I often talk about how to close and convert more leads to sales once you have those leads. I sometimes even go into relationship-building strategies with a newsletter or other media. But what about simply acquiring more leads with a lead magnet?
If you’ve been reading my newsletter (or this blog) for a while, you’ll know I’ve found that people don’t often need more leads; they need better systems and processes for nurturing those leads and closing sales, or they need to follow up more. But sometimes, you really do need more leads.
There’s a laundry list of media resources online that offer good lead generation strategies, including one example from Entrepreneur.com and another on the HubSpot blog. But I’m not going to talk about lead generation today. Instead, I want to talk about catching quality leads.
Don’t Make This Mistake
First thing’s first: Not all sources are created equal, and one mistake I’ve watched people make — and have even made myself in the past — is trying to simply take what worked somewhere else and duplicate it for a new media source of lower quality.
Years ago, when I made this mistake, I was trying to take a working book funnel that was getting warm traffic from website visitors and JV partners and use it on Facebook to attract cold traffic. I did get opt-ins — 500 in a single month, which included full contact details like names, addresses, and phone numbers. Unfortunately, around 400-plus of these were bad leads.
The whole campaign was a failure. It would be easy to say Facebook simply doesn’t work, or that it doesn’t work for my business, but the reality was that I was using the wrong bait (lead magnet) with the wrong nurture and follow-up system.
When switching to a totally cold traffic source like Facebook, I should have known to switch my lead magnet and follow-up system. I needed bait that would allow me to find more targeted leads and a system to better filter good leads from bad ones. Once I filtered the good from the bad and warmed the leads up a bit, I could drop them seamlessly into the warm funnel I’d already built.
I was fishing in the ocean but trying to use the same bait I’d use to fish in the stream behind my house. It didn’t work. Same goes for whale hunting — you can’t use bass bait to hunt a whale.
Instead, Experiment
Most people have one lead magnet, if any. I read a study about a year ago, and it said that companies with five or more lead magnets generate 200% more leads than companies with one lead magnet. Even if you only got 100% more leads, don’t you think that increase would be worth the effort of building five working lead magnets?
If you’re stuck on what bait to use, I get it. That is the hard part. I wish I had a formula that said, “Use this bait to be flooded with new customers.” If I did, I’d be happy to sell it to everyone, but the problem is that it takes a ton of trial and error to find what works.
Here’s the best advice I can give you: Don’t fall in love with the lead magnet you create. If the market doesn’t like it or it is attracting the wrong prospects, you have to change it. Sometimes you have to show the market what they think they want and then also give them what they need.
By the way, changing your lead magnet doesn’t always require a whole rewrite. Sometimes it’s just the headline or copy that needs to change. Sometimes that bait will work well, just not with the type of media you’re trying to use it in. Whatever the case, don’t get discouraged just because you don’t knock it out of the park the first time.
