Welcome to today’s episode of GSD daily, and this is episode 22. Being that we are in email marketing week, we are going to talk about lead generation strategies. Now if you were in yesterday’s episode, then you know that we went through and unpacked a lot of email marketing. So we talked about a ton of email marketing stuff. So let me just grab that link for you real quick.
For those of you who are not watching this video in our Facebook group, you’re going to want to make sure to go over there. I’m grabbing that link for you too so that way we can chat. If you’re watching this on my personal profile, I don’t think the comments come through all the way. Here is the button or the Facebook group there.
Today we’re going to talk about lead generation strategies. And then also, this is really a continuation of yesterday’s email marketing blog or email marketing live stream where we talked about just how to market to your email list, how often to send an email, how to schedule email, what CRMs to use, all of that stuff. This is yesterday’s transcript and yesterday’s video. You can go ahead and take a look at that.
Today, lead generation strategies. I have 30 minutes for this and we’ve got quite a bit to get through, so I’m just going to dive right in. At the end of the day, the goal of a sales funnel and the goal of your business is to generate leads and generate prospects, generate inbound leads.
There are so many businesses that I’ve talked to over the years and they have business development representatives or BDRs or BDR groups and it’s all outbound. So it’s outbound phone calls, it’s outbound postcards, it’s outbound direct mail and all that other stuff, which is fine. It’s expensive. And there are lots of ways you can employ artificial intelligence and machine learning to make your outbound marketing work more effectively.
However, it’s expensive and it’s time-consuming. So what we like to do is do inbound marketing campaigns. That’s 100% what we do, inbound stuff. So somebody comes in, they raise their hand and say, “Yes, I want more information.” And they opt into something. They read a blog post, they download something, they buy something, whatever, they sign up for a webinar or they enroll in something. So everything we do is inbound.
Lead Generation Strategies
Now being that everything we do is inbound, there are lots of lead generation strategies that you can employ and we’re going to cover seven of them today.
1. Lead Magnet
The first of the lead generation strategies that you can use, the one that we use more than anything else is basically creating something that you give away. It’s called a lead magnet. A lead magnet is generally a report that is six to eight pages long, sometimes it’s four pages, sometimes it’s two pages, sometimes it’s just a one-pager. But it’s usually something that you can give away and it’s instantly and immediately downloadable.
It is a video series or a set of videos that you give away for free in exchange for somebody opting into your email list. But it’s a little mini-course. It is a mind map. It is a process map. It’s a flow chart. It’s something that somebody can download, somebody can consume, somebody can get an aha moment quickly. That is the purpose of a lead magnet.
What your lead magnet should be doing is it should be getting the lead, it should be educating, providing some sort of an aha moment in their life, in their day, and make their life better. You want to start them in the transformative process of your business.
It also needs to pre-sell the thing, the thing you want them to do next. I mean, we’re inbound marketers, but we’re 100% direct response. We want somebody to move down our sales funnel and your lead magnet is a pivotal piece in that.
The words that you use in your lead magnet or the video or however you structure your lead magnet, should:
A. get the lead and get the lead well. I mean, you should have a pretty high conversion rate.
B. educate and provide some sort of an aha moment
C. lead them down the path of sales, so lead them into the next interaction, the next action with you.
We’ve talked before about micro-actions and really this is just a couple of micro-actions. They clicked an ad, they hit a landing page, they opted in for your report, they read your report, and then they moved on to the next piece of the funnel, which is maybe signing up for a webinar or jumping into a sales video or whatever.
So that’s the idea behind a lead magnet. Now, for those of you … I mean, I’m sure you guys have seen lead magnets and been through lead magnets and everything else. But we have quite a bit of material on lead magnets and using lead magnets in sales funnels inside this PDF. So go ahead and grab it. So free download. I spelled that right. And so that’s fantastic. So go ahead and grab the funnel factor report. It is going to walk you through how lead magnets are used in sales funnels basically. So here, let me … Let’s see. All right.
2. Surveys, Chatbots, and Quizzes
After you have your lead magnet, rather than having a lead magnet, there are some other cool things that you can do. You can do surveys, you can do chatbots. So surveys are fantastic because they lead people down a path. We talked last week about survey sales funnels or survey segmentation sales funnels last Friday, I believe. So you can check out the blog for that. I think it was episode 20. So survey sales funnels lead people down the path and put people in buckets based on what their interests are, what they’re into and then you can market to them based on that.
