Get Leads
Last week I attended Daniel Priestley’s Get Leads workshop in London. The event was run with his company Dent Global and focused on helping businesses of a range of sizes attract more leads.
In this post I want to share the 3 biggest takeaways from the full day event and how funnel builders can use them in their own business and with their customers.
You need new leads
Lead generation is the single biggest reason that business grow. Without new leads, your business dies.
The problem is that people spend money in the wrong places with lead generation, focusing on old and expensive advertising media like print and paper. While ignoring far cheaper and better ROI methods like Facebook ads and content.
No cold calling
When we think “lead generation”, most of us think cold calling. Interestingly, Daniel started in the lead gen business with print media, events and phone call follow up.
Qualify people and attract leads
The question that Daniel asked at the start was ” would you pay 5p for someone to watch your content, discover who you are and allow you to market to them later?”
Obviously everyone said yes.
What Daniel showed us is that we can cut our costs of getting in front of 1000 people from hundreds of pounds to a few penny’s.
Facebook and content now allow us to build a list of qualified, interested people who have seen our content and recognise our brand. They also trust us because they have voluntarily watched a video or two and have demonstrated that they’re interested in our product.
Easier to ID leads
Would you rather advertise your business to 1000 random people, or 100 qualified, interested people who recognise you? What if the second option was actually CHEAPER than the first? Seems like a no brainer right?
3 killer lead generation hacks I learned from Daniel Priestley at his Get Leads event
Big 2019 message
The first big takeaway from the event, was the we needed a big message for 2019.
In fact, Daniel recommended having a big message that you believe in full stop. But targeting a year is a good start because you’ll likely move on and change what you want to get behind.
We looked at a key message for all our businesses. From server engineers, to risk managers, insurance sales, funnel sales training, website building, growth consulting. Every business in 2019 needs a key message to start a brand new lead generation strategy.
Of course if you discover a key message before 2019 or after, that’s fantastic. But at the time of writing this post we’re close to 2019 so it made sense to treat it like a time sensitive campaign.
The key message serves a very important purpose. It’s designed to help you stand out from the crowd and position you as a very different offer to your competitors.
If we take two funnel businesses, one of them says “we build marketing automation funnels to help you drive sales and leads” and they create content around that.
The other funnel business says “if you don’t have an email list of at least 1000 people your business will die” which one are you going to listen to immediately?
It doesn’t have to be a fear based statement, it’s about saying something that you as the business owner wholly believe and think others should know.
Your big message could be based off an insight that you feel customers should know such as “it’s cheaper to advertise with video and reach qualified leads than to use any other media”.
Or you could mention your niche or market. “Sports apparel businesses can grow 10x faster when they are more emotional in their copy”. The idea is something you believe and would tell people anyway.
It can be based off a disruptive idea also. Something that challenges their current way of thinking. For example, my new message for 2019 is VERY disruptive and I’ve already had lots of people on both sides of the debate.
“Earning anything less than $250 000 is greedy”.
Shiiiiiiiiiiit. Seriously? I’m calling out people who earn less than $250k per year as greedy? Yes, I absolutely am.
Funnel builders could say something else disruptive and challenging. “A re-brand will never ever generate you new customers”
Or “a new website will not help you find customers”.
Something that flies in the face of what everyone “already knows”.
So what’s your big idea for 2019? Obviously I’ve butchered the delivery of this process. If you want more information on both your big idea and the Get Leads program, check out Dent Global events.
Mini-book content
This one blew my mind. SO SO SO obvious but I totally missed it.
I’ve written 3 books, published 1, working on a 4th.
My first was 70k words+, the 2nd around the same.
But…what if we created a mini-book, based around my 2019 key idea, that was only 15k words and I gave it away?
Would that position me as an expert, with a message and valuable content?
Is a bullfrog waterproof?
During the workshop we were showed how to create valuable, useful content that we could not only charge for, but also giveaway as a lead generation tool.
When we went over the plan on how to create the content, I was initially cold to the idea because I’d written so much. I absolutely value the idea of writing and giving away content, but I hadn’t seen this process of writing content.
Within minutes I realised that this was absolutely something that funnel builders needed to do.
