Day 1 - What is a Lead?
As Digital Marketers we use the word so much. Get Leads, Convert Leads, This
Lead, That Lead, and so on. However, what is a "lead" in the real sense?
That's what we are going to learn today.
There are a lot of people out there in the real world who would want to buy your
products and services. You are here with a product or service that you want to sell.
How are you going to reach out to your potential customers?
A lead is called a lead because it leads to a sale.
A lead is a connecting link between you (your business) and your prospect who is
out there in the real world.
A lead usually consists of the following 3 things:
● Name
● Email ID
● Phone Number
Sometimes the leads do not contain the names. Sometimes it is either the email ID
or the phone number.
The Email ID or the phone number helps you reach out to your potential prospect
and have a conversation with them so that you can tell them about your products
and services.
If you want to have a sales call, you need leads.
If you want to invite people to a webinar, you need leads.
If you want to invite people to an event, you need leads.
What are not leads?
When we are talking about what are leads, it also helps to talk about what are not
leads.
A lot of people focus a lot on building their social media following. But they are not
your leads.
All these are not leads:
● Facebook Fans
● Instagram Followers
● Twitter Followers
● YouTube Subscribers
You are having a connection in someone else's platform and that is not going to be
helping if you want to sell something to them. Many times, you will not be able to get
100% reach (or even 30%) because they are the users of the platform and not your
users. Hence you will not be able to reach out to them on demand.
I am sending this message to you by email. And you are my user. I have direct
access to you. This is my platform. I like to use social media sites to build brand
awareness and get people into my platform. I don't want to stay on social platforms.
So that's it for today's lesson on what is a lead and what's not a lead.
Looking forward to seeing you at tomorrow's lesson.
Day 2 - Do we need lead generation for B2C?
Welcome to Day 2 of your 100-day Lead Generation Course.
If your business doesn't need lead generation, then there is no point in trying to learn
how to generate leads, right?
So when does a business not need lead generation?
A business doesn't need lead generation when it is selling low priced consumer
goods that are simple in nature.
When consumers need not go through a tough decision-making process to buy
something, and when they do not need a lot of time to decide, generating leads is
pointless.
Here are some examples of low priced consumer goods:
● Candy
● Soap
● Pen
● Cookies
● Body spray
These FMCG (Fast-moving consumer goods) products are simple, low priced, and
attract a lot of repeat buyers.
Companies that sell FMCG products do not need lead generation.
Imagine how difficult it would be if you had to generate leads for someone who is
interested in a bar of soap, have a salesperson call them and convince them to buy
the soap and close the deal.
It is not practical because the amount of profit that you make from the sale of the
soap is not enough to pay for the sales person's time and you would end up making
losses with the sales process.
It is also not required because the decision-making process for buying soap is
simple. Only when a product or service is complex and has a lot of questions to be
answered about it, a salesperson needs to be involved.
Many FMCG products are simple products and decision making is usually impulsive.
In such cases, brands will engage in marketing activities to raise brand awareness
about the brand and get a strong market positioning within the market that they are
operating in.
For example, Gillette is a good brand for men's razor blades and they have a strong
market position as the leader when it comes to razor blades. They do not generate
any leads for the sales of their products. They just advertise and build brand
awareness.
(What would you do if you had salespeople that do not take a salary or a commission
from you? Would you employ them to sell your low priced, simple B2C products?
Probably yes. But in the real world, you cannot hire people at no cost. But you can
close yourself digitally and use marketing automation to sell without any human
effort. That's something we will look at in future lessons).
Can you think of all the products and services that do not require lead generation?
In the next lesson, we will discuss if we need lead generation of B2B and Enterprise
products and services. See you in tomorrow's lesson.
Day 3 - Lead Generation for B2B and Enterprise
Welcome to Day 3 of your 100-day Lead Generation Course.
In yesterday's lesson, we talked about why it is not required to generate leads for
B2C when the products are simple and low priced.
Consumers need not go through a long decision-making process to buy such
products and most of the products are purchased on impulse.
There are cases where you will need to generate leads for B2C products, but we will
look into it in future lessons.
Today let's discuss Lead Generation for B2B and Enterprise products.
Is lead generation required for it?
Absolutely yes.
Without generating leads for a B2B product or service it is very difficult to sell it.
The products are high priced and also complex in nature.
For example, if I have to sell my digital marketing services to a company, I have to
generate leads.
The number of people who can be my potential customers is very low and I cannot
do mass marketing or advertising for my services.
Do you think I would end up getting customers for my digital marketing agency if I
put a billboard in a busy junction? It might help in brand awareness, but people are
not just going to see an ad and buy a complex service with a 6-months contract.
When you are selling high-end services and products for B2B and Enterprise, lead
generation is also easy.
You might be thinking that isn't lead generation difficult in such cases?
No.
Lead generation is easy - but the sales and conversion process is difficult.
To sell well, you need a brand, a personal brand, and a good offer combined with a
strong sales pitch.
Let's look at an example from my own experience.
I sold a digital marketing funnel building service to a big publication. The publication
was YourStory. I had a feeling that if they did digital marketing well, they would be
able to scale up their revenues fast.
I wanted to get in touch with their CEO and I was able to do it. It took a lot of
patience and persistence, but when I got in touch with her, I requested a meeting
and I got it.
In the meeting, we pitched our services and we closed the deal along with some
advanced sales and negotiation tactics.
Here, the lead generation was not difficult. We knew their contact details. But I was
able to get a response from them because I had a personal brand for myself as a
Digital Marketer and they have heard about me. I also did a very strong sales pitch
and used my negotiation skills to close the sale.
Let's take another example of a company with products and services for high-end
clients. Wipro serving HDFC Bank. If Wipro has to sell their software development
services to HDFC, they will not be generating leads online nor will they advertise
their services. They will get in contact with the right decision-makers.
Getting a response from the decision-makers and closing the deal is not easy, but
the lead generation is not difficult. You just know who your target customers are and
you get in touch with them. Your target customers will be very low in number.
So what I am trying to tell you here is that lead generation is NOT required via digital
marketing if you are selling very simple B2C products (Lesson 2), or very high-end
B2B and Enterprise products (this lesson).
Lead Generation is required when you are selling high priced complex B2C products
or low priced B2B products. We will discuss this in the next lesson.
Day 4 - Lead Generation for High End B2C Products
In lesson 3, we learned that we do not need lead generation for basic B2C products
that are low priced and simple.
For example, if you are selling candy or a pen, it is a simple low priced product and
doesn't need lead generation.
The sales cycle is short and the decision-making process is easy. Many of these
products and services are bought on impulse.
Even if the end consumer makes a wrong purchase, it is not something to worry
about. If I spend 10 rupees on a pen and if it doesn't write properly, I will not lose
sleep over it.
My time is more valuable than going back to the shop and asking for a refund.
However, when it comes to high-end B2C products, we need to do lead generation.
Let's take two examples of high-end B2C products.
What are the biggest purchases that a consumer will make in his lifetime? It is easy
to guess.
The biggest purchase would be a house.
People end up spending their entire life savings to buy a home. The next biggest
purchase that they will make will be a car.
Let's first think about buying a home.
The Process of Buying a Home:
If someone is interested in buying a home, he/she will look at an ad and will call the
number on that ad. Or they will look at an ad online, click on it, visit the landing page
and fill out a form with their contact information.
This contact information becomes a lead for the seller. As we discussed in lesson 1,
this is a lead because it leads to a sale.
This contact information is the connecting link between the buyer and the seller.
Once the seller gets the contact information he will call the prospective buyer and
schedule a site visit.
Without seeing the house in person, the buyer cannot make a buying decision. This
is a complex product and once the purchase is done, it is difficult to reverse the
transaction.
So the buyer will visit the house (or a model house if it is still under construction) and
then will ask a lot of questions to the salesperson.
● Does it have a good water supply?
● Is this a good neighborhood?
● What about the facilities in this apartment building?
● What about the security and so on.
These are the questions and objections that the buyer has before he can go ahead
with the purchase. The decision-making process can take anywhere from 3 to 6
months. The sales cycle is long in this case.
The seller needs to generate the leads, profile the leads, score the leads, and then
close the sale with constant follow up. (All these strategies will be discussed in the
future lessons).
Now let's take another example of a high-end purchase.
The purchase of a Car:
After a house purchase, the next biggest purchase for an end consumer would be
the purchase of a car. It is not a one time purchase but it can happen once in 3-5
years. Since it is a complex product, lead generation is required for this.
This is how the process would flow:
● The buyer sees an ad online for a car.
● He visits the landing page and downloads a brochure.
● He gives his contact details to download the brochure.
● Then he watches a welcome video.
● Below the welcome video, there is a link to request for a test ride.
The form asks a lot of questions such as:
● What car do you currently own?
● When are you planning to purchase the new car?
● Will you be buying it as an individual or as a company?
● When do you want to request for a test ride?
● Do you need financing for the car or will you pay the full amount
upfront?
The questions that are being asked in the form is very important to score and profile
the leads. The salesperson may not have time to call every lead and give the test
ride of the car to them.
He has to filter out the highly qualified buyers from the unqualified ones. Many car
enthusiasts who don't have the money to buy cars would still request for a test ride.
The information filled in the form will help the salesperson to prioritize the leads.
That's why lead profiling and scoring becomes important. In future lessons, I will
show you how lead-profiling and scoring works in real life with practical tools.
You can see that in both the cases mentioned above the sale cannot happen without
lead generation.
No one will see an ad and swipe their credit card to buy a home or a car. Lead
generation and sales are required in this case because the buyer has a lot of
questions that need to be cleared before the sale can happen. And that can be
cleared only by a salesperson. And for that, the salesperson needs the contact
information of the buyer.
That's why lead generation becomes very important. The same method can be
applied for any B2C product that is high-end.
If you are selling an interior-design service or an appliance that is high priced, you
need lead generation.
In the first few weeks, we will be focusing on the theory and fundamentals of lead
generation which is very important. Without understanding the principles and
fundamentals, the strategy and tactics will not make any sense.
If you are looking for tactics and strategies that you can apply immediately, please
have patience, they are coming to you in the future lessons. If you understand the
principles properly, you will be able to come up with your own strategies and tactics.
That's it for today's lesson on lead generation for high-end B2C products and
services.
In tomorrow's lesson, we will talk about lead generation for low-end B2B products
and services.
Day 5 - What are Lead Generation Funnels?
In the last three lessons, we talked about lead generation for high-end B2C products
and high-end B2B products.
We also understood that low-end B2C products that are simple don't require lead
generation.
The effort that is invested in lead generation is not worth it because the profits that
we make from each sale is not going to be enough to justify the efforts in lead
generation and sales. Also many times, the end customers do not want to share their
contact information and talk to a salesperson when they are buying something
simple. They just want to make the payment, purchase it, and use it.
If they have to give the contact information and wait for a salesperson to get back,
they might not like it. Imagine the last time you ordered something from Amazon.
You just ordered it. We don't want to talk to someone in such cases even if someone
is available to talk to. It takes time and time is limited. Time is money.
So lead generation is only required when the price of the product is high and the
product is complex. Like a house or a car.
However, as a business, if you are generating a lot of leads then you will not be able
to call all the leads and serve them.
If you generate 1,000 leads a day and you have 10 salespeople who can call only 10
leads a day then what will you do with the rest of the 900 leads?
If your sales team tries to pick leads randomly and call them, there is a high chance
that a lot of these leads will not be interested. It would be an inefficient use of the
time of the sales team. And you as a business cannot hire 100 salespeople because
that would be too costly.