But surveys are really, really great lead generation strategies and tools too. There is a plugin that we’ve used for a couple of clients. Let me just switch over to a web browser here. I’m going to stop sharing my screen here and then I’m going to share my screen here. All right. We are looking at this. So the last link that I dropped was for the funnel factor here.
You can go ahead and download this report for free. This is a great example of a lead magnet and it’s a great example of a landing page where you would opt-in. We’ve run a lot of tests on this specific landing page style and it converts higher than anything else we’ve tested. Just use it, rip it off, use it and rebuild it wherever you’re going to rebuild it or whatever. This format works really, really, really well.
Survey Software
There’s a couple of survey softwares that we like to use and they integrate into your CRM.
- bucket.io – you can end up putting people into buckets based on how they answer certain questions. You can segment them and then literally market to them because you know what it is they’re into.
- JotForm
- Typeform – this is basically an online form builder. You can integrate integrated with Zapier into a CRM. So depending on how people answer, then they get put into different buckets.
JotForm employees conditional logic, as does Typeform. Quite a few of the form tools, employ conditional logic. If somebody answers a question one way, then they go down one path, and if they answer it a different way they go down a different path. So what that lets you do is customize the responses based on how qualified somebody is for working with you in the future.
Another one that we like to use, so Typeform is another one. Typeform, so let’s see. Typeform.com. Typeform is very, very seamless. It’s very chatbot-like, and that’s actually the last example is a chatbot. So I like Drift. Drift from a chatbot standpoint, is what we use in our business but basically, it is a chatbot and you can set it up so that people go down different paths, and then ultimately those paths fire into … There’s conditional logic and they fire into the CRM and you can fire off information or fire off marketing material based on how they answer certain questions and messages inside the chatbot.
The one that is really, really cool that we just started playing with is Thrive Quizzes, Thrive Quiz Builder. It is interesting because it’s a little complicated to set up but it adds a social component to it. You can go ahead and watch this video. But basically what they do is you can do conditional logic. There are individual elements of it, so there’s a landing page and then there’s a quiz and then there’s a confirmation.
The landing page basically kicks off the quiz and then from there, it gets into the confirmation. Then the quiz, you can segment people out, and then you can even score based on how they answer questions. You can run some marketing automation based on how they answer questions. And you can also pop up a score at the end of the quiz and let them share it on social media, which brings other people on the front side.
It becomes this self-fulfilling prophecy, maybe. But basically, you can have somebody go through a quiz and then they get a score and then they share it to Facebook, which puts more people on the front side of the quiz and you’re collecting all of their email addresses as they go through. So it really is interesting, interesting software that you can build an email list with, and then you can also build some marketing automation around. So super, super-nice stuff. Here, I’m just going to drop this link in here for you. So this is Thrive Quiz Builder. Cool stuff.
3. Give-away
Number three is just literally doing a giveaway. So whenever you want to incentivize somebody … I’ve actually never done a gift card giveaway from a lead generation strategies standpoint but I’ve had some clients who have. So basically what we’ve set up for them was a giveaway, and the giveaway was usually something related to the business.
Whenever we’ve done Amazon gift card giveaways for clients, it hasn’t necessarily worked all that well. I mean, you get to people who are interested and want that Amazon gift card, which doesn’t necessarily give you the best leads all the time. But when the giveaway item is something that they need, like we have a photography client who gave away a free year of Photoshop or Adobe Creative Suite, and that worked really, really, really well for them. They also gave away Photoshop brushes.
There are things that you can incentivize and it’s better if it’s an asset that you have and you run the giveaway for that. So basically somebody ops in for something digital usually. And then if they share it with their audience, they get this extra thing. So if they share it with three of their friends, then they get this extra thing. And that extra thing might be a video course or it might be a plugin or it might be something.
It works really well for software and that kind of stuff. And then it ends up just being this automated lead generation strategies and machine and you don’t necessarily have to spend a whole lot of money on it. You can usually feel it on the front side originally. But then the whole thing just takes on a life of its own. So giveaways are nice tools. We tend to do lead magnets more and then surveys second-most, but we don’t really do gift cards too much. It does work.
