There is intense pressure on every marketer
to generate high-quality leads. Your marketing tactics drive the growth for your business – leadership is
always looking for more - and despite what they say, your sales teams know deep down they
can’t do it without you.
After 25 years as the founder of a national
marketing agency, I can almost predict the exact moment when my client will ask
me “Marty, how do I generate more high-quality leads?”
Everyone wants to grow and get bigger, but
very few people have found that ‘silver bullet’ to reliably produce enough high-quality
leads to drive the kind of growth they’re being held accountable to.
If this sounds like you, keep reading, I’m going to share one of my favourite
strategies and two of my favourite tactics to generate leads.
Lead Generation Starts with a Strategy
I’m going to focus on inbound marketing for lead generation.
Inbound: “attracting
customers based on your content, your ads and your brand authority”.
Regardless of the industry, the type of
business, the size of business, the number one inbound marketing strategy that
I recommend to marketing clients is Value-Based Selling.
Value Based Selling
In order to live this strategy in the
CMO Dojo, you have to stop yourself and every member of your marketing team
from doing what comes naturally. Stop trying to promote your product or
service.
Seriously. You have to put down the pen
and start putting yourself in the shoes of your customers. Whether they’re a
size 11 loafer or a size 6 running shoe, your number one step is to focus on
providing value to your customer.
1. To make this work, you need to first define your ideal customer, as accurately as possible. You might be able to leverage some of your customer segmentation data or recent market research. It could come from long form answers to survey questions or by interviewing your sales team.
The simple thing is to WRITE DOWN WHAT
MATTERS TO YOUR CUSTOMERS. Go as broad and deep as you can with this as it will
underpin the foundation of your strategy and growth.
If you’re stuck, I encourage my clients
to do some simple, meaningful homework. Call up a few of your best customers
and ask them questions like:
“What’s the number one
challenge in your business right now”,
“What do you wish you had
more time to do”,
“What are your 3 biggest
priorities for the next quarter”.
Once you aggregate a list of your
customers’ pain points, interests and priorities you will be able to see where
there is commonality and frequent thematic overlap.
2. Figure out what you can do to provide value to your customers and prospects without making them commit to a transaction with you. That sounds strange because… shouldn’t this be about getting them to commit to a transaction with you? Let’s try some examples to show how this step works.
Example A: Financial Institution - Try
providing useful tips on saving and investing through YouTube or a blog.
Example B: Farm Equipment Manufacturer
– Your team might review and recommend various ag tradeshows to help farmers
decide which ones they should attend. You might also create and promote an
interview series with farmers across the country, showcasing how different
farmers create manage risk, grow high yield crops and somehow manage work-life
balance.
No matter what way you approach it, the
point is to focus your content so that it relates to the target customers
and provides value to them.
3. In order for Value Based Selling to be a meaningful strategy, you need
to commit. You can’t be a one-hit wonder or your target customers will see
right through you – or start ignoring you all together. The Commitment of Step
3 means you have to be consistent, frequent and targeted so
that the value becomes recognized as part of your company’s culture.
IT’s true. As a marketer, you know you have to give a lot before you get
anything back in return. But, once you make that paradigm shift, your marketing
efforts will create:
A stronger community,
A more
relatable brand
Lasting
sources of leads.
This isn’t the only strategy you should
use, but if you don’t have a solid value-based selling strategy in place, make
it a priority to get started this quarter.
Now It’s Time for the
Tactics
By now, your leadership team is
wondering when is marketing going to do so something that I can see turning
those leads into our business.
On to the tactics I promised you.
1. I call my first favourite tactic “Buy the list”. If you can narrow down your target market into a tight enough niche, it is quite likely that you can simply buy the list of Names, emails and phone numbers.
In my expertise and experience - if you
can buy the list of all your potential customers, there’s almost no better
investment you can make. It’s usually expensive, but well worth it.
And if you can’t “
Buy the List”,
there are all kinds of services and contractors that can pull this kind of
information together for you to “
Build the List”. Instead of paying for
marketing that tries to target customers through demographic and industry
filters, you have a real-life list. This means you won’t have to pay for a lot
of wasted impressions and clicks for customers that aren’t actually in your
target market. If you buy or build the list, you can simply target these people
directly.
If getting the list is the first step, the
second step is to stack other outbound and inbound tactics on top of
it.
CMO Dojo Tip
You may have to be a little bit careful
with using bought email lists on your inbound campaigns, but there are still
some clever ways you can leverage it to get massively improved results in your
inbound campaigns. I teach tactics like this in my CMO Dojo Facebook
group. If you’re a CMO or Director of Marketing and want to get my best tools
and training for growing your business, as well as monthly CMO coaching calls, click
this link to join for free for
the first year.
Did you know that if you start by
uploading an existing audience, Facebook uses its 52,000 points of data to algorithmically find
similar people? That means if you upload a list of your best customers, you can
build a lookalike audience of people that are similar. Then you can layer
additional targeting like geographic restrictions on top of this to further
refine who sees your ads. No wasted clicks or impressions and it’s all
completely on the up and up when it comes to privacy. I would never
recommend a tactic in the CMO Dojo that goes below the line.
You can do some pretty specific targeting
using interests, demographics, behaviour and other types of targeting but your
competitors have access to these exact filters as well. You aren’t the
only one in this Dojo so you have to use your best knowledge of your customers
to compete for the call to action.
How do you get started with Lookalike
Audiences? All you need is a list of email addresses for your customers and/or
prospects. You can take it to the next level, if you break that list into
logical groups (for example, you might have separate lists for customers and
for your dealers, and in this case, you would create 2 lookalike audiences).
CMO Dojo Tip
You need a minimum of 100 number of
emails in your list to build the Lookalike Audience on Facebook. But I’ve found
it actually works a lot better if you have at least 500 emails on the list.
Even if you don’t have the minimum
amount, you can still run this tactic in a different way. Other platforms
allow you to set specific website events as a condition for putting someone
into an audience.
Let’s use another example:
If people that visited your “pricing”
or your “catalogue” page are likely to be a good potential customer, you can
create a lookalike audience based off of that group as well.
Let’s recap our blog lesson on Value Based Selling and Lead Generation from the CMO Dojo:
- Build a Value-Based Selling Strategy as the foundation for your inbound campaigns.
- Figure out if you can BUY THE LIST of your target customers. if you can, DO IT. If you can’t, BUILD IT.
- Use Lookalike Audiences to outperform your competitors using your customer email list and your website data.
If you are a CMO or a Director of
Marketing for your company, I really encourage you to join my private Facebook
group CMO Dojo. I do monthly
coaching calls and publish all my best marketing training & tools, plus
you’ll connect with an incredible network of amazing and smart business leaders
- check it out!