As a thought experiment, consider that you can hire 100 salespeople and each
person calls 10 leads a day. And you are generating 1000 leads a day. What do you
think would be the conversion?
Let's say out of every 100 calls to the leads, 1 person converts into a customer. At
this conversion ratio, you are going to generate 1 sale per salesperson for every 10
days on average. That means each salesman can convert 3 leads into customers a
month.
Recap of the numbers:
● Leads generated per day: 1,000
● Total salesmen: 100
● Calls per day per salesman: 10
● Calls per month per salesman: 300
● Conversion ratio: 1/100 (1%)
● Conversions per month: 30
● Conversions per month per salesman: 3
Now the biggest problem you will face is that 3 sales are not good enough for you to
make enough profits and pay the salary of the salesperson.
The salary or the commission you pay the sales guy is going to be more than what
you make as profits.
So what we need to do here is increase the conversion ratio of each salesperson.
Instead of each salesman converting 1 lead into a customer out of 100 leads, we
need to get each salesperson to convert 10 leads into customers out of 100 leads.
And this can happen only if you create a lead generation funnel.
There is no lead source in the world which will give you high quality leads out of the
box.
Every traffic source online will send you all kinds of leads and we need to filter
through them. It's like mining for diamonds. You need to process a lot of coal before
you can find the diamonds. That's what a funnel does for you.
A funnel will filter out the high quality leads from a heap of leads and gives you the
best quality ones.
Getting back to our example, remember we are generating 1000 leads a day and we
do not have 100 salespeople. We have only 10. Each salesperson can call only 10
leads a day.
So what we need to do is find out what are the top 100 leads out of the 1000 leads
so that we can assign 10 leads to every salesperson.
We find out the high quality leads in such a way that the buyer is in one of these 10
leads.
It's like predicting which area of the coal deposit will have a higher concentration of
diamonds and processing just that instead of processing the entire coal deposit in
that area.
That's why we need Lead Generation Funnels. The funnel is a filtration mechanism
to find out the best leads that can be engaged with. With a funnel, we can get the
same conversions with 1/10th of the sales team. The funnel does the rest of the work
for us. That's why marketing automation is important. It cannot automate all the
tasks, but it can make us more efficient.
Recap of the numbers with a funnel:
● Leads generated per day: 1,000
● High-quality leads identified: 10% (100 per day)
● Total salesmen: 10
● Calls per day per salesman: 10
● Calls per month per salesman: 300
● Conversion ratio: 10/100 (10%)
● Conversions per month: 30
● Conversions per month per salesman: 30
In the process, the funnel also builds trust with the leads and converts the cold leads
into warm leads.
I hope in today's lesson you understood the importance of lead generation funnels.
In the next lesson, we will look at an example of how a lead generation funnel can be
applied to B2C leads, and in the lesson after that, we will look at how the same
technique can be applied to low-end B2B products as well.
See you tomorrow.
Day 6 - How I Generate Leads for my Business
In the previous lesson, we talked about lead generation funnels and why they are
important to filter out the high quality leads from the low-quality ones.
Filtering high-quality leads is important because when you are doing high-end B2C
sales or low-end B2B sales you will have more leads and a good mix of low quality
leads in it.
When you are generating leads via digital marketing a good mix of untargeted and
uninterested leads will come into your system.
When you are prospecting for B2B leads and reaching out to businesses, you are
generating very high-quality leads.
For example, Clever.com is software for schools for delivering education online.
Their minimum pricing starts at $5000 per year. Most of their customers are
enterprise customers.
In such cases, they will just reach out to their target customers via a sales force and
start converting the leads.
If you are towards the middle of the pricing spectrum you might not have that luxury.
That's why we need lead generation funnels.
Before we dive deep into lead generation funnels and how they work, in today's
lesson I want to give you an example of my lead generation funnel.
To create a lead generation funnel, you need a lead magnet. The lead magnet is the
first part of the entire funnel. Without a lead magnet, you will not be able to generate
a lot of leads through inbound marketing.
My lead magnet is my free digital marketing course with 25 videos. For people who
want to learn digital marketing, I give away this course for free. But to sign up,
people need to give me their name and email ID.
Once they give me their name and email ID, they become my lead. I created this
lead magnet a few years back. Once my lead magnet was ready, I went ahead and
started driving traffic to it.
First, I used search traffic to get the leads. I used to get more than 5000 visitors a
month via the search engines to my blog.
I converted the visitors into leads using this lead magnet (the 25 videos free digital
marketing course). Then I started driving traffic to the lead magnet using Facebook
Ads. And then I started using Google Ads to drive the traffic.
Once they enter their name and email ID, their course will start. I deliver one lesson
every day for 25 days. Until 25 days I do not sell anything. The videos are designed
to provide value and build trust with the audience.
Trust building is an important part of sales. Without trust, sales cannot happen. In an
offline sales model, trust is usually built via personal relationships.
If a salesman is good at his craft, he would build trust with his prospects and he
would close the deals. But when you are generating 100s or 1000s of leads, you
cannot have individual conversations with each person who is in your funnel. That's
why marketing automation helps in lead generation funnels.
An automated sequence of emails builds trust with your audience on automation.
You don't need to lift a finger. Setup the email sequence, get the leads and the
trust-building happens automatically. But as we all know, without sales the funnel is
not going to sustain itself.
"Sales" is the power source of the funnel. Sales give us transactions and
transactions will give us profits.
When we make profits, we can reinvest the money back into the creation of lead
magnets, back into traffic driving mechanisms like SEO, SEM, and Display Ads, and
back into CRM and Marketing Automation tools that help us build trust with the
audience.
So how do we sell in B2C when there is a funnel?
As we have discussed in the previous lesson, we need to pick out the high quality
leads from the low-quality ones to engage them in a sales process.
That's where the concept of lead scoring comes in.
I score the leads based on their behavior. For example, let's take 2 leads. 1 lead is
highly interested and there is a high chance she will buy. One lead is not so
interested and has a very low chance of buying.
The highly interesting lead will open all my emails and read through all the lessons.
The less interested lead will hardly open any emails. If I give 1 point for every email
open and 3 points for every click inside the email then I can find out who are the
highly interested leads and who is not so warmed up to my offer.
I would end up calling the highly interested leads and engage them in a sales
process.
"Sales" is a separate topic in itself and deserves a series of lessons on its own but
you get the idea.
The actual techniques of lead scoring will be discussed in future lessons.
That's it for today's lesson.
I hope you learned something new from the example I've given you.
Check out LearnDigitalMarketing.com and become my lead if you want to observe
how I have developed my lead generation and engagement funnel.
See you in tomorrow's lesson.
Day 7 - When do we need Lead Funnels?
In the previous lessons, we talked about Lead Generation funnels and I showed you
an example of how I have built my lead generation funnel.
We have also discussed that high-end B2B and enterprise products do not need a
lead generation funnel and low-end simple B2C products do not need leads at all.
Lead generation is required when you are selling a product that is high-priced, is
complex, and the buyer might have a lot of questions before buying your product or
service.
Please note that the requirement for lead generation and the requirement for lead
generation funnels are not the same things.
Lead generation is required when the product price is higher. But when the product
price is very high and the target market is very small, a lead generation funnel is not
required.
A lead generation funnel is required when you have a balance between the two.
Your products and services are not too cheap and simple, nor too costly and
complex.
A funnel is required when you have B2C products at a higher cost and B2B products
at a lower cost.
Examples of products and services where a funnel is required:
● High-end B2C Products like house, car, appliances.
● Low-end B2B products like software
So how can we visualize this?
I have made this chart which explains it clearly.
In the chart, you can see that there are two Y-axes.
The marketing effort goes down as the price of the product goes up.
The lead generation effort goes up when the price and complexity of the product
increases.
When the price is too low, you don't need leads, so you don't need lead generation
funnels.
When the price of the product is very high, every lead that you reach out to will be a
very high quality targeted lead, and you do not need a funnel in that case.
For example, Infosys, a large enterprise IT company, would reach out to people who
are the right fit for their services. They would already have a fair idea about their
target customers. Pinpointing the lead is not a problem at all. They would do
cold-emailing, meet, and connect with the right people in conferences and also reach
out to them via referrals. The sale is more dependent on the sales effort than the
marketing effort.
When do we need lead generation funnels?
We need lead generation funnels when we are somewhere in the middle of the chart
that I have shown above.
In the previous lesson, I talked about how I generate leads, nurture them, and filter
them to engage with the sales process. My business (the training one and not the
agency) is a B2C business. But the products (my training programs) are not low
priced. They are starting from 10,000 rupees ($150 approx). I cannot just market my
products and brand and expect people to buy. That's why I create a funnel.
Let's take a look at one of the B2B products I have - OptinChat.com. It is a lead
generation tool for website owners that collects names and email IDs of visitors. The
cost of the tool is $49 a month. The price of the product is not too high that I would
have a sales team that reaches out to people directly and sells them. The profit from
each sale wouldn't be enough to pay the sales team.
So even though OptinChat.com is a B2B tool, I market it in such a way that I would
sell a high-end B2C product. There are too many prospects out there for a manual
sales outreach to effective.
I generate leads for OptinChat by giving the free version of OptinChat for free and I
do webinars to sell the premium version.
In the next email, I will explain how the lead generation funnel for OptinChat (a
low-end B2B tool) works.
The funnel generates the leads, nurtures them to build trust with them, and converts
the cold leads into warm leads even before the sales process begins.
See you in tomorrow's lesson.
Day 8 - Case Study: B2B Lead Gen for OptinChat
In the previous lesson, we learned why Lead Generation funnels are important.
Lead Generation funnels are important because if your product price somewhere in
the middle, you will need to generate a lot of leads but you can only engage with a
small percentage of the leads.
The small percentage of the leads that you engage with should be the highly
qualified ones so that they can convert into customers.
In today's lesson, let's look at a case study.
The case study is from my own app - OptinChat.
What is OptinChat?
OptinChat is an app that can convert visitors into leads. There are many tools that
can convert visitors into leads but OptinChat is different. Most of the tools have a
popup on the screen which is irritating and doesn't provide a good user experience.
OptinChat shows a chat box that is non-intrusive. And the AI chat module chats with
the user in a conversational way. It asks for their name, email ID, and more
questions if required. All the details are collected and stored in a database. These
details can be passed on to any CRM of choice. You can have a look at the tool at
OptinChat.com
How I generate Leads for OptinChat?
I have a freemium model to generate leads for OptinChat. Instead of only giving the
pro version for a cost, there is a lite version for free. The free version of the tool has
limited options.
Every person who signs up for a free trial of OptinChat is a lead for me. And I can
use these leads to upsell the Pro version of OptinChat to them.
When someone signs up for OptinChat and deploys the tool on their website, it also
shows that it is powered by OptinChat. This is a link back to OptinChat.com and I
can generate leads via that.
As more people use OptinChat, the more visibility it gets and the more leads I can
generate.
But not all the leads to sign up will deploy OptinChat on their website. They will sign
up and sometimes forget about it.
The Email Sequence
When people sign up for OptinChat, I start an email sequence for them. The email
sequence is designed to educate them about OptinChat and convince them to
deploy the tool on their website. This email sequence goes on until they deploy it on
their website.
I do not talk about OptinChat Pro or persuade them to buy the premium version of
the tool until they have tried the free version. Because if they have not taken any
effort to deploy the free version then I can be pretty sure that they are not going to
use the paid version anytime soon.
