For most businesses, lead generation isn’t the main issue when it comes to increasing sales and growing business. The issues are usually churn, poor sales systems, no systems or processes, or something else along those lines. But what if the thing your business needs most right now really is more leads? What do you do?
The first step to increasing your lead generation is to reconsider what you’re asking potential customers to do and how you’re asking them to do it. This line of thinking has changed over the last couple of decades, and it’s critical to understand how that’s important.
Knowing How People Buy
The primary thing to review is what you’re asking your lead to do on the home page of your website. Your business’s landing page is a crucial part of your overall marketing. I review landing pages for clients where the first ask on the page is often to schedule an appointment. This is a common mistake and comes from days past. Think about business expectations from the ‘90s. When someone walked in or called your store, they were interested in getting info to buy. That’s just not the case for someone hitting your landing page today. Odds are that the visitor is nowhere near the buying stage. Asking them to leap from having a vague interest to scheduling an appointment is unrealistic, and it simply doesn’t work.
To be a great marketer, you have to slow your process. Help others get what they need to make a buying decision (mostly) in their own time frame.
All About The Magnet
The easiest way to slow a sale down to a prospect’s speed, which ultimately results in higher lead generation and more sales, is to make a lead magnet offer on your website or landing page.
For those who don’t know, a lead magnet is something of value you provide for free or at a very low cost that allows your target buyer to engage with your business before they actually buy. It also gives you a chance to gather their contact information.
Lead magnets are a simple concept, but so many people get them wrong. The #1 mistake I see is when lead magnets are too narrowly focused.
For example, let’s look at a client who’s in functional medicine. He’s advertising in a gym because he does amazing things to help people lose weight. He knows that a common reason people get stuck and can’t lose weight is because of their thyroid. Originally, his team wanted to make an ad all about managing your thyroid, but this approach was way too narrow. If he’d gone that route, he would’ve eliminated over 98% of people who don’t know they even have a thyroid issue. So, even if 1,000 people had seen it, only 20 would have known they have this condition. That would have been the best-case scenario. Of those 20, how many do you think would have responded? Not many.
Going Wide
To come up with a lead magnet, you need to go broad, not narrow. You can use other more specific methods at a later time. For your homepage lead magnet, ask yourself, “What is my prospect thinking about or worrying about 30, 60, and even 90 days before they buy from me?”
In the case of my client in functional medicine, leads are thinking about getting in shape and losing weight. After all, they’re at a gym. A weight loss magnet is guaranteed to get a better opt-in rate than a lead magnet about thyroid issues. Plus, even if the prospect does have a thyroid issue, they may still want supplements and/or other treatments to get them into shape.
Other lead magnet ideas for this client include a service to help people who have plateaued on gains or people who have too much stress, the latter of which is generic enough to appeal to a large portion of the population. Either way you slice it, fixing the thyroid isn’t a good lead magnet idea in a cold lead-generation setting.
Choosing The Best Magnet For You
I use a book on newsletters as one of my lead magnets. It works well, but with totally cold traffic, it sucks. If you haven’t seen our shock and awe package, you can snag a copy as my gift to you at NewsletterPro.com/freebook.
When generating leads in cold traffic, we have to switch our message to “Stop Losing Customers” or “Get More Referrals.” If we don’t educate leads on why they would want a newsletter, people disqualify themselves because they don’t realize they’ll grow faster if they lower the number of lost customers they have each month and get more referrals.
We live in a time when people want facts before they make any major buying decision. With that knowledge, we can provide prospects with the information they want (how to lose more weight or how to lose fewer customers) while educating them on the information they need (how to get their thyroid tested or how newsletters and relationship marketing helps them make more money by decreasing churn, increasing referrals, etc.). Check out these steps for ideas on how to create your own killer lead magnet.
The Catch
There is a potential problem to going wide: When you create your lead magnet, you have to seed it with information that both directly and indirectly educates people and leads them to the conclusion you would like them to draw. You have to figure out how to appeal to a large pool of people while still making each individual feel like you’re catering to them directly. Doing so successfully can be tricky.
If I were writing a lead magnet on losing fewer customers, I would first point out that the #1 reason a customer leaves is that they feel like the business is indifferent to them. The best way to overcome this obstacle is to build a relationship with your customers and let them know more about who you are, both personally and professionally. Once they feel connected to you and feel like they know you on a personal level, that perception of indifference will go away as long as you nurture the relationship. This method, called personal marketing, is profoundly successful.
Second, I would tell people about the huge issue with building customer relationships: distribution. How do you build a relationship with someone without communicating on a regular basis? I would finally point out that most methods of communication are lacking. Emails only have an 11% average open rate. On the flip side, direct mail has a 90% open rate, so newsletters are an effective vehicle for building relationships and, in turn, lowering the number of customers you lose each month.
Keeping It Simple
Of course, the above example is very abbreviated. If I were creating a real magnet to boost my generation of leads, I would have gone way more in-depth. But hopefully this drives the point home and helps you see how to pivot your lead magnet message when you go wide.
Many people overcomplicate lead magnets. I used to do that, so I understand. The good news is that they don’t have to be complicated! They don’t have to take weeks to create, and they can have a profound impact on your company’s success.
