The ability to not only create a lead but to nurture and maintain that lead is what determines whether a company will have a full pipeline or not.
Lead generation is the process in which a business sets up a system or strategy to capture a potential leads information via social media, their website, or blog, and nurture them down the buyers journey until they purchase from you or not. Having the ability to develop and implement this type of strategy can provide long-term benefits to a business as well as take the hassle out of generating quality leads.
However, the problem a lot of brands run into is, they set up a sloppy or inefficient process that boasts no ROI or even worse, doesn’t even perform at all. Setting up a sloppy process is just as bad, if not worse, than having no process at all.
This type of strategy is where it’s the most important to nurture a connection because if they have a bad experience with you through email, which is more personalized and specific than social media on the broad spectrum, they are likely to never buy from you.
Therefore, it is highly necessary to implement an optimized strategy to give you the highest possible chances of converting (or providing a positive online experience). When setting up a lead generation strategy, it is important to decide which type you are going to use. You can have it linked via blog, social media campaign (ads), gathering sign-ups on your website, or even a simple CTA under the services/products you offer, that prompts people to look more closely to what the offer is (could lead to up-sells).
In this blog article, we are going to talk about:
- How To Start
- Content Strategy
- “Did You Say it can be Automated?” ~ Why, yes, yes we did!
1.) How To Start
Have you ever wondered what it could be like to have a list of leads filling your funnel and pipeline without you doing anything after the initial set-up? If you’re a small business owner, then chances are that you have. Especially if you’re in the law, real estate, or really any other B2B or direct B2C (business to business & business to consumer directly) industries.
Thankfully, we have you covered if you have thought about this or even tried, more so if have tried but didn’t get anywhere. So, how do you start?
The first thing, as we usually start off with, is deciding on and committing to a goal or a max. of three goals. To us, there is three main goal-types that you should think about. The first is to actually convert into leads (the end goal of the funnel would be to get a phone consult or sales – meeting), the second is to add to your email list, and the third is to convert into a sale.
After you decide on your goal, you can now start creating a lead generation process. The next step is to decide how the funnel will trigger. Will it be from a CTA on a blog article, a landing page that people land on after clicking a link from social media, a paid ad campaign that leads to a landing page, or from a downloadable/exclusive offer? Decide and commit to whichever trigger you want/think fits your goals. You can even have multiple triggers for the same funnel, or different funnels that lead into a more segmented and targeted funnel as the funnel itself narrows down, however, we will get into that in a future sales/email funnel post. For now, use one trigger until you are comfortable setting them up/how to use and manage them.
The next step(s) after choosing your trigger is to set up the funnel itself (like we said, check back in the next couple of days for an in-depth guide on sales/email funnels) and to create and optimize the email sequence flow. This is where you’ll decide how many emails there are, if you’ll be giving away content, telling stories that build rapport, etc. These steps are also where, if you decided you’ll include or give away content in your funnel, you’ll implement that content here. You can imbed it within an email, have them download it by signing-up which if you do, you can have that second sign-up (or anyone after the initial opt-in sign-up) be a trigger for a segmented list that tells you someone is a hot lead, warm lead, or not a lead at all anymore.
2.) You Need a Content Strategy
Content is kind and there is no debate against it. As long as it reigns as king, it’s a necessity in any online strategy. In order for your lead generation strategy (or any type of sales/email funnel) to be rock solid and optimized to its highest potential, you need content and a content strategy.
This part goes back to choosing your goals, the first step. Depending on what goal(s) you picked for your lead-gen. strategy, you may need to create and implement content into your funnel. What we suggest doing, is to have a folder of around 10+ pieces of created content you can include in a funnel. Be sure not to repeat yourself if you have multiple funnels. You can provide the same content but change the *context.
This is where you’ll have to layout and format what content goes where, what you should be including in the funnel, how much content should be given, etc. You HAVEto make sure that is in line with your goals, what your goal of the funnel is, as well as in line with your overall brand. For example, a simple funnel we use at iForOne is the blog funnel. Each blog article has a CTA (call to action) that readers can sign-up and receive our blog daily in their email inbox. When they sign up, we send a welcome follow-up immediately after, welcoming them for joining and telling them what they get/why they’ll benefit, and then whatever blogs come over the next few days we send them.
After about the fourth or fifth blog we send them (around the fifth day after they sign-up), we give an opt-in offer. This could be a download, schedule a phone consult, training session, whatever it is, we offer this so when they opt-in, we know they’re looking for more and we have a potential client in our pipeline. If they don’t opt-in, we stick to the regular blog funnel goal of providing our readers with daily posts in their inbox then we repeat the cycle after about a week the second time around. Simple, right? Yet, so many get it confused and don’t end up creating a lead generation process/funnel.
*Context – If you have a funnel for say, your financial services firm’s tax-services, that is focused on tax returns, and within it you are using a tax return-related template, you wouldn’t use that same template in a funnel focused on managing your money, without context. Instead, in the latter funnel, you briefly mention it because taxes do relate to personal-finances, but do you see what we did? We changed the context but used the same content.
3.) “Did You Say it can be Automated?” ~ Why, yes, yes we did!
The lead generation (and all of sales/email funnels) can be put into an automated process, so you can set-and-forget. This is the BEST part of having an organized and optimized lead-gen. process in your arsenal. By automating this process and sequence of email flows, you are giving yourself more time to work on the business, close sales, up-sell, and maintain/nurture leads and previous buyers.
By implementing a lead generation process, you are automating the most important part of a sales cycle: the prospecting. By creating an optimized process with a backend funnel, you are (without even realizing) finding, prospecting, nurturing, and building trust all in one. The reason? Say you run a one-week ad that leads to an opt-in landing page. Then, by the end of the funnel, you want to have a sale. Well, by running an ad campaign, you are finding potential prospects and increasing your search or traffic automatically because it is running by itself once you set it up and push it through Facebook, Instagram, or YouTube. Then, when someone opts-in and journey’s down the funnel, you are automatically prospecting that prospect, to see if they’re a good fit. This is specifically important relating to goals. You need to decide and commit to your goals so you can optimize your funnel to weed out prospects or to not, depending on your goal. By having a funnel that tells stories and builds rapport as well as giving away valuable content, which again, once you set up the sequence, is all automated, you’ll be nurturing and maintaining that connection on autopilot.
So, how do you automate? Well, you first need to create a MailChimp account, or a similar provider. This is your email provider, what will allow you to automate. Then you create the ad and landing page (can be done in MailChimp itself), and then you go into MailChimp, and click “Create Campaign” then “Create Email.” Once it brings you to the email set-up page, you can choose to set-up an automated flow, or you can do it one by one.
Lead generation is a huge asset to small businesses, especially those in law, real estate, dentistry, landscaping, or consulting industries. Having a filled pipeline, constantly, is an incredibly undervalued aspect to have for a small business. With a filled pipeline you can always have potential buyers, always make potential sales, growth-hack (article coming out tomorrow on this) through asking for referrals, and much more.
It allows the sales and marketing functions to combine and intertwine. You are creating content for social media (marketing) that leads someone to a funnel and they stay in that funnel until they make a purchase or not (sales).
Lead generation is something that small businesses need to utilize and leverage to their advantage now, before social media changes on us again.
The Creative Blog 
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