The email sequence will keep going on until they deploy the tool on their website, or
unsubscribe from me. The sequence sends two emails per week. The sequence will
have all these kinds of emails until they deploy it:
● The story behind the development of OptinChat
● How to use OptinChat
● Why OptinChat is better than other email capture tools in the market.
● Success stories and case studies of customers using OptinChat
● Features and benefits of OptinChat
Once they deploy OptinChat on their website, the next email sequence will start.
Email Sequence for Existing Users of OptinChat Lite
Once the users deploy OptinChat on their website, they will be able to start collecting
emails with it. They will experience the tool and discover how the tool is better than
other tools.
Now it is time to convert them into users of OptinChat Pro.
There are many ways that a Lite user can be converted into a Pro user.
● They will upgrade without being asked to. They would want the Pro
features.
● They will upgrade after we follow up on email and direct them to a
sales page where the details of OptinChat Pro would be available.
● They will attend a webinar where I explain the features of OptinChat
and then they will upgrade.
● They will upgrade when the sales team engages with to explain the
benefits of upgrading to the Pro version.
Out of the 4 methods explained above, the first two methods do not require any lead
selection because they are automated.
Inviting people to a sales webinar and doing sales calls with a team would require
lead selection through the funnel. I would pick out high-quality leads who are
engaging with my emails and using OptinChat.
I would do a webinar or do a sales call only to the people who have deployed
OptinChat on their website. I would also look at the people who are having a high
number of page views on their website. If they have a lot of traffic and if they are
collecting a lot of emails, then I would make sure that my sales reps call them to
convert them into Pro customers.
How to do 121 Sales and how to sell on webinars are concepts that we will discuss
in the future lessons.
That's it for today's lesson. I hope you got an idea about how my lead generation and
sales funnel works for OptinChat.com
I will see you in tomorrow's lesson.
Day 9 - Types of Lead Magnets
It feels like yesterday when we got started with the 100-day Lead Generation Course
and it is already the 9th day. Time flies fast.
I am having a good time writing these lessons and I hope you are having a good time
learning them.
Before I jump into the next lesson, I would like to ask you:
● Are you finding the lessons useful?
● What have you learned so far?
● Tell me a bit about yourself, why are you learning lead generation?
You can reply to this and let me know, or you can tweet with the tag @highdeepak
on Twitter.
And with that note, let's get started with Lesson 9 for Day 9.
Types of Lead Magnets:
By now I am sure that you have a fair idea of how lead generation works for B2B and
B2C.
By now you would have discovered that there is a lot of common ground between
B2B and B2C when it comes to creating a lead generation funnel.
Whenever we talk about funnels and lead magnets, we will not identify it as B2B and
B2C anymore. It's common for both.
Even my business has a mix of B2B and B2C. A lot of people who sign up for my
digital marketing courses also sign up for my software tools.
You might be in a niche where you have a mix of B2B and B2C customers as well.
Even B2B companies that focus on outreach and prospecting will start generating
leads in the long term when the demand for their products and services increase.
That's why I am talking about funnels before we get into B2B lead generation
techniques directly.
In the upcoming lessons, I will tell you about a lot of tools that will help you generate
B2B leads directly, but before that, let's understand the types of lead magnets that
will help us build lead generation funnels.
So here are the different types of lead magnets that you can use to get people to
share their contact details with you. It's like an ethical bribe to get their contact
details. In most cases, these are given for free or at a very low price such as $1 or
99 rupees.
● Ebook
● Mini-course
● Trial of a course
● Trial of a software product
● Checklist or cheatsheet
● Template
● A form to get people to express interest in a product or service
● Request for a test ride of a car
● Request for a site visit of a real estate property
● Request for a free demo of a product
● Book a consultation call
● Membership to a community
● Report generator
● Resume generator
● Calculators
● Spreadsheets
● Mindmaps
● Register for webinars
● Recording of a webinar
● Slidedeck
● Quiz
● Survey
● Coupons
● Case studies
● Waiting list
● Applications (Internship, Jobs, or Memberships)
Out of the list I have given, here are some of the lead magnets I have used in my
business (and some I am planning to use in the future).
eBooks:
eBooks are one of the best types of lead magnets. Many products and services have
the perception that if it is cheap then it is not going to be of high quality. Books and
eBooks have a history of being cheap but at the same time, they can have
life-changing information in it.
Mini-Course:
The best performing lead magnet of all time for me is the 25 video course on Digital
Marketing which has been hosted at LearnDigitalMarketing.com. It has generated
over a million leads for me since I started my training business in 2016.
Trial of a Product:
OptinChat's Lite version of the product is like a trial for the pro version. People can
use the trial version of my app for unlimited time but if they need more features they
need to upgrade to the pro version.
Membership:
I have a private community at Tribe.DigitalDeepak.com and when people sign up for
the community they have to give me their contact details. All of them are potential
customers for my courses and high-level membership programs.
Webinars:
I conduct webinars from time to time and when people register for the webinar, they
have to give their name, email ID, and phone number. It becomes a good lead
magnet. They also end up expressing interest in the product or service related to the
webinar and it would be relevant for me to send them emails related to that product.
Applications to a Program:
If people want to join my Internship program, they first need to apply for the program.
I do not accept Interns without an application. Applying for my internship program is
a good way to generate highly qualified leads. There are many form fields that they
have to fill up, almost 10, to complete the application. These fields give me options to
customize the communication to them in my follow up emails. How to send
personalized emails is something that we will learn when we get to marketing
automation.
Apart from this, I have used Quizzes, Mindmaps, and Spreadsheets from time to
time.
I hope this lesson gave you a clear idea about the different types of lead magnets
that can be used for your business.
I will see you in tomorrow's lesson.
Day 10 - Traffic Sources for Lead Generation (Part 1)
In the previous lesson, we talked about the different types of lead magnets that can
help you generate leads. In this lesson, we will talk about the traffic sources for lead
generation.
If you have a lead magnet, you need to drive traffic to it. Without traffic, your lead
magnets are not going to generate the leads for you. If the lead magnets are the
seeds and leads are the fruits, the traffic source is the water.
Once you have got your lead magnets ready, you can use a variety of different traffic
sources to drive attention to your lead magnets. In this lesson, we will discuss some
of the top traffic sources that I use for my business.
High Traffic Sources for Lead Magnets:
Some of these sources are free and some of them are paid. I recommend that you
get started with the free traffic sources and scale your way up to paid traffic sources.
1. Organic-Search Traffic
Organic-search traffic is the traffic that comes from the search engines. You do not
need to pay for this traffic. Every search engine including Google has paid listings on
their search and free listings. If you make sure that your pages appear in the search
results for specific keywords then you will be able to tap into a lot of traffic and you
do not need to pay for it.
The only problem with organic-search traffic is that your landing pages will not get
ranked easily in the search engines. Search engines prefer content-heavy pages and
they do not rank landing pages well. (A landing page is a page like
LearnDigitalMarketing.com that collects the names and email IDs of visitors).
You should drive the search traffic to blog pages and then use a tool like OptinChat
to convert visitors into leads. You will be able to convert 5 to 10% of your visitors into
leads if you use a tool like OptinChat. (Landing pages convert better with 20-30% of
the visitors converting into leads).
To get good search traffic into your blog pages, you need to have great content,
backlinks, and good on-page SEO. The topic of SEO is very deep and you might
want to take up SEO training from me if you want to learn SEO in an in-depth way.
2. Paid Search Traffic
The second best method to get traffic to your lead pages is to get traffic from the
paid search listings.
Paid search listing will cost money but if you know how to convert your leads into
sales then you will be able to afford to pay for the clicks.
You can configure your paid search ads on a tool like Google Ads. With Google Ads,
you can set up paid search ads on the Google Search engine.
Every search engine has a tool for advertising in the search engine. There are many
niche search engines that will help you search for products within a niche. You can
advertise in those sources as well.
The good thing about paid search traffic is that they will not hesitate to drive traffic to
your lead pages. While it is difficult to rank your lead pages on organic search, there
is absolutely no problem with paid search.
The only disadvantage of a paid traffic source like paid search is that you have to
pay for it. But if you can get an ROI from the traffic - the biggest advantage is that
you can scale it fast. It might take several weeks to months to start getting significant
organic traffic to your website.
Paid search ads can scale fast. You can go from 1,000 visitors a day to 10,000
visitors a day overnight. You just need to increase your ad budgets.
Search Traffic is High Intent
I have mentioned organic search traffic and paid search traffic first because these
are the best and the most reliable methods of getting leads. And these leads are of
high quality because the people who are searching for these things on the search
engines have high intent.
If someone is searching for "learn digital marketing" and I am listing my digital
marketing course in the search results (organic or paid) then I can be sure that I am
going to get high-quality traffic.
There are many traffic sources to generate leads and that's why I have divided this
section into parts.
In tomorrow's lesson, we will talk about Facebook Ads - an excellent source of traffic
next to search engine traffic.
Day 11 - Traffic Sources for Lead Generation (Part 2)
In the previous lesson, we talked about two major traffic sources. One is the organic
search traffic and the other is the paid search traffic.
Search traffic will give you the highest quality of traffic because the traffic is
high-intent traffic. People are searching for you and you appear in front of them
(either as an organic search result or a paid search result).
The click-through rates and the landing page conversion rates will be high in this
case because you are meeting your prospects midway.
Though search traffic is a good, high-quality source of traffic, there are two major
drawbacks when it comes to search.
● The traffic can be costly if many advertisers are bidding for the same
keywords.
● There will be a limit on how many people are searching for a specific
keyword per day and your traffic is limited based on the keyword search
volume.
That's why you should not be dependent on a single traffic source for your business.
You need multiple traffic sources apart from search traffic. The next best source for
traffic apart from search is display ads.
Display Ads:
Display ads are text and banner ads that you see on other websites. Many of the
display ads are controlled by the Google network itself (but they are not the only type
of display ads).
Many website owners and publishers want to monetize their website traffic with
display ads. They would deploy Google Ads on their websites.
If you are a publisher and want to run ads on your website, you can sign up for the
Google AdSense program and run ads on your website. (I do not recommend this
method of monetizing your traffic because the earnings per visitor will be quite low).
Though I do not recommend using display ads for monetizing your website traffic, it
is a good way to generate traffic as an advertiser.
Benefits of Display Ads:
● Unlimited source of high traffic to tap into
● Display Ads are cheap
● You can run text-based display ads or image ads
● You can do retargeting with display ads
Disadvantages of Display Ads:
Display ads have a lot of benefits but they also have downsides. Here are the top
downsides of display ads:
● The ads are shown to people who do not have the intent
● CTR (click-through ratio) will be less
● Conversions will be less
● Sometimes, you might get invalid clicks to your ads and you will still get
charged for it. These are bot clicks and not real human clicks.
● Display ads are ignored by people (ad-blindness) and become less effective
over time.
I use both search traffic and display traffic to power my business. In the previous
lesson, we talked about the two major sources of search traffic.
In this lesson, let's talk about the three major sources of display traffic.
Google Display Ads:
Google Display Ads are an excellent source of traffic because they don't just run
image ads but also text ads. The text ads look like content on many websites and
they get a good CTR. When you run search ads on Google, you can enable the
display network along with it. Google will run a combination of search ads and
display ads (called search ads with display select). Based on the search queries,
Google knows the audience who are more likely to click on the display ads and
shows the ads only to them. Such display ads are well-targeted and get a better CTR
than generic banner ads.
