Simply put, leads are the bloodline of any business.
If you do not have a system or multiple systems in place to consistently get qualified enquires, you will struggle and your business may eventually die.
But with so many lead generation strategies available in 2020, it can be overwhelming to know where to place your focus.
In this article we are going to simplify the lead-generation process for you and show you some of the strategies that we install for our real-life clients.
A successful lead generation engine is what keeps your pipeline full of sales prospects, even while you sleep.
Your goal should be to have your calendar full of booked qualification and then sales calls when you get into the office, with potential customers who:
- Know they have a problem
- Know you are the solution to it
- Have the means to pay you
Generating leads is a top priority for all marketers, and it should be for all businesses as well.
And here is the first step to success:
The Big Question That You NEED To Ask Yourself: What is your lead-generation strategy plan?
You can’t get leads, appointments or sales calls without getting fresh eyes on your service. So in order to do this, you need to create a sustainable growth strategy to:
- Find people (preferably decision makers) who need what you’re selling.
- Educate them about your service
- Convert them into clients/customers.
There are many options to do this, all which come with pros and cons, that you need to consider when making a lead-generation strategy plan and deciding which are best for your business.
Personally, we create several cold-traffic streams for our clients that together pull in thousands of new monthly visits to our website services pages.
We focus on several outreach and inbound systems, each which have their own unique strategy:
- Cold Email Outreach (Outbound)
- Paid Ads (Inbound)
- Organic traffic (Inbound)
- LinkedIn Lead-generation (Outbound)
Let’s break each of these core strategies down into their fundamentals.
#1 Cold Email Strategies That You Think Are Beneath You (But Could Actually Make You A Tonne of $)
It’s surprising how many people turn their noses up at cold email, and say “oh it doesn’t work”, “we tried it and it doesn’t work” …
The people who say this probably only sent 5 emails per day for a week before giving up…
They do everything manually…
They have zero automation set up and no coherent and systematic email outreach strategy.
Tell that to our systems that send 500-1000 targeted, professional cold emails per day…
Tell that to our clients who are generating 5-10 booked appointments per day exclusively from cold email.
Cold Email outreach works… but as with everything in business it is not an exact science and your open rate/response rate/conversion rate depend almost entirely upon:
- Your ability to NOT talk about yourself
- Your ability to adequately address a pain point that niche may be feeling
- Your ability to position yourself as an authority in solving that pain point
- Your subject line and call to action in the email
- Quantity
- Follow up strategy
It is not in the scope of this blog to tell you about your ideal customers’ pain points, but it may help to think about what their ‘hair on fire’ burning desire is, and how you can help them solve it.
Put that in the email.
Keep it short and sweet, and give them a call to action that makes it easy to reply such as “If this is interesting to you simply reply YES to this email and we can set up a call”.
Your goal here is not to sell anything. REPEAT. Your goal is not to sell ANYTHING in this email. You are simply opening the door for a conversation and giving the prospect an opportunity to raise their hand and say “yes, tell me more”.
#2 A Paid Ad Lead Generation Strategy That Will Make You Love Facebook Ads
Paid ads on Facebook, Google or even Bing are the best way of scaling your service business as you can reach thousands of highly targeted individuals every single day, and show them a unique and tailored ad (or series of ads) that is designed specifically for that ‘persona’.
But the ‘ad’ itself is only one piece of the Paid Ads puzzle – and so many people focus all their attention on this first step, but not the five, seven, ten steps that come after. Paid ads ARE and ALWAYS will be the most profitable way of growing your business as you can control so much, if you get your system thoroughly prepped and ready.
Here is how we do it:
We do deep-dive research into who your ideal customers are, where they hang out, what makes them tick, what their interests are.
We then create ‘personas’ for each of these customer buckets, and create text copy specifically for them.
The ad itself addresses that ‘personas’ needs, wants and concerns and compels them to click through to your landing page.
On the landing page, which is also bespoke and created for that user ‘persona’, they are met with further information that is intended to pre-qualify them:
- Create copy that addresses their pain points, concerns about buying, trust issues…basically anything that removes any question of “is this really for me?” or any question of not buying.
- Referrals and reviews that remove any doubt about your services capabilities.
- Information regarding guarantees, time factors etc.
On this landing page, there is an opt in button where users can download what we call a “high-value-content-offer” (HVCO), in exchange for their email address and name.
An HVCO is something like this blog “7 Stupid Simple Lead Generation Tips That You Are Not Using (And Probably Should)” that answers your ideal customers’ burning questions, at a high level. It could be a checklist, a ‘free guide’ or a webinar etc.
In the HVCO itself, we have big buttons that have a strong call to action to set up a more formal meeting of some kind with you and your team.
When they click this button in the HVCO, they are taken to a second opt-in page where they can provide you with their phone number etc and a calendar app integration that gives them the opportunity to set their own meeting with you.
This is a lead – from our definition.
They are pre-qualified as they have jumped through 2 hoops so far to get to this point.
They know who you are, they know they have an issue and they know you can solve it, and are booking their own meeting with you!
Awesome, right?
This is how we have super high direct close rate for our clients, because by the time the phone rings it’s almost always a done-deal.
#3 LinkedIn Lead-Generation On Autopilot
LinkedIn is quickly becoming a personal favourite of mine as it is a platform where you can find decision makers in your niche, who expect to be pitched!
What is this, heaven?
Okay, fine…it is not THAT simple, but it almost is.
Success on LinkedIn depends on several factors similar to Cold-Email, but also requires you to be a professional.
I mean a completely set-up profile. High-quality profile image, banner and a message in your bio about what you can do for businesses.
You are not “CEO of super awesome big boy business”
In my case, my profile bio states “Growth Marketing Specialist | We build systems that find, educate & convert users into lifelong customers.”
If you are not familiar with the way LinkedIn is set up, when you make a connection request with someone, you have the ability to send them a note…make sure you do this. Send one that is tailored, professional, and short. So many of our past clients ignored this part and had very little engaged accepted connections.
We set up these systems so that these connection requests are automated for you (so you don’t have to do it!) with messages that are bespoke and have a high acceptance rate from your target audience. We then create follow-up messages that turns an accepted connection request into a booked qualification/introduction call.
How? That is a secret…you’ll have to jump on a call with us to find out!
#4 Organic Video That Beats All Other Organic Posts
YouTube and Google are the two biggest search engines in the world…and they are also owned by the same company!
Algorithm changes have meant that video on YouTube is often considered by the Google system to be more valuable than text posts, and thus video content often outranks text posts in search. This is a massive change and means that every business that relies upon lead-generation should have a focus on video marketing within their web of inbound traffic.
How does this work?
Well, imagine creating a blog post like this one…but instead of writing it out, you turn it into a video script, film it and post it on YouTube.
Boom. You now have a piece of content that is compelling and addresses a question from your ideal customers, that will bring in traffic over time and may be high up in search on Google. Winning!
Need help setting these systems up? You too could get 30-100+ pre-qualified leads every single month. Nouveaux Media connects brands with customers at low cost, using our Growth Marketing Engines. Get in touch here for a quick introduction call.
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