The Top 3 Lead-Gen Challenges B-to-B Marketers Face (And How to Solve Them)

All B-to-B marketers will inevitably find themselves struggling to generate high-quality leads at some point in their career. Finding people who are interested and excited to learn more about your product or service can often feel like an uphill battle.

Recently, Formstack surveyed over 200 marketers on current trends and opportunities in marketing, and we profiled our findings in The State of Lead Capture in 2016. From the survey data, we found that no matter the industry, marketers face similar challenges when it comes to lead generation.

If you’re looking to boost your lead capture this year (and let’s be honest, who isn’t?), here are three of the top problems our surveyed marketers face and, more importantly, how to solve them:

1. You don't have enough traffic. Not generating enough traffic to your website is arguably the most frustrating problem a marketer can encounter. How can you qualify leads if you're aren't getting any? Before you get too discouraged, focus instead on what you can control, and soon you'll see your traffic numbers moving in the right direction.

Solution: To get more traffic visiting your website, start by optimizing its content. Use SEO best practices to get started, ensuring all of your site's pages are in good shape to rank for your targeted keywords. Once you've optimized your site, focus on driving more traffic with targeted paid advertising through Google or social channels like LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter.

2. You don't have the right tools or systems in place to effectively measure, document and follow up with your leads. Getting leads is just one piece of the puzzle. Once you have leads coming in, what are you doing to nurture and convert them into customers? Many marketers don't have a clear answer to that question, inevitably leading to poor results.

Solution: This problem is many times a result of poor communication between sales and marketing teams. Ensure you have a clear system in place for how leads are passed from marketing and subsequently handled by sales to avoid the problem altogether.

Also, streamline your CRM process with tools and technology that make measuring lead gen easy. With so many options available, it's easy to get lost in the noise. The best way to avoid this problem? Keep it simple and find a platform that integrates with the apps you already use. That way, you know all of your leads are getting passed to sales and you don’t need to rely on time-consuming manual data entry to keep the sales funnel moving.

3. You're getting plenty of leads, but they're not qualified. A lot of B-to-B marketers might consider this a good problem to have. Smart marketers, however, know that this problem is rooted in not correctly identifying and going after your target buyer persona.

Solution: Spend some time defining a buyer persona based on demographic data. Survey your existing customer base to find the attributes that speak to your most profitable customer, or call up some of your brand advocates to learn what they find appealing about your business. Once you have your target market clearly identified, ensure all your lead-gen collateral speaks to this persona. Every ad, landing page and email you write needs to be written to your uniquely specific audience, and you’ll have better information to build more targeted audiences on your social advertising as well.

Lead generation is rarely a perfect process. Instead, think of it as a work in progress for all marketers. However, if you follow these steps, you'll be on the right track to overcoming your lead gen struggles.

Lindsay Johnson is demand generation team lead at Formstack, a online form builder.