lead generation

Not all sales strategies are created equal nor lead conversion strategies.

Getting to the top of Google requires great lead conversion strategies. And we’ve got them for you here.

When you’re selling a high-cost product to a high-end buyer, you need a system that is unmistakably yours and that increases your lead conversion in the middle of the funnel.

It’s changed dramatically. What got you your success today in 2019 isn’t going to cut it as we move into the 2020s.

Today’s leads know more about your competition than you do. And for high-end products and services more than any other, you need to know how to win and keep the hearts and minds of the ultra-informed buyer.

We’ve compiled a list of key questions to help you run an objective diagnostic on your high-end sales system, whatever that looks like for you. By the time you’re through answering these questions, you’ll know exactly what steps to take to strengthen your sales efficacy and close twice as many deals this year.

Think about as you develop your marketing plan for how the campaign will be tested with multi-variant test elements.

Social selling is big, does your marketing department help with social media marketing?

Make The Complex Sale Simple with Better Lead Conversion Strategies

Everyone wants the prestige (and of course, payout) that comes from closing a million-dollar transaction. But few understand how hard they’ll have to work for it.

Because the days of “I got a guy” are over.

Today, there are 6.8 buying influences involved in a single complex sale, and that doesn’t count all the other peers and “experts” whispering in your buyer’s ears. You need to take the time to get to know, understand and educate each one of them about how your product makes life better for everyone.

Start by taking a hard look at your current pitch to see:

• What internal processes are adding doubts, questions or red tape for your buyer?
• How many people will be affected by this decision? Who are they?
• Do your marketing and sales teams really understand your buyer’s risk in making this decision?
• How can you pre-empt these challenges and shorten the conversion timeline?
• What does your buyer need to know to make the buying process as smooth as possible?
• How can you use tools like videos, one-pages, or live

Break The Team Silos

Alright, it’s clear—the higher the ticket, the more people you need to sell to.

So why do you still have one rep managing the entire transaction?

Preston Guy, CEO of Myrtle Beach real estate company CRG went from $27 million in 2016 to $47 million in 2017 with one simple addition to his team: a dedicated Client Care Coordinator.

Here’s how he did it:

• Reduced the number of automated messages and focused on personalization
• Made the Client Care Coordinator responsible for tracking Inside Sales Agent (ISA) follow-ups
• Put the Client Care Coordinator in charge of all post-closing follow-ups
• Included the Client Care Coordinator in all closing meetings (bringing along a basket with goodies like coffee mugs, local honey, and a handwritten thank-you card)
• Trained the Client Care Coordinator on the latest market trends so they can pass knowledge on to existing clients and leads

Whether you’re selling a luxury home or a premium software product, you need to not only know who is involved in the decision-making process on the client’s side—you also need to take stock of who you have on your team that can deliver the right information to the right people and makes your offer a true must-have.

Here are the questions to think about:

• How can you close the gap between sales and marketing? Can you align your sales and marketing teams? And between sales and customer support?
• Where are the bottlenecks causing the lead conversion to be below standard?
• Do your salespeople really need to be sourcing their own leads?
• How can you offer better content, information, or service to your leads and customers?
• Are you measuring your team on what matters? Do your performance metrics unite or divide your teams?

Don’t Automate What Doesn’t Work (and Yes, We Mean Email)

Remember the days before automated email campaigns? It used to work great for lead conversion downstream. Not any more.

We know, it’s tough. But think back. You probably had a handful of emails from friends and family with fun little quips and updates about work, life, etc.

Yeah, the good old days…they’re over. It’s predicted that by 2021, we’ll be sending and receiving a whopping 320 billion emails per day.

While the “spray and pray” approach to email automation may have worked well enough in 2015, today’s high-end consumers require much more convincing.

On the flip-side, personalization does work.

In fact, according to a widely cited 2014 Experian study, personalized emails generate up to 6X more revenue than non-personalized emails. But many marketers have over-corrected so much in this direction that we’re now segmented to the point where we’re only sending emails to leads who are red-headed Geminis at exactly 1 pm on their 35th birthday.

It’s getting out of control.

If you want to double your conversions, how you budget your time and energy is everything.