4. Guest on Podcasts, Blogs, etc.
The fourth lead generation strategy is to be a guest on podcasts and guest blogs and all that stuff. I used to do quite a bit of guest blogging way back in the day. Had to be like 10 years ago, 8 or 10 years ago when I was doing a lot of SEO stuff. I was a guest blogger on some social media sites and I would write blog posts. So guest blogs, the benefit back then was you end up getting a link to your website. So that link transferred like link juice, SEO juice, to your website and then helped get you ranked for keyword phrases that you were trying to get ranked for.
That was really the idea behind guest blogging way back then. Not so much anymore. I mean, now you want to get high-profile links from other sites. So guest blogging is a good way of doing that. But that’s largely … Every once in a while you’re going to get a click-through from that guest site, that guest blog, but really to generate a significant amount of leads, you need to be doing it all the time.
We have a couple of clients who write for Forbes and who write for some other publications and they generate leads, but not as many leads as if they were just to run paid traffic to their lead magnets. And they have since started running paid traffic to the lead magnets. But they have this huge following on these guest blogging sites and they do generate some leads and the leads tend to be pretty high quality. But in terms of lead generation strategies, it doesn’t trump running paid traffic to a lead magnet or a landing page.
Podcasts, however, are a little bit different. So podcasts, doing an audio podcast, and then having some sort of a verbal go here to download a free report or go here to apply to work with us or go here to whatever. Having some sort of a verbal prompt is a little different because of those podcasts. I mean, blog posts live forever too, but podcasts live forever and also have rave followings. So not many people go to a website, especially a B2B website, to check on the news. They rarely even add it to a feed reader anymore. If they see something that they’re interested in, they will click on it, but they don’t necessarily actively go and follow sites.
If a site throws something at them and it looks interesting, they will click on a link in an email or a link on Facebook or whatever, go and read it. The last job that I had eons ago, one of my coworkers on his lunch break every single day would go and look at this one car website.
Every day for 30 minutes he would eat his lunch and he would go and troll through the 10 or 12 or 15 or 20 articles that were new on this car site. And that just doesn’t happen anymore so much. I mean, it might be for hobbyists and for people who are into a certain niche, I guess, maybe. But I know even I like doing DIY stuff and woodworking stuff and I don’t actively go to a website, one website, to look and see what they’ve published. I just don’t. I might look at the DIY section in Apple News to see what is new, but that doesn’t always lead me to the same website.
Even in the morning I’ll go and post a bunch of stuff from business articles and start-up articles and whatever, and it might be from Forbes or Entrepreneur, but they publish hundreds of articles a day. So there’s usually a pretty good mix and I’ll flick through it and if something catches my eye, I’ll check it out. Now a podcast, you subscribe to that channel.
Your iPhone or your Android device is actively downloading the newest additions of that podcast and is also letting you know that there’s a new podcast out. So typically if you listen to three or five different podcasts every week when you’re mowing the lawn or doing dishes or whatever, then you’re going to check out that podcast and that podcast lives forever. So as people become aware of the podcast, aware of the person, the host of the show that you are on, they’re going to listen to that podcast.
Now, ten years ago or eight years ago, I actually had a podcast, I called it, I think it was JD’s podcast actually, way before it was cool. And I think I had 14 episodes and one time I logged in and I saw 60,000 downloads and I’m like, “What the hell is this?” It just blew my mind that 60,000 people download it. But there weren’t nearly as many podcasts as there were now.
Podcasting, being a guest on podcast shows, gives you a lot of additional content that you can tweak. Something to get into and think about.
Now, let’s see. Lead generation strategy number five swaps. So I used to do a lot with swaps. So there was a … What’s that called? Warrior Forum from an internet marketing standpoint. Every once in a while when I first, got started online, I would do list swaps with Warrior Forum folks. So basically I would give them 100 bucks and they’d mail it to their list of 800 people and then that was that. They would promote a lead magnet and then that’s how I built my list. It’s usually a pretty good way of kind of getting started.
Yesterday we talked about lists.nextmark.com which is a different way of basically getting a solo ad, getting somebody to mail your list for you. So if you are in the insurance business, you are providing services for insurance professionals, you can look up insurance and then go and rent an email list and have them mail your ad out to their email list.