Facebook Ads:
Facebook is one of the biggest display ad networks in the world. They run ads on the
Facebook platform, but they also run the ads on Instagram and other websites
(called the audience network). You have the option of running image ads or video
ads. Many times image ads outperform video ads because all we want to do is to
capture people's attention and get them to click on our ads to visit our web-pages.
There are so many options and strategies within Facebook Ads that it is beyond the
scope of this lead generation course to explain it completely. I recommend that you
check out my Facebook Ads Mastery Course if you want to learn more about
Facebook Ads.
Native Ads:
The third type of display ads I would recommend is native ads. Native ads do not
look like ads but they look like content recommendations. If you have browsed
around news websites, you would've noticed it. One of the downsides of native ads
is that the ads of generally of very low quality. People advertise all sorts of things
when it comes to native ads. But at the same time, native ads can give very low-cost
traffic and they are great for branding. One of the Native Ads networks that I would
recommend is Outbrain. There are many native ads networks but I would
recommend Outbrain the most because it gives the highest quality traffic and they
have placements of their ads in reputed publications and online magazines.
That's it for today's lesson.
I will see you in tomorrow's lesson.
Day 12 - Traffic Sources for Lead Generation (Part 3)
I hope you are reading my lessons every day. Before we get started with today's
lesson, I would like to get your feedback about this email course you are getting.
Reply to this email and let me know. What did you learn from the lessons you are
getting. I will be looking forward to it.
With that note, let's jump into the next lesson in your 100-day Lead Generation
course. In today's lesson, we are going to talk about another traffic source that many
people do not take seriously.
Affiliate & Referral Traffic
You can give a percentage commission on your sales to your affiliates and referrals
and let them promote your products.
If you are selling a digital product, you would be giving an affiliate commission only
on the sales. You will not be giving any commissions on the traffic that is being
driven to your pages. This is a free way to get traffic. You can have a retargeting
pixel on your page and run paid ads to this audience to generate leads and sales.
You can also have a low-cost product that is meant to generate leads for your
business. This 100-day course is a trip-wire product for my business. I am able to
generate high-quality leads because only serious people will pay to join an email
course.
You can create a product like this and give 100% affiliate commission for your
resellers.
And I am going to do that now.
Live Example of Affiliate Traffic:
If you feel that you have got good value from this course, you can promote this
course at 100% affiliate commission.
[Reply to this email and let me know if you want to become an affiliate to promote
this course to others]
You need an Instamojo account to become a reseller. Once you become a reseller,
you will be able to find your link in the "Reseller" section inside your login.
For every sale that you refer to the 100-Day Lead Generation course, you will get
100% of the sale proceeds.
Right now the price is discounted for you, but the original price is ₹1000. You will get
a commission of ₹1,000 on every sale. This is not just an example, but it is a real
opportunity for you.
I just want to demonstrate to you live on how the affiliate method can be used for
lead generation. When you are selling a digital product, there is no cost of
replication. If you bring me 100 sales and take 100% of the commission, it wouldn't
be a problem for me because I am not spending money on each additional customer
I am getting into the course. There is a marginal cost for the CRM tool that I am
using but it's not much.
You can also give tools for free (freemium) and then charge for the Pro version of the
tool (like I do for OptinChat). Or you can have a lite version of a tool at a low cost
and let people promote the tool at a 100% commission.
If you have a free tool, no one is going to go out of their way to promote it because
there is no benefit for them. But if you have a tool that is giving away a 100%
commission on the sales, people will do it because there is a profit for them.
Incentives motivate people to take action.
Referral Traffic:
You can create a referral campaign and get people to refer others to unlock offers.
Here are some tools that can help you generate referral traffic. It is similar to affiliate
campaigns but there is no monetary commission involved in this.
● Gleam.io
● Vyper.io
● KingSumo
● UpViral
You can use a custom tool as well. The idea is that you give rewards to people
(mostly digital products) when people refer other people to your brand.
You cannot convert these referrals into customers immediately. You need to build
trust with them using marketing automation and other techniques that we have
discussed (and are going to discuss) in future lessons.
That's about it for this lesson.
I will see you in tomorrow's lesson.
Day 13 - Feedback Day
Today, there is no lesson in the 100-day Lead Generation Course. We are taking a
one-day break.
Today is a feedback day.
I just want you to reply to this email and let me know your detailed feedback about
this course.
You can also give the feedback on Twitter and tag me with the username:
@highdeepak
We will continue the rest of the lessons from tomorrow.
Day 14 - Revealing the CATT Framework
I've been generating leads for almost 5 years now.
I have an email list of 350 thousand people and growing at a steady pace.
I've generated leads for b2b, SAAS, and b2c businesses.
I've built my business entirely on the foundation of my email list.
But that isn't as simple as it sounds. To be honest, it is one of the costliest journeys.
It cost me around 2 crores to grow my email list and still spending and growing.
To grow this email list, I've used a lot of methods, approaches, and frameworks. I've
tried almost everything said and written in the online world.
During this journey, I learned a lot. I learned what works and doesn't, what attracts
people, converts into leads, and persuade them to purchase.
I made it a framework that anyone can follow, implement, and get similar results.
And I am revealing it in this email.
I sincerely believe this framework can make a difference in your marketing career or
business growth.
I call it the CATT framework.
Content > Attention > Trust > Transact framework.
The beauty of the framework is, it can be applied for brand building, affiliate
marketing, coaches, course creators, products, services, and almost every type of
business you can think of.
I call it the four pillars of online marketing.
Yes, it truly is.
Let me explain.
But before we get there, let's take a moment to understand how marketing works.
Let's assume you have a product or service to sell (even if you aren't a businessman
and a digital marketer, this is why the business has hired you)
Now how will you do that?
You start with identifying the target audience - the set of people who need the
solution for their problems.
Then you either create content to reach them organically or run ads.
People are visiting your website.
What happens when you ask them for sale in their first interaction?
The same thing that'll happen if you ask a girl or boy to marry you on the first
meeting.
The odds of this approach working is almost zero because people don't know you.
They don't know who you are, what you offer, why they should care about it.
First, you need to get them to know you - who you are, what you stand for, your
expertise, why they should give a damn to whatever you are selling them, etc.
That means you should get their attention first, then gain their trust before you can
ask them for the transaction, aka sale.
So how will you do this?
How can you make them pay attention, trust, and transact? What's the one thing that
can help you achieve all the three?
Content: It's the centre of all marketing campaigns, and it's the first step of the
framework.
To capture the attention of your target audience, you need content.
To gain their trust by showing them your expertise and how you can help them? You
need content.
To persuade them to transact, you need to tell them why they need to solve their
problem and how solving can change their life, and for that, you need content.
In short, you need to get your audience's attention and gain their trust before you can
ask for the transaction. For all that to happen, you need content.
Let's put it in the order.
● Content
● Attention
● Trust
● Transaction
What are you getting there?
The CATT framework.
Now let's see how it applies to lead generation.
You cannot market to every one of your target audience because not every one of
your audience will need whatever you are going to sell them.
So you need to identify those who either want or have a need it.
Let's call them leads.
And when you have the leads, you can put your marketing machine together to gain
their trust and make them transact.
If they don't become your leads, you cannot send them a sequence of messages
designed to increase the trust and persuade them to transact.
That's where the CATT framework helps you.
The first component of the framework is the content.
1: Content
Like I mentioned earlier, content is the center of all marketing.
The content can be a blog post or a social media post or a podcast or a video to
capture the attention of your audience.
The content here also points to the lead magnets that you offer your audience in
exchange for joining your email list or becoming your lead.
There are 100+ lead magnets you can create in various formats.
The trick here is creating the right lead magnet that makes sense to your audience
and convinces them to become your lead by joining your email list.
2: Attention
Once you have created the lead magnet, you need to get your audience notice it or
get their attention to it so that as you planned, they become your leads.
You need to drive your audience to your lead magnet. You can do this either
organically or with the help of paid ads.
When your audience meets your lead magnet, the magic happens.
The magic transforms them from visitors of an unknown entity to your leads where
you know their name and email id.
And that's where their journey begins.
3: Trust
Now you need to gain their trust.
Trust is the most crucial element of the entire sales process. People don't buy from
anyone randomly. People buy from people they trust.
When your audience became you lead, a relationship begins.
You need to make this relationship healthy and grow the trust to the level where they
start considering doing business with you.
You can build trust through email sequences and retargeting ads.
Trust is a very fragile thing. It is built over time in small doses. You need to create a
sequence of content that instills trust in small doses on a regular interval.
4: Transact
And then we come to the final stage where the transaction happens.
But because they trust you doesn't mean they will buy whatever you are selling.
People don't give a damn about you or your product.
All they care about is themselves.
They should have a need strong enough to warrant the purchase.
So you need to understand whether your leads have reached the stage where they
are ready to transact.
You can do it with lead profiling and scoring.
Lead profiling and scoring can tell you the right moment to make the offer and
present your product or service.
When your audience is ready, present your product or service packaged in an offer
they cannot resist, the next magic happens.
Your lead becomes your customer.
Isn't it what you want?
CATT framework can help you make it happen.
Day 15 - The Lead Generation Formula (nCATT)
In yesterday's lesson, I revealed the CATT Framework to you.
That is based on the assumption that you already have a business.
What if you do not have a business yet?
What if you have not chosen a niche yet?
That's what we are going to talk about today and in the next few days.
Here's the formula for wealth.
Wealth = n ^CATT
n is your niche.
Whatever your niche is the CATT framework will help you multiply the power of your
niche.
Let's say my niche is lead generation. Let's look at how my niche is multiplied by the
power of CATT.
Content: I have first developed the content (this 100-day Lead Generation Course).
Attention: I am driving high traffic to the landing page that sells this paid newsletter.
I am driving attention. Without attention, I cannot get people to consume my content.
Trust: I am giving value to the people who have subscribed to my paid newsletter. I
am developing trust with my audience (that's you).
Transaction: Once I have developed enough trust with my audience, I will convert
this into a transaction. (You can expect that I will ask you to upgrade to my Lead
Generation Mastery Course sometime in the future).
I can give this newsletter for free, or I can charge a small price for it (like I have
charged you).
Choosing your niche:
I chose lead generation because I have a passion for lead generation (it is a very
interesting concept for me - that's why I am spending so much time in writing so
much about lead generation).
I have a talent for lead generation. I have generated more than 1,000,000 leads for
my business so far and have 400,000 active leads in my database right now.
There is a market for lead generation. People want to learn how to generate leads
and you are here reading this newsletter because you want to generate leads for
your business, your partners, or your clients.
This is the blueprint for choosing your niche.
A niche is not something you can select over-night. It takes a lot of thought and
some practice to find out what you like and what you are good at. It takes time and
introspection.
When I started my digital marketing career, I used to run a motorcycle blog.
Motorcycling was (and is) my passion. After 4 years, I sold my blog and I moved on
to working with startups in Bangalore. Niches can change over time.
You cannot spend too much time trying to choose a niche. Pick one that is going to
have a combination of the three and start building a business on it. My niche now is
Digital Marketing with a specialization in Deep Marketing (Marketing Automation)
and Sales.
So that's the lead generation formula.
Wealth = n^CATT.
Deciding where to compete is half your success.
Reply to this email and let me know - what's your niche? Have you already chosen
it? Are you in the process of coming up with a niche? Or you have no idea about it so
far?
Day 16 - The Importance of Lead Magnets
Can you give me your name and email address?