Today, true personalization is turning left when everyone else goes right. Here’s how the Graham Seeby Group grew a list of just 279 contacts into $90 million in just 4 years using a simple four-part follow-up campaign while everyone else was busy over-automating.

1. On the 15th of every month, the team sent a postcard to everyone in the database
2. On the 7th of every month, they sent a short 90-second video email
3. On the 21st of every month, an email
4. Once a quarter, all contacts on the list would get a phone call

No matter what line of work you’re in, these questions will help you avoid the trap of over-automation:

• When does your prospect really need to hear from you? What are the most pivotal points in the buying journey?
• What don’t your leads know yet? How can you be the first one to teach them what they actually need to know?
• What intel do you have on your leads? How can you use that to drive meaningful follow-up at every step of the process?

Do More of What Works

Great. You’ve freed yourself from the automation straightjacket and committed to delivering value-driven touch points with your prospects.

What now?

Unfortunately, there’s no one answer to that. In these days of robocallers and millennial buyers, you can’t afford to paint all your prospects with the same brush. Whether it’s a personalized email, friendly SMS or the good old-fashioned cold call, you need to test and track what works with your leads and lead conversion.

But there are only so many hours in the day and we’ve all got our quotas to crush. You need a system that will let you see at a glance which methods work best with which leads so your team can act on that information.

“When you check inside your CRM and you can see if an email has been opened or not, you realize maybe email just isn’t this customer’s thing,” points out Jeffrey Funk of The Funk Collection real estate team.

If they find out a lead signed with the competition, Jeffrey and his team can take a deeper look to see where they went wrong and what to do differently next time. That’s the kind of intel that has taken their team from $0 to $50 million in production in just three years.

The right automation tool can help you put relevant long-term follow up on autopilot while showing you which leads to focus your energy on each and every day in the office.

A good rule of thumb is to use a sales automation tool that alerts you to a few key behavioral factors:

• When did my lead last engage?
• When did I (or a member of my team) last engage?
• What type of content does my lead engage with?

Narrow your focus to the simple things like leads who were on your website in the last 5 days but haven’t had a call, email or text. This way, you and your team can focus your energy on the highest priority leads, without getting distracting by the kind of trivial demographic or historical data that often gets baked into complex lead scores. Watch your lead conversion soar.

Bring Brand Back for Lead Conversions

Before you go rolling your eyes at yet another mention of the words “influencer marketing,” bear with us.

Ron Howard is the owner of Baltimore’s leading real estate team. He closed over 470 homes in 2017, without following the conventional “sales” advice. From the beginning, Ron understood that the concepts of social proof would be crucial in helping him create a bond with prospects.

But for Ron and his team, a great brand isn’t just about the number of stars next to your profile pic. It’s about the community.

60% of Ron’s business comes from his local community events. He also gets a slew of phone calls coming in every day from Zillow, where Ron Howard & Associates have over 700 reviews.

From email to Instagram, it’s easy to get caught up in the instruments of digital marketing. But with modern high-end consumers, your message matters most.

And that means brand.

According to the 2018 Edelman Earned Brand study, 64% of consumers now buy on belief—they will gladly choose, switch, avoid or boycott a brand based on where it stands on the political or social issues they care about.

So before you hit send on a queue of automated emails that look just like everyone else’s, sit down and give some real thought to the following questions.

• What makes your brand unlike any other and generates quality leads?
• What are the unique skills, knowledge or information you can offer your customers that no one else is offering?
• What’s the ONE thing you’re not afraid to take a stand on?
  Is that message clearly conveyed on your website, social media channels, and all other marketing material?
• What are the community and review sites or channels that matter most to your buyers?
• Have you informed your newest customers you’ll be asking them for a review?

Choose Your Tech Wisely for Lead Conversion

In order to know where you are going, you need to know where you are. So add your Google analytics track code for tracking conversions, measuring conversion, identifying sales rate conversion rate, landing pages, and helping to improve your sales process.

Yeah, we know. This topic probably doesn’t immediately light your fire.

Most sales CRMs were designed in the days when email automation reigned supreme. By default, many of those features can end up being nothing more than a clunky distraction to your sales team.