Here we have the Insurance Carriers Journal, Insurance Product Buyers Register. So there are 48,000 people on this list. There are lots of ways that you can do swaps or you can do solo ads to generate traffic and generate leads on your own list. You just want to make sure that you do your research before you actually mail the stuff out. At the end of the day, this is a paid traffic strategy. You’re paying money for somebody to mail their list and then you’re expecting clicks, expecting opt-ins. So you just want to make sure to do your due diligence there.
Lead generation strategies number six is referrals. This is social media referrals. This is basically not partnering. It is going out and networking with people who are either in your space or tangential to your space. Let’s say you are a website designer. You might have friends who are CPAs, lawyers in your local area, or just online in general.
When they have somebody who comes in and says, “Hey, I need a website done,” then they would ship them over to you. This isn’t necessarily just from a service provider standpoint. When somebody is looking for more information, making sure that on your website you have your landing pages, you have different things, different lead generation strategies, and mechanisms. You’re able to transition that referral, that traffic, that person into a lead for your business.
And that leads to the seventh strategy which is just having content. There are a lot of ways that you can generate a lead once they are on your website. Landing pages, lead magnets, surveys, chat boxes, the whole deal, all of that happens on your website. Podcasts, guest blogging, all of it happens. Once you get somebody to your website, then you convert them into a lead.
One of the plugins that we like, we like easy stuff that you can implement and then gives you quite a bit of different ways to turn that visitor into a lead. SumoMe is a great WordPress plugin that lets you … It gives you a bunch of different ways that you can … Oops, I just hit my mic. It gives you a bunch of different ways that you can turn that person into a lead in your email list. So there are lots of different things that it’ll do. We use it a lot from WordPress. So we’ll use the WordPress plugin a lot.
There is another one which is Thrive Leads, which we actually like better. So Thrive Leads, there it is. It’s in the Thrive Themes. Thrive Leads gives you six or seven different ways that you can generate leads from exit pops to hero bars. We have inline forms and then two-step opt-in forms. It’ll slide in from the bottom or there are opt-in widgets. So there are lots of different ways that you can turn that visitor into a lead.
Content Lock is a cool one. We haven’t played with that too much. The Scroll Mat is cool too. This yes, no, in multiple-choice form is really, really, really powerful and it really ties back into the survey piece, which is you can end up putting people in buckets. So pretty powerful stuff.
Now in terms of lead generation strategies, that’s seven tips, seven things that you can implement on your website. The biggest thing is making sure that you have content though. Generating content, putting it on your website, getting search traffic, running paid traffic campaigns, all of it is important. But to generate leads, you need to be attracting eyeballs. Every lead, email list, email person that you have that signs up for your list is a human being. There’s a human being on the other side of the computer. It means if you are not generating traffic, there’s no way you’re going to be generating leads.
You want to have this stuff set up, but then very quickly afterward you need to go out and say, “Okay, how am I going to get traffic to my website?” If it’s going to be free, like if you need free traffic, then you need to.
If you need free traffic, then it’s content. You’re going to be investing time in writing content or doing live streams like this. After, get them transcribed or whatever, but you still need traffic. If you’re doing paid traffic, then you might be doing some video editing, might be doing some image editing, whatever, and setting ads up on Facebook or Google or Pinterest or Twitter or whatever, YouTube. You’re going to be getting ads up and paying per click.
For more information on building funnels from scratch, click here!
But regardless, to generate leads, you need traffic. So in future episodes, we’re going to talk about running Facebook. Maybe next week we’ll talk about Facebook ads after we get through this email stuff. But anyway, I hope you enjoyed today’s lesson on lead generation strategies.
Let me know if you have any questions or thoughts. Just send me a message here on Facebook or go to doneforyou.com/start. Fill out the little form and then tell us a little bit about your business. You can then schedule a call and talk to us. If you have any questions at all, then just go to doneforyou.com/GSD. Then those questions we’ll answer on an upcoming show.
Tomorrow at 10:00 AM we’re going to talk about copy. So we’re going to talk about writing email copy, the different pieces of your autoresponders, your subject line, your body copy, all that stuff. We’re going to talk about that. And if you have any questions between now and then just let me know.