Assume if you ask this to someone who doesn’t know you, what would be the
response?
He will give you a weird look and try to leave the place as soon as possible, won’t
he?
That’s what happens in online also.
And that’s the first challenge when it comes to generating leads.
People are really picky when it comes to sharing their contact details because they
know that continuous messages will start pouring in their inbox once they do.
When someone asks for their name and email id, they prefer to run as fast as
possible.
How can you overcome this challenge and get their details so that you can initiate a
communication line with them, nurture, educate, and then persuade them to become
your customer eventually?
You need to step out of your marketing shoes and step into their customer shoes?
Why would someone share their details? What is in it for them?
Because we, the people, are selfish.
When you ask for their details, that’s the question they will have, and if you manage
to give the right answer, you might succeed in the quest.
To convince someone to share their details, you need to offer them something in
exchange, that is valuable enough for the audience.
"That something" is called lead magnets.
The lead magnet is the content component of the CATT framework.
It’s the backbone of your lead generation campaign.
Your ability to generate leads at an affordable cost and the quality of the leads you
get depends on the lead magnet you create.
But creating the right lead magnet is not an easy feat.
As soon as you sit down to create one, you’ll face tens of questions.
What’s the best lead magnet to offer?
Should it be in written format or video format or audio one or a tool or a freemium
product or an image one?
Should it be a long-form content or short-form content?
Should I create one long-form lead magnet in one topic or several short-form
contents across various topics?
Which lead magnet works better?
Which works better for a marketing agency or real-estate or SaaS product or
software or web apps?
Which one is good for technology and high-tech products?
And so on.
There are 100s of lead magnet ideas out there, and you have to choose the right
one.
How to choose and create the right lead magnet is the biggest question.
In this email, I will share the one secret that can help you create the best or right lead
magnet every time.
Shall we get to it?
Let’s do it.
We discussed earlier that whether your lead generation campaign work or not
depends on your lead magnet.
If your audience feels what they get from the lead magnet is good enough to risk
sharing their details, you’ll get the leads.
Which means you need to create content that is valuable enough for them.
To create such content, you need to know your audience inside out.
You should know:
● their dreams, wishes, and aspirations. What do they want to become?
● their problems, difficulties, and limitations. What’s stopping them from
achieving whatever or whoever they want to become?
Because only then you can create a lead magnet that acts as a bridge or tool that
helps them achieve their goals by solving their problems.
Once you do so, your audience will sit up and listen to you because it is essential for
them. It solves their problem and can help them reach their destination or goals.
When you sit down to answer the "what to offer" question, answer the following
questions.
● What’s the problem your audience facing right now?
● How solving the problem can help your audience?
● Why should your audience care about the problem and the solution?
● What’s the smallest action or information that can help your audience
immediately?
● How can you solve it with your content or lead magnet?
● Why should he listen to you?
It sounds a lot... but trust me, you need to get this right.
Let me explain this with the help of my lead magnet, "25 free digital marketing
videos."
Since you are on my email list, you might have come across my 25 free digital
marketing videos offered at learndigitalmarketing.com .
Now let’s see how it answers the questions we listed above.
What’s the problem your audience facing right now?
My audience wants to learn digital marketing. But there is too much information out
there. They don’t know where to begin and what to choose. They are overwhelmed
with the choices.
How solving the problem can help your audience?
A structured program can help them learn without wasting time browsing endlessly
and start in the right direction.
Why should your audience care about the problem and the solution?
Starting right is critical for them. They can easily go in circles, spending days and
days, and still end up not learning anything.
What’s the smallest action or information that can help your audience immediately?
An overview of digital marketing that helps the audience to learn the different
components of digital marketing can help because people can decide what they want
to learn more.
How can you solve it with your content or lead magnet?
If I can create something that teaches them the basics of digital marketing and help
them choose the right direction forward, I can solve their information dilemma.
Why should they listen to you?
Because I am a self-learner, I worked with different companies, and I run a
successful blog. I’ve given TEDx talks. And I’ve used the same skills to grow my
career and achieve my dream - of becoming independent, quitting the day job, and
becoming an entrepreneur.
I am everything my audience wants to become.
That’s how I created an irresistible and valuable lead magnet that helped to add 250
thousand people to my email list.
You can follow the same approach and create your perfect, irresistible lead magnet
that’ll make people drool over and instantly share their details.
Now, you have the lead magnet created. What’s next?
You need to drive people to your lead magnet so that they can know more about it
and decide whether to become your lead or not.
Let’s talk about it in the next lesson.
Day 17 - Driving Attention to Your Lead Magnets
So you got your lead magnet ready.
What next?
You know the answer.
You need to get people’s attention to your lead magnet, which means you need to
drive traffic to the lead magnet.
In this email, we’ll briefly discuss it because this is something you all know very well
and very proficient with.
To set up your lead generation campaign, you need
● your audience,
● lead capture and lead magnet delivery mechanism and
● a traffic campaign.
Let’s talk about each briefly.
1. Audience
You should have this covered because you already know who your audience is and
defined them while creating the lead magnet.
2. Setting up lead generation machine
Once you have decided the audience, you should set up your lead capture and lead
magnet delivery mechanism.
This involves:
● a page that people can visit, learn about your lead magnet.
● A lead form your audience needs to fill before they can access your lead
magnet.
● A thank you page where you deliver the lead magnet.
● An email software or CRM tool where you store the leads.
● An integration connecting your squeeze page to the email software
I’ll quickly explain each one.
Squeeze page:
The squeeze page or landing page is where you put up the details about your lead
magnet.
You can use one of the landing page tools like OptinMonster or Unbounce or tools
like Thrive or Elementor.
There are plenty of tools out there. You can learn more about them in detail in my
digital marketing tools training program.
You can pick whichever suits your need and budget.
Lead Form:
Your lead-form plays a crucial role in your lead generation performance.
The number of leads and the quality of your leads you get is directly proportional to
the number of fields in your lead form.
If you want more leads, you should limit your lead form to one or two fields max. You
can ask for an email address only or the first name and email address.
But if you are a B2B business with a longer sales cycle, you might need to collect
more details like name, email, business type, website name, profession, number of
employees etc.
As the number of details, you ask increases, the number of leads you get decreases,
but it also increases the quality of the lead.
Thank you page:
The third component is the thank you page that comes after people fill in the details.
What goes on this page depends on how you deliver the lead magnet.
If you are delivering the lead magnet immediately after the form is filled, your
thank-you page can give the download link or a link to access the lead magnet with
instructions on how people can access the lead magnet.
If you are delivering it via email, you can instruct the leads on how to confirm their
email subscription to get the lead magnet and whitelist your email address.
You can also use this page to ask them to connect with you on different social
networks.
Or you can share testimonials from your happy customers.
This probably is the most underrated page ever been used in lead generation.
Email or CRM tool:
The next is the email or CRM tool.
You need to communicate with your leads, aka email list.
You need to send them emails - indoctrination sequence that introduces you and
your product or services to them, a nurturing series that educates them about the
problem and solution, and a sales sequence that persuades them to make the
purchase.
You need an email platform or tool to send the emails, tag the audience as they
interact with your emails, and so on.
You might need a simple email platform or a full-fledged CRM depending on your
business, sales cycle, etc.
The last thing is integrating all these pieces.
You need to connect your squeeze page to your email tool and thank you page etc.
You need to automate the entire process, so when your lead submits their detail, his
details are posted to your CRM or email tool, and he or she also gets the lead
magnet delivered.
Most of the landing page builders and email tools have the facility to integrate these
things.
But if your tool doesn’t have native integration, you can connect them and make
them talk with external apps like Zapier.
And there you go.
Your lead capture and the delivery machine is ready.
And you don’t need to worry much about the cost of setting up this machine. You can
set up this mechanism or system without spending much or even free.
The email tools are free up to a certain number of leads, and landing page tools are
free to start with some traffic limitations. And so on.
Ok, so, you have the lead magnet and the lead capture/delivery machine ready.
3. Traffic
Next comes the attention, aka traffic part.
You can choose either the less-cost, more-time consuming organic approach or
more - cost but quick results paid approach to drive traffic to your landing page.
I’d recommend the paid approach because it can help you validate your lead magnet
idea and audience quicker, helping you make sure you are on the right track.
Because the organic route takes a while to get the results, and it might delay
validating your idea.
It might be crucial to validate your idea as early as possible because if your idea or
audience is wrong, you might have wasted your precious time on the wrong idea.
Regardless of the approach you choose, you also have to select the platforms or
networks and formats.
You need to decide whether to focus on Facebook or Twitter or LinkedIn or
Instagram as your primary channel for organic or paid promotion.
You also need to decide whether you want to go with text first content approach or
video first approach or audio first approach for organic approach.
That’s it.
You are ready to drive traffic to your lead magnet and build leads.
With that, you are half-way on the lead generation game.
And the next two components are the one that decides whether you get the results
you want or not.
In the next email, let’s talk about trust, the essential component of any successful
lead generation machine.
Day 18 - Building Trust with Your Users
Let's talk about trust.
Trust is the invisible unit of measurement we use to choose our friendship,
relationship, and purchase decisions.
It's the beginning and end of almost everything.
We begin a relationship when we trust someone to be good, and we end the same
when the trust is broken.
Whether it is sales or friendship or love or respect or whatever exists out there, trust
is the foundation.
Trust is a weird currency.
It grows slowly, very slowly.
Every act of positive impressions adds 1 to the trust level.
If someone answers our question, we add 1 to their trust score. When they help us in
some manner, we add another 1 to their account and so on.
But a single act of negative impression can impact the trust immensely.
When someone makes an irrelevant or hurtful comment reduces 10 from their trust
score.
When they do something we don't appreciate, another 10 is reduced. When they
post an abusive or insensitive rant, another 10 goes poof.
When they ask for the sale before the right time, another 10 goes out.
And so on.
That's why it takes years to build trust and one small mistake to lose all.
The worst thing is, once lost, it is very hard to regain trust.
If people don't trust you, they won't feel like you have their best interest in mind or
that you will deliver on your promises.
They won't trust you to solve their problems.
To put it simply, if people don't trust you, they won't want to buy from you.
That's why trust is the one metric we marketers need to be conscious of.
If you need to grow your brand, you need to build trust among your new fans so that
they go out, talk about you, and get you more fans.
If you need to land a job, you need to gain your interviewer's trust so that he takes
the risk of hiring you. Because if you mess up later, he will lose his reputation.
If you need to land a client, you need to gain your prospect's trust so that he entrusts
you with the task.
If you need to sell a book, you need to gain the trust of your audience that you are
the right person in the topic of choice to listen to or learn from.
If you need to sell a course, you need to gain the trust of your audience that you can
help them learn whatever you are teaching and get results from it.
If you need to date a girl, you need to gain her trust that you are an excellent person
to go out with.
Trust is the critical element of converting a prospect into a customer.
So, as a marketer or a businessman, why do you need to gain trust? Why do you
need to focus on it?
Let's assume your audience took the bait and decided to share their details with you
and become your lead.
Their trust score will be something like 0 or 1.
You cannot persuade them to buy whatever you are planning to sell them.
Because measure the cost of purchase using a formula like
Cost of the purchase = how much they trust you (x) the benefit of the product.
And if the price is less than the cost of price derived from the above formula, they
purchase.
It doesn't matter how beneficial the product is or how low the price is, if the trust
value is zero, you aren't getting the sale.
If your product is low priced, a small amount of trust with a decent list of benefits is
good enough to close the sale.
