Give a man a fish and he’ll eat for a day…

…but give that man a fishing rod, and he’ll feed himself for the rest of his life.

If this idiom was created with business in mind, it might look something like this:

Give a company a lead and they’ll be profitable for a day…

…but give them a lead generating machine, and they’ll be profitable for generations.

If you own (or have any hand in the management of) a business you’ll know the importance and value of leads.

In this guide, I’m going to explain how you can generate (more) leads for your business, but not just any old business leads…

…these people are going to be highly qualified, keen to hear from you and excited to buy your stuff.

Let’s go get ’em…

Why Listen to Me? 

As an agency, we collect leads for our clients, business leads for our marketing services and leads for our website and training materials…

…and we aren’t bad at it.

As you’d imagine, we have different channels and systems for these business aims, but our actual process and methodology is pretty similar for all of them.

Historically (as an average) my content has collected 2500+ leads per month for our training materials ALONE (not including clients, or business leads).

That sounds great, but I’ll hold my hands up and say that anyone can get those numbers. In fact, a kid with a laptop could generate more in just a few days.

However, what very few people can do, is generate that number of HIGH-QUALITY leads. These leads open and click on our emails, take our offers, listen to our recommendations and request contact from our team.

The lead generation strategy that I’m going to give you (in just a few moments) will work in any industry or niche (we have yet to find one that it doesn’t work in) and will collect contacts who actually want to hear from you.

Other Lead Generation Strategies 

Before we get into my favourite (and our most-used) lead generation tactic, it’s important that we talk about a few others, how they’re used and their strengths and weaknesses.

BTW: You might’ve noticed that we have used (and continue to use) ALMOST all of the lead generating strategies that are highlighted in this section, but they’re used sparingly compared to our other lead gen strategies.

Let’s get into them:

• Contests: This is a great way to generate new leads, but it’s only worth using in short bursts otherwise you’ll jeopardise the integrity of your brand. Contests can be run natively on your website, as well as being promoted on social networks. These work by exchanging a prospect’s contact details for an entry into the contest. Find out how we’ve used Messenger to collect leads from contests.
• Newsletter Subscriptions: If you’re producing awesome content on your website, why not offer visitors the chance to subscribe and receive more of the same awesome content via email? Newsletter subscribers can quickly become brand fans and ambassadors, as they’ve signed up for more of your content (which is a clear sign that they already love it!) without expecting anything else in return.
• Discounts/offers: People are much more willing to part with their contact information if there is a monetary incentive. A discount on your products, or an exclusive offer for subscribers ONLY, is a great way to generate new leads.
• Bought List: There are many places to buy email lists (AKA leads), however, this is something that I strongly recommend against. A bought list DO NOT know who you are, will be much harder to convert and can require a lot of man-hours to make a return on. Find out more in, Is It Ever OK to Buy a Marketing (or Sales) List?
• Support: Another way to generate leads is via offering a live chat option to prospects. We do this on FB Messenger, with anyone who contacts us on this channel given the chance to subscribe to our Messenger list. But be aware, that these people must consent to future communications.
• Free Trial: If you sell a service or tool, a great way to capture leads and make more people aware of the quality of your solution is to offer a free trial. These usually run for a short period of time before reverting to a paid service.

These are a few lead generation methods that are sure to give your sales team plenty of opportunities.

Great Lead Generation Campaigns Get Great Leads

^^^Read that headline again^^^

It’s really important that you understand how crucial that sentence is. It’s the foundation of all our lead gen campaigns and it should be at the heart of yours.

The more time, effort and quality you put into generating leads for your business, the higher quality those leads will be.

Your leads will know who you are, be much more willing to buy and actually look forward to hearing from you. All this equals a very high conversion rate.

Trust me, I’ve seen a lot when it comes to lead generation campaigns, from bought leads, to contests, newsletters, comment email captures…

…and I can safely say that businesses who take shortcuts in this area, experience slow (or stunted) growth, low conversion rates, high staff turnover and a lot of manpower to achieve sales.

Lead generation shortcuts include:

• Buying an email list
• Running contests 365 days a year
• Offering a discount to new subscribers but using ‘small print’ to redefine the offer after they’ve signed up

As a general rule, I’ve found that the more time spent putting together a lead gen campaign, the better the leads have been, the higher they have converted and the more they have wanted to hear from us (or our clients).

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Value Overload

It’s a well-documented fact that the best way to convert prospects into leads (or subscribers) is to offer them something in exchange for their contact information.

This means going further than simply giving them the chance to ‘subscribe’ to keep up-to-date with your content.

It means actually handing them something. In marketing, we call this a lead magnet.

And the more value that you stack into your lead magnet, the better it will convert, and the better those leads will convert AFTER they’ve consumed it.