But if your team’s logging in and immediately getting hit with 150 to-dos, the wind will be knocked right out of their sales before they even get a chance to pick up the phone.

Sales tech is now a mainstream (if not mundane) part of every business workflow. But because of its history, there are some subtle yet crucial nuances to choosing a tool that actually makes your team more effective.

Here are the questions to think about:

• How will this tool support lead engagement and improve your lead conversion rate?
• How does it help me track meaningful connections between my reps and their prospects?
• Is it easy to see the right kinds of activities within my team?
• How will this tool support my team’s day-to-day workflows?
• Who owns this tool? What will happen to my data if the software company is sold?
• How secure is the data inside this tool?

Keep in mind, if your pipeline and revenues aren’t growing one of two things is happening:

1. Either there’s a problem with your tool
2. Or, there’s a problem with the way you’re using it

In the new game of sales, your team’s time and energy is all they have.

And the stakes are especially high with sophisticated buyers interested in your product.

If you really want to apply proven lead generation strategies to help increase the number of leads, improve your sales lead conversion rate, and have more sales qualified leads. It’s time to give your team everything thing they need to maximize conversions and stand out as stellar sales reps amid a sea of competition.

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General FAQ’s

The best lead generation programs are created by, sometimes, extensive testing.

You can’t ignore these 7 shocking lead generation rules you may be missing.

Lead generation is the first and by far the most important stage of the sales cycle and lead generation rules can help performance.

After all, how can you expect to drive conversions if you cannot even attract verified leads to your website and encourage them to engage?

Think of the sales funnel divided into 3-parts: top-of-funnel (TOF), middle-of-funnel (MOF), and bottom-of-funnel (BOF).

It is a multifaceted process that requires you to invest a lot of time and effort into audience analysis, content creation, and customer relationships. But even though it demands hard work, lead generation is helping organizations to achieve the ultimate business goal, and that is to increase revenue.

Unfortunately, it seems like many entrepreneurs and marketers still do not understand how this process functions. That is why I decided to write this post and present you seven shocking lead generation rules you probably still ignore.

What is lead scoring?

Lead scoring is a methodology used to rank prospects against a scale that represents the perceived value each lead represents to the organization. The resulting score is used to determine which leads a receiving function (e.g. sales, partners, teleprospecting) will engage, in order of priority.

Lead scoring allows for you to organize and prioritize leads based on specific information a lead has provided, or important event activity the lead has taken a part in.

SharpSpring enables you to define custom lead scoring parameters. Just watch this demo of SharpSpring?s lead scoring and lead scoring ranges.

1. SEO Is Just the Beginning

Search engine optimization (SEO) is the starting point of lead generation rules and strategy. It allows you to raise brand awareness and stand out from the bunch of competitors, which is essential at the early stages of the sales funnel.

However, website traffic alone does not mean anything to you. A report shows that 96% of visitors who come to your website aren’t ready to buy yet. You need to be aware of this fact and prepare all those little details that convert visitors into full-time leads.

While creating quality content, like blog posts, for your website is great. It’s also important to optimize your web pages so that search engines like Google and Bing.

You want to do this so that Google or Bing’s search bots can realize that they deserve to be listed in Google searches and to rank in Google at the very top of their SERPs. The higher your web pages are ranked on SERPs, the higher the traffic you’ll get on your website.

Off-page SEO includes social networking, blog and forum marketing, article submission, etc. basically, the things that you do off your website, that enhance your SERP rankings.

On the other hand, on-page SEO is the things you do on your website to boost your visibility on search engine results. These include meta tags and descriptions, page titles, and internal linking.

2. Optimize Content for Different Funnel Stages

As a content creator, you should optimize posts to fit the requirements and interests of users on different levels of the sales funnel. One size fits all is never a good option for your content strategy, which means you have to distinguish between three stages of the sales funnel:

• Awareness: It’s the largest group that consists of users who have a specific problem and now look a solution to it. Blog posts and educational videos represent the best content formats at this stage of the funnel.
• Evaluation: This is the point at which users compare several brands, products, or services. In order to choose your company, you need to provide prospects with training, events, and presentations.
• Conversion: At the very bottom of the funnel, prospects are ready to engage by downloading your content, subscribing, or signing up. If you want to encourage them to do it, try with free trials, product demos, or case studies.’