Assume it's a 99 product, it is a minimal cost to your lead or audience. Even if you
aren't an established expert in your niche, you can sell it to them as long as it offers
at least one significant benefit to the audience.
If you are selling a 499 product, you need to be an established expert, and your
product offers a decent list of benefits to make the sale possible.
But if you are selling a 4999 product, you need to be perceived and respected as a
mentor or an expert with proven results, and the product should offer a
transformation for sale to happen.
As the product price increases, you need more trust and more benefits to make the
sale happen.
But as discussed, regardless of the price, for sale to happen, you need trust.
So, how can you grow trust?
The best way to gain trust is by educating and nurturing your leads.
Like I mentioned earlier, when the lead joins your list, the trust score stands at 0 or 1.
As you tell them about you,
why you decided to create the product or the service,
how it helped people to become better or get better results
and so on, the trust score gradually grows.
As you talk about the problem, your audience is facing,
how the problem is stopping your audience,
how their life will change when they overcome the problem,
how you were facing the problem and
how you struggled with the problem, and so on, the trust score moves upward.
As you introduce how you come across the solution,
how you tested it,
how you made sure it works for others too,
the results people got from applying the solution,
how they got faster results, more time, and so on the trust score improves.
That's what a lead nurturing sequence can do.
So what is a lead nurturing sequence?
It is a carefully designed series or sequence of content delivered to the audience at a
specific interval.
It could be a mix of emails, blog posts, ebooks, case studies, videos, testimonials,
etc. delivered through email or retargeting ads.
Emails work best because they are guaranteed to reach your audience's inbox while
everything else isn't.
The nurturing sequence content has only one goal - to educate the customer and
move him from one stage of the customer journey to another so that you can ask for
the sale at the right time.
But how will you know when is the right time to ask for the sale? How can you
measure how much trust have you gained?
That's what we are going to discuss in the next email.
Day 19 - Getting the Sales (Transaction)
We have reached the final component of the CATT framework.
It’s the most crucial part because whatever we learned so far is to reach this stage.
It’s time to make the audience transact.
Before we get there, let’s quickly recap what we have learned so far.
We discussed the importance of lead magnets and how to create the right lead
magnet to help you attract quality leads.
Then we discussed how to drive attention to your lead magnet, 5 components of
effective lead capture and delivery machine, 2 traffic generation approach, and the 2
essential choices you need make before driving attention to your lead magnet.
Then we discussed trust - how trust influences the purchase decision, how trust
score works, how to grow your trust using the lead nurturing sequence.
Now it’s time to make them transact.
You’ve done everything possible to gain the trust of your audience. You want to
present your offer.
But the problem is you don’t know whether it is the right time to ask for the sale.
If you ask for the sale too soon, you might lose the trust, and your lead might even
stop hearing from you.
If you ask for the sale late, the audience might have purchased the solution from
someone else, or their need might have passed on.
So you need to present the offer at the right time to the right audience.
Because that’s when a transaction happens.
Transaction happens when the right offer is presented to the right audience at the
right moment.
But you need to identify the right audience and the right moment.
How can you do it?
That’s what we are going to discuss in this email.
You can identify the right audience and the right time through lead profiling and
scoring.
Lead profiling:
Lead profiling is the process through which you collect as much detail as you need to
decide whether he or she is the right audience.
For example, at the early stages of the digital marketing learning curve, people who
want to become digital marketers and people who have just started their digital
marketing career and want to grow are the right audience for my training programs.
When people enter my email list, all I know is their name and email ID.
I don’t know whether it is a student or a professional or an entrepreneur or a
competitor.
If I present the same offer to everyone, it’s not going to work.
All of them have different reasons for choosing the program and want to solve
various problems by joining the program.
So I need to know a bit more about my leads and categorize them accordingly.
How I do that?
Once a while in between the nurturing emails, I’ll ask them to tell them whether they
are a student or working professional, a beginner or intermediate or expert,
entrepreneur or something else, and so on.
Based on their response, I tag and segment them.
After some time, I ask them where they come from, their educational qualifications,
the current income level, how much they want to make, and so on.
With every response, I slowly build their profile.
Through lead profiling, I learn how many of them want to become freelancers, who
want to start their agency, become SEO specialists, and so on.
The more I know, the better I can segment my list and send relevant content to them.
Do you know what happens when people get relevant content that talks to them,
focusing on their problems?
Their trust in me grows faster, and they reach the transact state quicker.
That’s how I profile my leads, and you can do the same.
First, you need to know what details you need to identify your right audience and
prepare a plan to ask for those details without making it sound awkward or intrusive.
People are susceptible to sharing their details, so you need to be very careful while
asking for additional information.
A small mistake is enough to make them click the unsubscribe button.
With the lead profiling, you can know more about your audience enough to identify
your perfect audience to make the offer.
But you still need to know when to present the offer.
You can learn it with a lead scoring process.
Lead Scoring:
As you can understand from the name, lead scoring is the process by which you can
know whether your audience is progressing to the transact state or not and how
much have they progressed.
Lead scoring can be done based on how people are engaging with your nurturing
sequence and other content.
When people open your emails, you assign them a score and increment it with every
email open.
When people click on your emails, you assign them another score and increment it
with every link click.
When people watch your videos, again, you assign them a score and increment it.
You can add different scores to different content based on its importance in helping
the audience progressing to the next level of their customer journey.
For example:
● For the case study content consummating, you can give them 10 points
● For every how to email or blog post 5 points
● For every educational video 5 points
● For testimonial content, 10 points and so on.
And when your lead stops opening your emails, you can reduce their score for every
unopened email, and you can do the same for every link they stop clicking, every
case study they skip and so on.
By doing this, you’ll have a clear idea of how your audience is engaging with your
nurturing content.
When your lead reaches a particular score, the threshold score and you can move
them into the sales sequence where you present your offer to them in a structured
manner asking for the sale.
The sales sequence could be a series of emails or sideways sales letters.
You can present the offer following some of the famous, proven sales or copywriting
frameworks like AIDA or PAS.
And that leads to the sale.
Let me recap what we discussed in this email:
We discussed:
● How to use lead profiling to segment your perfect audience,
● How to use lead scoring to identify when your lead arrives at the right
moment to present the offer and
● How to present the offer asking the sale using the sales/copywriting
frameworks out there.
In the next lesson, I’ll share the steps of a successful lead generation campaign.
Day 20 - Building Your Lead Generation Machine
Let's build your lead generation machine.
We discussed the importance of lead generation, CATT framework, and how to use
the CATT framework to generate quality leads at a profitable cost.
We discussed how content, attention, trust when combined, lead people to transact.
This email lets us connect everything we learned so far and discuss how to build
your lead generation campaign or machine.
Build your lead generation machine in 12 steps.
Pre-campaign work:
Before you start working on your lead generation campaign, you need to set the
foundation.
It involves two steps.
1. Setting up your goals
Every campaign should begin with a set of goals.
Writing down what you want to achieve from your campaign is an excellent way to
measure whether the campaign is successful.
So before you begin the campaign, you should define your goals set like:
The number of leads you want to acquire. You should begin the campaign with an
expected number of leads. This goal will help you measure whether you were able to
get to it or not.
The preferred cost per acquisition. Likewise, you should also have the desired CPA
again to measure whether you are getting the leads at the price that can get you a
profit.
The expected conversion rate can help you measure your lead capture mechanism -
like landing page, lead form, CTA etc.
And the ad-related metrics like cost per click, click-through rate etc.
You should also have goals like the number of conversions you expect from the
leads you generate from this campaign - it could be sales, free trial to paid account
upgrades etc.
The first set of goals helps you measure the lead generation campaign performance,
and the second set of goals enables you to measure how the generated leads are
performing.
Because we don't want to generate any leads but to generate quality leads who will
become our customers.
Isn't it why we are generating leads?
2. Your target audience
The next step is to define your target audience for your campaign and ideal leads.
Why am I mentioning two audiences here?
The target audience definition will help you set up the campaign, and the ideal leads
definition helps you qualify the leads and measure the campaign performance.
Your target audience definition originates from your ideal lead definition.
Starting with the right audience definitions is critical for the success of your lead
generation campaign.
For example, if you want to get people who are working as digital marketing
professionals with 2+ years of experience, you should target people digital marketing
professionals, excluding students and beginners.
Assume you targeted everyone interested in digital marketing as your target
audience.
In this case, you'll get people who want to become digital marketers, who are
learning digital marketing, who have just started their career and people who are
fulfilling your actual lead requirements.
You'll end up getting a lot of low-quality leads because the number of people who
want to become digital marketers and learning digital marketing is more compared to
the number of working professionals with 2+ years of experience in digital marketing.
And that's why you need to get your audience definition right if you want to generate
quality leads.
After completing the pre-campaign steps, we can move on to the content part of the
CATT framework.
Content
The content part of the framework contains two content pieces - the warm-up and
lead magnet content.
Let's discuss both.
3. Create your warm-up content
Warm-up content is a blog post or a social media post or a video or a podcast, which
attracts your target audience and funnel them to your lead magnet.
You probably have defined the two audiences, as discussed in the previous step.
Let's continue with the same example.
Assume you want to generate leads of people who have 2+ years of work
experience in digital marketing.
To get those leads, you want to target only digital marketing professionals who are
working and repel those who want to become digital marketers or learn digital
marketing.
In this case, you can create a warm-up content relevant to your preferred audience
and filter out the rest.
The warm-up content can also be used to create interest in your lead magnet.
For example, if your lead magnet is about time management tips for digital
marketers, you can publish a warm-up content that talks about time management
mistakes digital marketers to make and how it hurts them.
Creating such warm-up content can help you generate interest and need for your
lead magnet and improve your lead magnet campaign's performance.
4. Create your lead magnet
The next step is to create your lead magnet offer.
To generate leads, you need to offer something valuable to your audience in
exchange for their details.
In the earlier lessons, we discussed lead magnets in detail. So, I'll keep it short here.
The best question you should ask before creating your lead magnet is - what does
your audience want?
If you keep the pulse of your audience's problem, you could create a lead magnet
that solves one of their burning issues and converts them into leads.
Or you can create a lead magnet that is part of your main product or service and
funnels your audience towards the purchase.
For example:
Assume you are selling a time management tool for digital marketers.
You can create a lead magnet that talks about time management like "5 ways digital
marketers can manage their time effectively" or "10 time management tips for digital
marketers" or "8 time management mistakes digital marketers make."
People who sign-up for this lead magnet are unknowingly raising their hands,
accepting that they have time management problems, and it qualifies them as the
quality lead for your product or service.
That concludes the content part of the framework.
Let us move on to the attention part of the CATT framework.
Attention
Attention is where your target audience meets your lead magnet so that they can
become your lead.
The attention part contains 4 steps:
● setting up your lead capture mechanism,
● promoting your lead magnet offer,
● testing the components of the lead generation campaign, and
● optimizing the campaign and mechanism.
Let's continue discussing them in the next email.
Day 21 - Building Your Lead Generation Machine (Part 2)
In the last lesson, we left at the four parts of the CATT framework's attention
component.
Let's continue from there.
5. Set up your lead capture mechanism
So you've created the lead magnet.
Before you promote it to your audience, you need to set up a lead capture and
delivery mechanism.
In the fourth email of this sequence, we discussed setting up your lead capture and
delivery machine in detail.
Lead capture and lead magnet delivery mechanism involves setting up your landing
page, lead form, and connecting it to an email tool or CRM. You also need to set up
a thank you page to deliver the lead magnet.