It’s fast to create, at only 10k – 15k words, you could smash that out in a day if you focused.
It’s cheap to produce the book, as it’s fewer than 100 pages most of the time.
You can give it away to leads and customers to prove your expertise.
Take your key idea or big message and structure the 3-5 key points of why it’s so important and how to accomplish the best result.
Let’s say as a funnel builder that your big message for 2019 is going to be “your customers are happy that you sell to them on automation”. You talk about how people are actually happier when your customer sells to them and especially happy when a business sells on automation.
Your mini book explains why this is true and disrupts a few ideas they already have. You then talk through a few insights that explain why your message is true and then you include the key method steps that explain how to create happy customers through sales automation.
Anyone who reads the book believes that YOU are the happy-sales-automation expert. You’re the queen or king of happiness on automation. Sounds good right?!
Funnel businesses are at risk of becoming commoditised due to cheap staff and funnel software. Without a big message and killer piece of content, you’ll struggle to position yourself as a expert and attract more leads (who have better budgets).
If you’ve already got a killer post, turn that into a mini-book. Your long form content is only going to get stronger when you print it.
Create video audiences
Finally, this was a strategy on the bleeding edge of lead generation and conversion.
At the start of the post I asked if you’d want to pay 5p per person, for a list of people interested in your content and your business. 5p per person to create a list of interested, qualified and targeted prospects.
THIS is how you build that list.
Facebook ads puts a lot of businesses off, because they’re worried about spending money on ads that don’t convert.
However, Facebook ads don’t convert for 3 key reasons.
- Your message is bland and no one cares
- Your targeting is poor
- Your conversion strategy for those that do click/interact is weak
It isn’t the tool, it’s you.
Typically, the targeting is the best place to start. Instead of randomly choosing interests to target in Facebook, we’re going to show very short videos, based on your big message, to a wide audience.
Anyone who watches 50% of the video, is added to a custom audience list for us to market to later.
Let’s say your big message, as a funnel business, is that “the only way to grow a coaching business is with webinars”. So you create 3 short (1 minute) videos briefly talking about webinars, coaching businesses and growing a business.
They don’t have a call to action or an offer. They’re pure content. Just 60 seconds of useful insights.
The titles and subjects are pretty broad, we don’t talk about our offer or who we are just yet. Think of these as broader interest videos. People will naturally qualify themselves out as they watch.
Maybe your 3 videos are:
- You must grow your business
- 3 step process to finding more customers
- The 1 hour that changes your life
The words “coaching business” are said right at the start to qualify out those that aren’t your ideal customer. Then you deliver a 55 second insight or idea (easier said than done!) to the viewer.
Facebook allows us to then add people who view X% of a video to another custom audience. Anyone who has watched over 50% of the video is pretty likely to be a coach and interested in the thing of the video.
For a crazy low price (~2p a view) we can reach a wide range of people and qualify a list that we can target later.
Then we produce a few more videos with ideas closer to their niche and market before finally getting them to take a call to action.
The CTA? The mini-book of course!
Or a contact form or event booking, or a product or webinar. Whatever, experiment with your warm traffic list and test out offers to them.
This seems like a lot of work
I absolutely agree, isn’t it exciting! All these new ideas for attracting new leads faster than ever AND all of these ideas are as good as free. The ads step is so cheap it might as well be free.
Daniel also talked about “big pants budgets”. Lots of people like to spend $10 here and there on ads and never get any real results. You need to put on your “big pants” and commit at least $500 to an ad campaign and run it properly. If they’re set up right, you won’t have anything to worry about.
Next steps
I have a wonderful newsletter every Friday with the occasional email through the week, full of dedicated funnel builders like you. It’s totally up to you if you join of course, but I seriously think you’ll get a lot from it. As a bonus, I’ll send you my plan for my $100k funnel that you can access, totally free.
Get Leads
Your business has the opportunity to change lives. Genuinely change lives. Imagine waking up every day knowing that you can help a business do MORE of what they love.
You’re amazingly capable of delivering great work to your clients and customers. You just have to get out there! You’ve done the hard work, you’ve taken the scariest step. Your “fear” of setting up ads and putting content out there is the only thing stopping you from finding more paying clients and success.