3. Lead Scoring with Marketing Automation, like SharpSpring

The third tip on my list goes hand in hand with the previous one. In order to organize potential consumers and prepare a tailored sales strategy for each prospect, you have to analyze and score the existing leads.

According to the report, organizations that conduct lead generation rules and programs before data filtering waste 27.3% of sales rep’s time (over 500 hours a year per rep).

The scoring system depends on the nature of your business, but it should evaluate the so-called sales-readiness of your leads.

For example, eCommerce websites will give a higher score to users who recently checked their product pages than to users who read generic industry-related articles.

4. Use Multiple Lead Magnets

This rule goes without saying, but you would be surprised to see how many marketers stick to just one or two types of lead magnets. Craig Gardner, a CMO at UK Careers Booster, says the best-performing businesses always design multiple lead magnets.

They want to make their offers a more versatile and interesting for a wide range of prospects. Some frequently used lead magnet options include eBooks, surveys, reports, free trials, cheat sheets, templates, and so on.

Use landing pages with a call to action to capture leads and growing your email list.

5. Use Email for Lead Nurturing

Did you know that businesses who nurture leads make 50% more sales at a cost 33% less than non-nurtured prospects? It’s an extremely important marketing issue and I suggest you use various channels of communication to maintain relationships with your prospects.

With your target audience tagged, in your marketing automation system or CRM, you can begin to develop a lead generation campaign with email marketing and content marketing components. As you gather potential customer, layer in calls from your sales team and watch your conversion rate ratio increase.

However, I believe that email newsletters are the single most effective tool in this field. Your subscribers get used to the weekly dose of content and anticipate your email messages while you can also make the process interactive by inviting them to send you business-related questions or comments.

6. Choose Social Platforms Carefully

Social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter or YouTube make an integral part of your lead generation rules and strategy, but it doesn’t mean you have to focus on every single platform available out there.

My colleagues at Collegessaywriter.com explained this issue briefly: If you are working in the B2B niche, do you really need to waste time on Instagram or Facebook? In this case, LinkedIn and Twitter should be your weapon of choice. Think about it before you rush into multi-platform activities.

One thousand four hundred and forty. That’s how many minutes we have in a single day. How we choose to spend those 1,440 minutes determines our productivity.

With all of our devices making communication instant, coupled with the sheer amount of information available at any moment, it can be difficult to be effective AND productive.

Distractions are literally everywhere!

Fortunately, there are tools out there that can help improve your productivity, keeping you and your team focused. No matter where you are in your biz, there are amazing tools that can save you dozens of hours per week, automate key marketing activities, and save you thousands of dollars on pricey freelancers.

To keep you from going down a rabbit hole Googling all the options out there, I’ve compiled my finding the right tools for my business.

7. Beware of Voice Searches

I’m sure you’ve all been familiar with Voice Search. You may have used it on your mobile phone with Siri or Google. You may have bought Google Home or Amazon Echo for your home, in which you use your voice to interact with the device and Search whatever you like.

More than half of all searches in 2020 will be voice-induced. It’s a staggering figure that clearly tells you to plan content based on the peculiarities of voice inquiries. What do I mean by that?

Voice Search has been essentially growing since 2008 by 35%. So, that’s quite a high growth rate in which, it’s capturing our attention.

Well, it means that you can improve online discoverability by creating posts that are straightforward and answer the basic questions: who, what, where, when, why, and how Voice searches are very direct and so they demand concise answers. Marketers who realize this fact will be able to generate leads much more effectively than their less agile peers.

Conclusion for lead generation rules

Verified leads are critical to the success of your business, so you cannot allow yourself a poorly designed lead generation strategy.

You need to understand every single aspect of this process, which is why I showed you seven shocking lead generation rules you cannot ignore.

Keep my tips in mind and don’t forget to put them into practice they will make your sales strategy much more effective!

Have a tip about lead generation?

We’re listening.

Have something to say about lead generation rules? Share it with us on Facebook, Twitter or our LinkedIn.