Your landing page informs your audience what the audience gets in exchange for
their details, what problem it solves, and why they should get it.
Your lead form should ask for the minimum information you need about your
audience to become your lead.
An email tool or CRM helps you communicate with your leads, and a thank you page
can help you deliver the lead magnet or inform how to get the lead magnet.
6. Promote your lead magnet
Once you setup your lead generation machine, it's time to promote your lead
magnet.
Choosing the right traffic source is critical for the success of your lead generation
campaign.
You can choose either an organic method or a paid method to promote your lead
magnet.
I recommend a paid option because it helps you get enough visitors in a specific
period and makes it easy to test and optimize the campaign.
But if you are getting a good number of organic visitors to your website regularly, you
can go with the organic traffic route.
Choose your primary traffic source based on where the majority of your target
audience hangs out regularly or the channel your audience use to find your content.
While choosing the traffic source, pick the content format your audience prefers to
consume or expect from you.
For example, if you dominantly publish blog posts, run a text ad. If you publish
videos, then run a video ad and so on. It helps your audience to connect with it and
see it as an extension of your regular content.
7. Test the components of your campaign
You've set the campaign, and leads have started coming in. You might think you are
done.
But not yet.
The game has just started. There is a lot more to do before you can consider
relaxing a bit. There is a lot you can fine-tune and optimize to improve the
performance of your campaign.
Your organic content or the paid ads, landing page elements like the headline, lead
form and CTA, your thank you page, etc.
Each one of them involves several metrics. Your CPA, CTR, conversion rate, email
confirmation rate, the overall number of leads you get from the campaign, and so on.
You might get some of them close to the goals you decided in the first step, and
some might be falling short.
You can tweak the components of your lead generation campaign, split test them
against the originals, pick a winner, and improve the performance metrics.
You can test ad creatives, headlines, lead forms, landing page images, CTAs, button
colours, landing pages messages and so on.
You can try different versions, split test them and find out the winners.
Testing is a critical component of your marketing success.
8. Optimise the components
Testing tells you what's working and what isn't.
Through testing, you can find the winning version and use it to optimize the
components for the best results.
For example, assume your ad is getting 3% CTR, you can change the ad creative or
the ad copy and bump it to 5% or even 10%.
By optimizing the ad and improving the CTR, you can improve the overall
performance of the campaign.
Similarly, assume you are getting a 1% conversion rate on the landing page, you can
tweak your headlines or the CTA or reduce the number of fields in the lead form and
bump it to 2% or 4%.
Imagine what it can do to your overall campaign performance.. it can increase the
number of leads you get, thus reduce your acquisition cost.
As you test each component of the campaign finding the best performing version,
you can use them to improve the overall performance of the campaign.
And that completes the attention part of the CATT framework.
Trust
Next comes the trust part of the framework.
We already discussed how trust plays a vital role in converting your leads into
customers. You can read about it in the 5th email of the sequence.
The leads might know you or not. They may need your solution or not. The best way
to gain their trust is by nurturing them.
9. Nurture your leads
Tell your leads about you, your experience, how you struggled with the problem like
your leads, how you come across the solution, and how your product helped your
audience overcome their challenges achieving their dreams and aspirations.
But don't let it be all about you.
Focus on their problems.
Send emails with helpful content solving their problems, educating them about
different solutions available to them, and so on.
You can send them via emails or links to your existing content pieces, and videos or
specific content you created for this campaign.
The more you focus on your audience - helping them solve their problems, people's
trust in you will grow.
As the trust grows, your audience will slowly move to the final stage of their journey
where the magic, transaction happens.
Transact
We've reached the final part of the puzzle.
It's time to close the sales, converting your leads into customers.
The transaction involves three steps:
● Profiling your leads to pick the right ones,
● Scoring them to find the right moment to present the offer, and
● Closing sales.
We discussed this in detail earlier in the 6th email of the sequence, let's quickly
connect it here.
10. Lead Profiling
As you know, sales happen when the right offer reaches the right audience at the
right moment.
Profiling is where you collect additional details about the audience that'll help you to
find the right lead to present your offer, asking for the sale.
When the lead joins your list, you know one or two details about them. You can use
your nurturing sequence to ask a bit more about them without sounding nosey and
use it to tag and segment them.
11. Lead Scoring
Lead scoring helps you identify the right moment to present your offer.
When people become your lead, they might be in different awareness levels.
As they progress through your nurturing sequence, their awareness levels will also
change.
Some might reach the stage where they are ready to make the purchase decision
and wait for the offer to arrive.
Some might still be waiting for a bit more information or time to make the decision,
and some might not be interested at all.
Scoring helps you identify who is all ready for the offer and present them at the right
time.
12. Closing the sale
And the final step is to present the offer and close the sale.
All you need to do is present the right offer. The right offer is where the benefits of
the program significantly overtake the cost of the purchase.
You need to package the program or service in that manner.
You got to value stack the benefits of the product or service so that the price you ask
is 1/10th of the benefits they get from the program.
Don't forget to add bonuses that can help them get the most out of the purchase and
make their life better and simpler.
Finally, add scarcity by making the offer available to the audience for a limited time
or limited units.
Voila...
Sit down and see the sales rolling in.
And there you have it.
A 12-step lead generation machine you can use to generate, nurture, and convert
leads.
It is the same process I use to grow my email list and business. I've used the same
method to set up a lead generation for multiple companies and clients I worked with.
Even if you are an absolute newbie and never generated a single lead ever before,
you can follow this process to build your lead generation machine.
Remember, taking action is the key to getting results.
Day 22 - Lead Generation Mistakes You Should Avoid
So far, in the previous lessons, we've discussed why lead generation is the skill
everyone needs, my CATT framework, and how to use the CATT framework to
create your lead generation and nurturing machine.
I also shared the 12 steps to build your lead generation machine.
All you need is to follow the steps, and your lead generation machine will be ready
and running.
If you haven't checked those emails, please do. It will take your lead generation
game to a whole different level.
Because it is the same approach I use to build my 350K+ and growing an email list.
It's not something I invented. I took the information people who built an email list
before me shared. I tried different approaches, tested, learned and fine-tuned it.
But there are lots of marketers failed to get similar results, and there are marketers
who are still struggling to get results.
How many of you have tried Facebook ads and cursed Facebook for sending you
crappy leads?
How many of you tried Google ads, content marketing, SEO, LinkedIn and either got
poor quality leads or no leads or leads, costing you an arm and a leg?
A lot of you might've been there because I've been there.
● Why is lead generation so hard to crack?
● Why is it tough to get quality leads?
● Why is it so challenging even after having such an easy 12-step formula?
Because people make mistakes.
We are all human, and it is natural to make mistakes.
Lead generation involves a lot of moving parts. It's almost like building a car or some
other complicated machine. That's why I prefer to call it a lead generation machine.
Even if you miss a single screw, the machine will fall apart. You won't get the desired
results.
Avoiding mistakes is as important as following the right approach.
In this short series of emails, let us discuss the top mistakes people make in lead
generation.
If you avoid these mistakes, you'll get the quality leads you to want to grow your
business and career.
Most of the common mistakes people make can be categorized into three:
● Landing page related mistakes.
● Offer related mistakes and
● post-lead-generation, aka email marketing mistakes.
Let's discuss them in detail.
First, let's start with landing page related mistakes.
The landing page is the particular page you create to capture leads. It's the page you
use to offer your visitors a bribe to join your email list or become your lead.
Mistake #1: Not having a landing page
The first mistake is an obvious one - people don't use a landing page.
Some marketers even recommend not to use a landing page because it involves
technical steps like setting up a landing page, lead form, connect it with an email tool
or CRM, writing emails and so on.
I agree that it involves all those things mentioned and requires a bit of technical
talent.
But it doesn't mean you need to become a landing page specialist.
You can easily hire a freelancer to do it for you for a reasonable fee. In the
gig-economy, finding a freelancer is easier than ever before.
Of course, you can use the built-in lead capture mechanism of ad platforms like
Facebook ads. You will get more leads, but you will also get poor quality leads.
See, the job of an ad is to capture your audience's attention, get them to notice your
offer, and send them to your landing page. When you use it to generate leads, the
quality might suffer because you are packing too much in the ad.
With a dedicated landing page, you can focus on explaining the bribe or the lead
magnet or the benefits of joining your email list etc. to your visitors.
Remember, your audience doesn't care about becoming your lead or what you offer.
They are worried about sharing their details and getting spam messages. They don't
want to sign up at all.
You need a landing page to alleviate their concerns, break their resistance and
convince them to trust you with their details.
Mistake #2: Having a "me too" landing page
Some marketers realize landing pages are essential, and they create a "me too"
landing page following their competitors or some templates.
Or they set up a basic landing page with a headline, a text block, and a lead form
with a CTA button.
A landing page is not something you set up in such a manner.
Your audience and your offer are different from your competitors or other templates
out there.
If you are offering the same thing everyone is offering, then your audience doesn't
have a reason to choose you and become your lead.
Your landing page targets a specific set of your audience, offering a specific offer
solving a specific problem. It is almost unique for your campaign.
You need to communicate why they should become your lead, why they should care
about whatever you are offering in exchange for their details and how it can solve
their problem or help them become better.
Mistake #3: Ad/landing page message mismatch
You've done a great job with the ad.
You promised them a kickass solution in the ad.
Your audiences are excited.
They want it. They clicked and landed on your landing page.
But they don't see it on the landing page. They don't see anything you mentioned in
the ad.
The landing page isn't matching the ad at all. Your audience is disappointed and
leave. You didn't get the lead and wasted a click.
Your ad and landing page should be on the same page, communicate the same
message.
Your landing should give a slight push to an already interested audience and
convince them to sign up.
Mistake #4: Not having a CTA or having a poor CTA
This is the next classic mistake I see people make out there.
Some people don't even have a CTA on their landing page or think using a button
with "submit" as the CTA is enough.
Unfortunately, it isn't.
Your job is to motivate your audience to overcome the resistance to share their
details.
Each phrase or word you use on the landing page should help him do so—every
word matters, including what you use in the CTA button.
Using "submit" as your CTA isn't harmful or wrong. But using a relevant CTA can
improve the performance and get you more leads.
Mistake #5: Poor Design
People create landing pages that look as if done by an amateur.
Your landing page is your salesperson talking to your audience.
Imagine if someone dressed in rags is trying to sell you something or asking your
details in exchange for something, how will you react to it?
Obviously, you'll not pay attention and try to move away as soon as possible, won't
you?
That's the impression people will get from a poorly designed landing page.
The landing page tools and add-ons available can help you design a decent landing
page without a designer.
Mistake #6: Not optimized for mobile.
I know it is impossible to accept and believe this.
People are no longer desktop/laptop first when it comes to access the content.
They use multiple devices, especially mobiles a lot to interact with your campaigns.
If your landing page is not optimized for the mobile, then your campaign is set to fail.
See you in the next lesson.
Day 23 - Lead Generation Mistakes You Should Avoid (Part
2)
Let's talk about offer related mistakes in this lesson.
But what is an offer?
Offer is the lead magnet or bribe or solution you offer to your audience in exchange
for their details or persuading them to become your lead.
Your offer decides the performance of your campaign - how many leads you get and
how good those leads depend entirely on your offer's quality.
Creating an irresistible offer is probably the most challenging part of building the lead
generation machine, and that's where many marketers make mistakes.
