“A quality team is essential. Organizations grow at the speed of trust!”
– Dave Ramsey, at ICON 2016
The above quote is just one of Dave Ramsey’s “5 Essential Qualities of a Leader,” and as he continued to rattle off even more quotable nuggets during his keynote presentation, I sat in the audience with my pen and paper taking notes during the first day of the 2016 ICON event for small businesses.
The four-day event took place in Phoenix, Arizona where small business from across the globe gathered to hear from influential speakers, attend detailed breakout session on how to improve their business, and speak one-on-one with industry experts about developing successful business agendas. This year ICON celebrated its 10th anniversary and welcomed more than 3,000 people coming from 25 different countries around the world.
One of the fundamental principles of KeyMedia Solutions is our devotion to education and training in order to stay current in the constantly evolving industry that is Digital Marketing. We believe that our commitment to bettering ourselves not only strengthens us as a company, but also allows us to deliver a higher quality of service to our partners and customers. As a result, I was fortunate enough to be in attendance during this year’s ICON event and had the opportunity to learn from Dave Ramsey, David T. Fagan, Gary Vaynerchuk, and many more about ways to achieve business success.
Whether you were there at the conference with me or not, I want to share the experience with everyone. That’s why over the next three weeks, I’ll be posting about my top three takeaways that I believe anyone can use to increase their business and achieve success. Make sure to stick around to the end of this post to find out what I’ll be talking about next week.
I’ll begin today by addressing a question every business owner, no matter the size, asks themselves almost every day – “How can I generate more leads for my business?” In my first blog, I’ll talk about what I learned about lead generation and give you three helpful tips that you can start using today.
How to generate more leads for your business
One of the many breakouts that I attended during the conference was focused on generating more leads for businesses looking to increase their amount of customers in their database. Hosted by the Founder and President of Box Out Marketing Tyler Garns, he outlined his plan that was responsible for increase his company’s monthly leads from 300 to 25,000. Here are some of the class highlights.
Identifying Quality Lead Sources
Whether you invest or create them in-house, lead sources are what drive traffic to your site or landing page. Here are some examples of lead sources that you can use to generate leads.
|
|
Identify What Your Customers are Searching For
Generating leads in pointless when they are not qualified. Identifying your ideal customer and what they’re searching for when they go online will help you narrow your advertisements and lead magnets to speak to them and answer their questions. Here are some tools to help you do this.
Creating Effective Lead Magnets
Let me make this clear, lead sources are what grab your customer’s attention. They are how your customer’s will see and learn about your business. Lead magnets are what will influence them to take action and convert your target audience to leads. Here are just a few examples of possible lead magnets you can use to generate leads.
|
|
Keep in mind that these are just a few examples of materials that you can use to force action by potential customers. The important thing to remember here is that lead magnets must be appealing or provide a beneficial service for the target lead. Lead magnets are not your “money makers,” they are what will start someone down your sales funnel that ends with you converting a big deal. Let’s take a look at some helpful tips that you can use while creating effective lead magnets.
Tip 1: If you’re delivering a lead magnet through an email, there are a few things that you can do to increase the effectiveness of your emails.
- The headline of your emails should include a call-to-action. Show them what they are getting and tell them what you want them to do. Make this the first thing they read in your email.
- While including images in a highly effective way to increase engagement with emails, including links also increase the engagement of customers.
Tip 2: If your lead magnet is a report, whitepaper, or anything downloadable, there are a couple of things you can include that will make them more appealing to leads.
- Using short lists of tips or features greatly increase the effectiveness of your lead magnets. Examples of this would be, “3 Tips to Lose More Weight” or “5 Tricks to Eating Healthier.”
- Include bullet points. These make your document easier to read. Making lists are a great way to deliver the relevant information that your potential lead wants to learn.
Tip 3: Once you’ve distributed your lead magnets and are waiting to the leads to flow in, don’t sit on your hands and do nothing. Take this time to track, optimize, and test.
- Test, test, and test some more. If you’re sending out emails, test subject lines. If you’re creating Facebook or Google Ads, test copy. My point is that comparing similar elements of your lead magnets will allow you to actively make changes in the future that are backed by your own research and data. These decisions will optimize your lead magnets and generate more leads for your business.
- Tracking the activity of your lead magnets will allow you to see which one are performing better than others. Making this observation will allow you optimize other lead magnets over time and reproduce positive results.
These tips are meant to optimize a small part of your sales funnel. No matter what your current lead magnets are, you can use these tips to improve their connectivity to potential customers.
Start Generating Leads
Let’s recap everything that I covered in today’s discussion. First, I outlined lead sources that you can use to reach out to potential leads. Second, I gave you a couple of tools that you can use to better define what your potential leads are searching for. Finally, I explained the difference between a lead source and lead magnet while also giving you three tips to maximize the effectiveness of future lead magnets.
If you have any thoughts or questions about what I covered today, please feel free to Click Here and schedule a time to talk to someone on the KeyMedia Solutions team. We’d be happy to answer all your questions.
For Next Week
My trip to ICON was incredibly helpful and jam-packed with useful information that can help your business no matter your size. In my blog next week, I’ll discuss what I learned during the keynote presentation of Ryan Deiss. We’ll go over ways to make your marketing effort a success and how branding your business can be the difference between growth and bankruptcy.