Scott Mathews is a content creator at NinjaEssays and a part-time blogger at paper writing services Nerdywriters and Easy Essays. Scott specializes in digital marketing, but he also loves writing about the issue of personal productivity and self-improvement. Scott is a passionate runner who never misses the opportunity to participate in semi-professional long-distance races.

General FAQ’s

Lead magnets are important to drive web sales leads.

All you have to do is implement lead magnets and an email campaign that gets your web visitors into your contact database and into email nurturing workflows.

What Is a Lead Magnet?

A lead magnet is an incentive that marketers offer to potential buyers in exchange for their email address or other contact information. Lead magnets usually offer a piece of digital, downloadable content, such as a free PDF checklist, report, eBook, whitepaper, video, etc

I hear this all the time from prospects, partners, and our readership. We’re not getting enough leads. Our marketing programs just don’t have enough lead magnet ideas. Have you heard this before?

• WEBSITE TRAFFIC IS LOW: “Our website sucks! It’s not getting any traffic and it doesn’t capture any leads for our sales team.”
• BLOGGING ISN’T WORKING: “We putting in tons of resources and effort into blogging but isn’t paying off.”
• PROSPECTING ISN’T WORKING: “Our sales teams are having a very difficult time getting the attention of new prospects. And, what used to work, no longer does.”

If you are experiencing any of these issues, well read on… There are millions of ways to market your products and/or services. While you may hear terms like inbound marketing, content marketing, and account-based marketing, what does it all mean? 

The concept is simple, and it works for every company – unlike some outbound marketing techniques. The idea is to attract, engage, and convert people that are searching for your stuff. Simple right? Not so fast.

There are a lot of components to make it successful including positioning, messaging, content creation, promotions, nurturing, and technology to name a few. A well-tuned lead generation machine is not a trivial task. So let’s dig into one of the critical components to make your lead generation system work: Lead Magnets.

What Are Lead Magnets

If you’re not familiar with the term, a “lead magnet” is something you give away for the purpose of attracting potential customers (“leads”). It could be a free report, a webinar, a template, or something else that will persuade a person to give you their contact info.

In other words, it’s something you give to a website visitor or social media connection so you can collect their email address or any other contact information you might need.

Spend enough time in the digital marketing world and you’ll notice that even the term lead magnet has a lot of variations to it. Chances are you’ve also heard the term lead magnet as a “free gift,” a “giveaway”, or an “incentive.”

You need lead magnets if you want to convince people to not only give you their email address but also drive them down your entire marketing funnel.

This allows you to turn your most skeptical leads into brand evangelists. But think about lead nurturing and use lead magnets to help you educate your audience with their current problems.

Keeping track of potential leads is important, especially considering that less than 5% of visitors to your website will make a purchase on their first visit. 

But creating a signup form for your blog updates isn’t enough to draw volumes of new leads. More and more people are using feed aggregators (e.g., Feedly or Pulse) to read their favorite blogs, making signing up for email updates seem pointless.

Incorporating some different lead magnets into your marketing campaign, on the other hand, can help you capture more than 75% of your web traffic as leads.

Here are 12 different lead magnet ideas that you can use to drive dramatic results.

1. Reports

Special reports are one of the most popular lead magnet ideas. The best ones offer relevant educational material or useful data that target audiences can use. If you are a marketing leader, you have to read this State of Inbound by Hubspot (@Hubspot).

This report is cited in content across the internet and social channels all year round.

It’s worth the effort because the Hubspot marketing team gets information all year round from people that are interesting in learning more about how to improve their inbound marketing automation platform and this report explains the key issues all marketing leaders are experiencing including the top key issues.

This report is not evergreen content because it was published in 2015. Therefore, it has a limited shelf life.

Anything that was written about this year’s current events, for example, is not evergreen content because it will become obsolete in the following months and the keywords used with the topic will end up in the SEO graveyard, never to be searched again. Evergreen content typically does not have a shelf life.

Here is another example of a report from Abode. Click on the image below to get the report.

2. How-To Video Tutorial

“How-to” content is valuable for your audience, which makes it a great lead magnet. How-to content pieces are great lead magnets for the awareness and consideration stage in the buying cycle.