Mistake 1: Not telling what the offer is
If you don't tell your audience what the offer is - what your audience gets in
exchange for the details, your audience will not know it or become your lead. It is
simple and straightforward.
I know I've repeated it a couple of times already in the series so far because there is
nothing much more important than this.
Remember, your job as a marketer is to make it clear for the audience to understand
what they get in exchange for their details.
If your offer isn't clear for the audience, they aren't going to decode, understand, and
become your lead.
He or she will close the browser tab and get on with their life. You lost a lead and
potentially a future customer.
Make it clear to the audience - what your offer is and why your audience should care
about it.
Mistake 2: Focusing on features instead of benefits
This is the second-most-common mistake marketers make.
Marketers think that a massive list of features will convince the audience.
They go on talking about the features after features of their offer or lead magnet or
software or app or product or service.
Unfortunately, it isn't.
People don't buy features.
People don't buy a program or course because it has 100 videos or 30 hours of
videos or 50 cheat sheets or other bonuses.
People don't buy a book for the number of pages or the cover design. People don't
buy things because what is in it for them, what it does for them.
People buy a program because of what it can do for them or because it can make
them smarter or help them get a better job and earn more.
People buy for the benefits and results.
If you want to persuade someone to exchange their details for whatever you are
offering them, you need to tell them how "your offer" can change their lives, make
them better, or help them achieve something.
Which means stop talking about the features and start telling them the benefits.
Mistake 3: Irrelevant Offer
This one is another lead killer.
People think if they create a lead magnet, the audience will take it and give their
details.
As soon as someone wants to generate leads, they rush some lead magnet, set it
up, and expect it to work.
That's not how lead generation works.
People don't exchange their details for anything or everything. They do so for
something valuable to them or can help them.
The entire concept of lead magnet exists for that reason.
You need to create something people will want or need and will give their details.
This means you need to make the right offer, which makes sense to your audience.
Assume your audience wants to lose weight. You cannot offer them a guide to exotic
foods and expect them to join your email list.
But if you offer them the guide to exotic foods they can eat without worrying about
gaining weight, people will gladly join your list in exchange for the guide.
Your lead magnet or the offer should solve your audience's problem or answer your
audience's question or help your audience to do something smarter, faster, getting
quicker results.
Free alone doesn't work. It should be a "valuable something free" in exchange for the
details.
Mistake 4: Not having a variety of offers
You cannot have one lead magnet and hope to build a quality lead list.
Even if you are expanding your audience and reaching new audiences, your lead
magnet will start losing its attraction.
Also, if you are creating ebooks after ebooks as your lead magnet, you'll be missing
out on people who prefer content in audio or video formats.
You should have a variety of lead magnets.
You should have ebooks, infographics, webinar recordings, audio recordings,
checklists, and so on.
Because no one offer fits all.
Mistake 5: Poor Ask vs Offer ratio
What you offer and how much details you ask should have a reasonable ratio and
relevancy.
For example, you cannot ask your audience to fill 10 fields in a lead-form to access
an ebook or checklist.
People sometimes go overboard and try to collect as many details as possible in
exchange for a poorly designed guide or ebook.
At the same time, you cannot let people have an in-depth research report or
case-study for just a name and email.
You should make sure you are collecting relevant professional and business details
before giving them such valuable materials.
Of course, asking for more details will reduce the number of leads you get, but it will
improve the quality of leads if you are doing it the right way.
Striking a balance between the ask vs offer is a challenge.
I recommend you to approach it backward.
Before you decide on the number of details you are going to ask your visitor, ask
yourself:
- What are the details you need to collect to identify the right lead?
- Is it possible to break the form into two stages so that people don't feel
overwhelmed with it?
- Is it possible to collect some of the required details afterward?
Choose the minimum number of details you need to begin.
And then ask the question:
- What could be the right lead magnet you can offer to convince people that it is
worth providing you with the details you ask for?
That's it.
If you avoid the mistakes we discussed in this lesson, you'll create the right lead
magnet or the offer that will get you the number of quality leads you want.
In the next lesson, let's talk about the email marketing mistakes people make.
Day 24 - Lead Generation Mistakes You Should Avoid (Part
3)
There are two stages in any lead generation campaign: pre-lead and post-lead
stage.
Pre-lead is what happens before someone becomes your lead, and post-lead is what
happens once someone becomes your lead.
In the last two emails, we discussed the common mistakes people make during the
pre-lead stage.
Those mistakes impact the performance of the campaign like conversion rate,
cost-per-acquisition, and the number of leads.
Post-lead mistakes are the mistakes people make after the lead is generated.
They impact how the lead progresses in their customer journey and whether they
become your customer or not.
What you do after the lead joins your list, how you interact, and how to educate them
defines whether the lead becomes a customer.
This is where many marketers struggle and fail.
Mistake 1: Letting the leads go cold
This is the biggest mistake marketers make.
Most marketers ace the lead generation game. They probably have learned and
mastered at least one traffic source and know how to drive quality traffic to their lead
generation campaigns.
With the help of the right lead magnet and capturing mechanism, they get the leads.
But that’s where their struggle starts. They aren’t sure how to proceed with the leads.
They struggle with email marketing and nurturing campaigns.
Either they send a few emails in the first three days or send an email or two once a
month.
The leads go cold, and that’s the end of their lead generation campaign.
All their efforts to generate leads go waste because the leads won’t be making a
purchase or becoming customers.
People let the leads go cold because they don’t have an email marketing plan or a
nurturing sequence, which is the second mistake.
Mistake 2: Not having a nurturing sequence
Lead nurturing is the only way to convert your lead into a customer.
You want to convert as many of them as customers because you only make a profit
when the sale happens.
If the sale doesn’t happen, you end up losing whatever you spent to generate those
leads.
And for sale to happen, they need to know what you sell, why they should care about
whatever you are selling, and how it will improve their lives.
When someone becomes your lead, they probably won’t have many ideas about you
or your product or what’s in store.
You need to introduce who you are, what you’ve created, why it matters to your lead,
how it has helped people like your leads, and so on.
After that, you need to send them 5 must-read contents, which helps your leads
move towards the purchased end of their customer journey.
We call it a nurturing sequence because it nurtures a lead to become a customer like
you nurture the seedling to become a tree.
Email marketing works when you send them in a sequence and at a regular interval.
You can neither send them more or less. You cannot send them 10 emails in a week
and then not send anything for a month.
Remember, you are building a relationship with your leads. A relationship is essential
to build trust, and trust is a must for sale to happen.
Mistake 3: Treating Email Like a promotional channel
There is one thing that is worse than not having a nurturing sequence and letting
your leads go cold.
That is treating email marketing as a promotional channel and start sending
promotional emails.
Many marketers send emails about offers, deals, discounts, and other sales pitches.
Nothing else.
No value addition. No nurturing or educating the leads about the problem or solution
or the product.
People don’t want to receive more promotional emails.
If you aren’t adding value, your leads will get tired of receiving mindless promotional
emails and hit the subscribe button.
You lose a lead and a possible customer.
Remember, the best sales or promotional email is the one that doesn’t sell but
makes the reader look for the purchase link.
Add as much value as you can, which makes the user look for the purchase link.
Keep in mind - emails aren’t painkillers. You cannot use them when you need them.
Emails are like vitamins. It works well when it is consumed regularly.
Mistake 4: Not segmenting the emails
Even the smart marketers who nurture their leads falls short when it comes to
segmenting their leads.
They know the value of their emails and have crafted some quality nurturing email
sequence.
But they treat all their leads the same.
All your audience, aka leads, aren’t the same. They don’t interact with your emails in
the same way.
Some consume your emails, click the links, watch videos, read blog posts, and don’t.
Every piece of information they consume helps them progress in their customer
journey, moving towards the purchase.
If you don’t segment, you won’t know who is progressing and who isn’t responding to
your messages.
If you send all emails to the entire list, they lose their effectiveness and fail to
produce the desired results.
You should send nurturing emails - the 5 essential contents to people who joined
your list recently.
You should send your sales sequence to those who’ve reached the purchase end.
You should try sending reactivation sequence to those who aren’t responding to your
regular emails and understand whether they are still interested in your product or
not.
If you want to know more about segmenting, you should read the emails I sent
earlier on lead profiling and lead scoring.
Mistake 5: Content that doesn’t resonate
This is another most common mistake we do.
We approach content creation through the marketer’s perspective and not through
the audience’s point of view.
There is a mile-gap between what we see and what our audience want.
The purpose of the email or content marketing is to communicate with your
audience, help them overcome their challenges, and solve their problems.
If you aren’t creating content, aka emails that speak to your audience about their
issues, it’s not going to resonate with them.
If it isn’t resonating with your leads, they aren’t going to open, read and act on them.
If they aren’t reading and acting on them, they aren’t going to become your
customer. You aren’t getting the sale. Everything you worked so far fails and goes
waste.
That’s it.
We’ve covered more or less all the mistakes marketers usually make when it comes
to lead generation.
Of course, this isn’t the complete list of mistakes.
But if you avoid making these mistakes we discussed in this short 3-part email
series, you’ll do a lot better than 90% of marketers out there.
How can you avoid all these mistakes and create a profitable lead generation
system?
What if you can follow a playbook that guides you through each step of the lead
generation system?
What if you can follow it to create the right lead magnet, set up an effective lead
capture mechanism, and design a powerful nurturing sequence?
Day 25 - Engaging Your Leads with Email Marketing
"Money Is In The List"
First I heard this phrase or quote in 2015.
Till then I wasn’t giving much thought about emails and list building. I was just
focusing on writing blog posts and sharing them on my social profiles.
When I read "Money is in the list" it struck me hard.
Why am I not building a list?
I didn’t have an answer for that.
But, then I decided to build a list.
Now, I have 400,000+ people on my list, and it’s the channel that drives my sales
and revenue.
I’m planning to grow my list to 1 million people by next year.
So, what changed?
Well, I realized the power of email marketing.
If you don’t have a list or not thinking about building a list, stop everything you do,
and start building your list.
Because "The Money Is In The List."
If there is one popular saying in digital marketing that’s true, it got to be this.
And, it’s not just because of money.
1. Email is the #1 preferred communication channel. At least 91% of the consumers
check their email on a daily basis and 72% of the consumers prefer email as their
source of business communication.
2. Email drives more conversion than any other marketing channel, including search
and social combined. If you are more focused on conversions, you should focus
more on email.
3. Emails also have higher click-through rates and higher ROI than any other
channels. You are 6x more likely to get a click-through from an email campaign than
you are from a tweet.
4. When it comes to purchases made as a result of receiving a marketing message,
email has the highest conversion rate (66%), when compared to social, direct mail,
and more.
5. A message is 5x more likely to be seen in email than via Facebook. The organic
reach days are over on Facebook. If you want to reach more of your fans, you need
to pay.
6. About 53% of emails are opened on mobile devices, and 23% of readers who
open an email on a mobile device open it again later. If you add the fact, 88% of the
smartphone users actively check email on their phones, email becomes the best
channel to reach the mobile audience.
7. You own your list. This is the most important reason to build a list. On Facebook
or any social network, your account could be suspended or deleted at any time, for
any reason, without notice. You could lose all your fans in an instant, and all the
efforts you have put could go waste. However, when it comes to email, you own your
email list. No one can take those leads away from you.
It should be clear by now that email marketing is probably the most powerful channel
when it comes to customer acquisition, retention, and conversions.
So, are you ready to dive into email marketing and boost your conversions, sales,
and revenue?
Wait for my tomorrow’s email: How To Start With Email Marketing?
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