchange their information for 
4. Each persona group should have its own lead magnet, to maximise engagement with your content
5. Ensure that your copy and imagery work together in harmony and that the imagery you choose is appropriate in theme and style for your persona group

Have a think about what sort of topic would be most impactful for your lead magnets - what are your competitors already offering? What sort of information is freely available? If your prospects were to ask you one question about your products or services, what is it likely to be? 

4 Not maximizing automation tools available 

Automation is the best way to save time, minimise effort, and reduce resource drain. With lead generation marketing, automation is even more important, because it allows you to reach an unlimited number of prospects and keep re-engaging them by sending valuable content. 

Here are some ways that marketing automation can improve your lead generation campaigns: 

• LinkedIn Ads Automation: Automatically display ads to relevant prospects and retarget them with a follow up if they do not convert
• Facebook Automation: Automatically show ads to prospects based on targeting criteria, then retarget with follow up ads
• Email Automation: Automatically send a series of nurturing emails to prospects and steadily convert them into sales qualified leads through consistent messaging
• Lead management: Automatically manage lead scoring and get alerted when a prospect meets all criteria and has a high enough score to be passed on to the sales team for contact
• LinkedIn Bots Automation: Automatically send connection requests, connection acceptance messages and follow up messages to your prospects without having to manage individual communications 

 5 Failing to nurture leads in creative ways 

Lead nurturing is the process of keeping leads warm by increasing a prospect's interaction with your brand. You do this by serving them useful and interesting information, via email. Retaining their interest as they move through your sales funnel is vital, so consider lead nurturing to be one of the most important elements of your lead gen campaign. 

Here are some ways to build trust and loyalty through effective lead nurturing:

• Set up email autoresponders that trigger customised emails which are sent to a lead once they download a certain amount of information, try a product trial, make a purchase or when you have a time-limited offer to promote 
• Be patient - lead nurturing can take anywhere from 1 month to 12 months depending on your purchasing cycle 
• Be consistent - send updates and information at regular intervals; you may not be seeing interactions with this content initially, but it's quite common for a prospect to take several months to start actively engaging with information you send
• And most importantly get creative and be interesting - send a variety of information for your prospects to engage with, including blog posts, infographics, video, polls, research, whitepapers, ebooks - anything your persona research tells you will be well received! 

For more information on how you can improve your lead generation in 2021, feel free to check out Leads on Tap [2], a free guide designed by The Brains Marketing [3]. This resource helps business owners and marketers take charge of generating leads for their business in the most effective way.