Develop a list of critical issues your target audience is trying to solve. Then create useful content that will help training and educate them to remove their issue. Content like this also will position you as an expert on the subject matter.

Check out Michael Koehler (@michaelkohler20) how-to video’s on YouTube. Here’s a great about “Google Analytics Tutorial For Beginners” – How to Use Google Analytics.

Your audience has a problem, and you have the answer; all they need to hand over is their email address to get access to the tutorial.

3. Free Webinar

Offer a free webinar that brings value to your audience. Anyone can attend by registering.

Here’s one webinar lead magnet about the Buyers Journey hosted by HubSpot (@hubspot) and Matrix Marketing Group (@mmgtweets).

Or sign up on my friend’s, David Garland (@TheRiseToTheTop), and learn about the “5 Steps to Creating A Course That SELLS.” Enter your email for a step-by-step breakdown of the EXACT strategy he used to generate six figures with his Create Awesome Interviews course.

4. Slides From a Webinar

Once your webinar is over, you can still use it to attract more leads.

Write a blog post or information page about it, and offer readers access to the slides in exchange for their contact information. And consider promoting it on LinkedIn’s Slideshare.

5. Discount/Coupon

If you’re an online retailer, discounts and coupons can be a valuable lead magnet.

You could offer customers 20% off on their first purchase, for example. This will get them to sign up, and encourage conversion. Then, you can continue to market to them via email.

Even if they abandon their cart and don’t make a purchase. 

6. Assessment or Test

Use these lead magnet ideas and watch your web traffic grow.

Even if the prospect is not ready to buy, audiences would love to get some personalized information about how they can benefit from your products and services.

So, offer an assessment of free consultation in exchange for signing up.

Matrix Marketing Group put together a Marketing Performance Grader:

When a person clicks on the ‘GET STARTED’ button, it takes them to a landing page.

7. Exclusive Podcast

IF you’re considered an authority in your niche, people will be interested in getting access to your exclusive content, such as a podcast.

For our friend Amy Porterfield (@AmyPorterfield), this is the main part of her marketing strategy:

8. Infographic

Infographics are a great lead magnet ideas.

Most marketers like to make their infographics easily accessible for others to share and integrate into their own content. Infographics are often available as a downloadable image and embeddable code. 

Instead of giving it all away for free, you can turn some of these components into a lead magnet. Offer a high-resolution copy of the embeddable code by asking for an email address. Here’s one from Statista (@StatistaCharts)  and Forbes (@Forbes).

9. Calendar or Template

Use these lead magnet ideas and watch your web traffic grow.

It’s pretty simple to put together a helpful template or calendar in a spreadsheet that your audience would find useful. 

Offer it as a lead magnet, like this Social Media Planning Template.

10. Plugin

If your business is online, a plugin is the perfect lead magnet. Take the content amplification platform AddThis (@addthis).

Their plugin is one of the most popular social sharing widgets for WordPress websites. But it works on HTML websites as well.

The plugin is free, but they also offer a wide range of other services that they can now easily market to the plugin’s users.

11. Event Recordings and Lead Magnet Ideas

If your brand is hosting a high-profile event, the recordings can be used as a valuable lead magnet.

It’s a way to expand beyond marketing to the event’s attendees – using the recordings as a lead magnet will help you target others who were interested in attending, but couldn’t.

12. Add Click-to-Tweet into Blog Posts

If you have a great blog post or high-quality article that your audience might want to share, add an image with code from Click-to-Tweet to get more shares and pull readers back to your website or content.

Offer it to them as a downloadable PDF, as seen here on our website. Try it by clicking on the image below.

Conclusion about Lead Magnets

As this list shows, there are many different ways to offer small pieces of value to your audience as a lead magnet.

Considering how valuable an audience’s contact information is for moving them down the sales funnel, we as marketers should constantly be looking for new and unique ways to get them to sign up.

Use these 12 different lead magnet ideas as a starting point to inspire the kind of value proposition that will encourage your audience to take action.

Know any lead magnet ideas, I forgot? Let me know in the comments below!

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