BTW: If you’re still unsure about what a lead magnet is, check out this FB Audience’s eBook.

I’m sure that many of you are wondering why you should put so much emphasise on the quality and value of your lead magnet…

…after all, shouldn’t it be the product (that you pitch to your leads) that needs to hold the MASSIVE value? Once you’ve captured the leads, it’s down to your sales processes, right?

My experience has taught me otherwise.

Every time a prospect interacts with our business (or a clients’) I want to increase the perceived value of our paid services and products…

…and the best way for me to do that is to increase the REAL value of our free products and services.

In the case of Einstein Marketer, that’s our blog articles, guides, resources and most importantly, our lead magnets.

I want everyone who interacts with anything that’s available FREE from Einstein Marketer (like this guide to lead gen) to think something along the lines of: 

‘Wow, if this is what they offer for FREE, their paid stuff must be something else!’

‘These guys are real experts in their field. I really trust them after this has helped me so much.’

‘If anybody I know has a problem that relates to this industry, I’ll recommend them!’

‘I can’t believe how much I’ve learnt from this eBook. If I get all their eBooks, my results will sky-rocket!’

When (or if) you create a lead magnet that gets leads thinking like this (before you’ve even pitched or contacted them) you’re on to a real winner.

And as far as I know, the only way to do this is to inject massive value into your lead magnet.

What Kind of Lead Magnet? 

I prefer lead magnets that impart knowledge over anything else (including monetary incentives) because they provide leads with long lasting value.

Yes, contests and offers have their place in lead generation but the value (for your lead) is short-lived (and more often than not, they don’t even take up the option to use their discount!).

These types of monetary incentives will give your list a boost in terms of speed and size, but they can’t be left running and they won’t create much long-term value.

When creating a lead magnet (and stacking tons of value into it) you need to be aware of where many of your prospects are in their development.

A lot of your leads won’t be ready to buy, some of them will be fact-finding and many of them will be learning more about your industry.

When you create a lead magnet that doubles up as a long-lasting resource, you give yourself a much better chance of converting these leads when they are ready to buy.

BTW: If you want to see what a lead magnet like this looks like (and pick it apart) check out our FB audience’s eBook or imitate a page exit (by raising your cursor to close the page) and check out our FB Ad Copy Cheat Sheet (with 15 Ad Copy Templates) that appears as an exit pop-up. 

Creating a Lead Magnet of Massive Value

There are tons of different ways for you to inject massive value into your lead magnet.

The first thing you want to think about is your target market’s biggest problems (that are relevant to your industry), you then need to use your knowledge to provide solutions.

It’s at this point that many businesses fail to understand the true level of value that their lead magnet requires.

For many brands, they see the solution to their target market’s problem as their product. This is where they go wrong.

A product is the implementation of the solution. It should be a guaranteed fix. A product isn’t the knowledge or information that can guide a target market to solve the problem themselves (unless you’re selling training- if you are, give them a small piece as a lead magnet).

For most people, the idea of learning how to fix their biggest problems is really appealing (which is why they download your lead magnet), but the majority will either be too lazy, too busy or too afraid to implement the solution…

….and this is why they’re so much happier to buy from you (as they move through your funnel).

For example, we have a product that is literally the best Facebook Ads training program available anywhere (I repeatedly checked before, during and after its creation), but our lead magnets ALL show our leads how to run FB ads themselves.

These lead magnets include:

• The Ultimate Guide to Facebook Audiences: So leads can find their target market on Facebook without wasting a penny reaching people who won’t want their stuff
• A FB Ad Copy Cheat Sheet (Including 15 Ad Copy Templates): Because we noticed that a lot of our prospects were struggling to write high-converting ad copy
• A Guide to EVERY Facebook Ad Campaign Objective: I noticed that a lot of our prospects were struggling to pick the correct FB campaign objective, and there were a lot of misconceptions about them (mainly due to their names).

All of these lead magnets help prospects solve their problem- creating and running FB ad campaigns that return positively on their ad spend, which is the exact same as our product…

…but none of them directly implement the solution for our target market.

And this is why they are so ready to buy when we follow-up with them.

If you’re still stuck for ideas, here are a few types of lead magnet that convert really well when stacked with value and closely tied to your products:

• eBook (20-50 pages is enough)
• Cheat Sheet
• Templates
• Calendars
• Schedules
• Plans

Get More Leads

The information in this article should be enough to get you started towards a higher converting lead gen campaign, that generates more HIGH-QUALITY leads for your business.

But remember, this is only a solution to your problem, the implementation is in your hands as soon as you leave this page.

The value line has moved for all businesses and it’s up to you to provide as much as you can for FREE.

This will create an amazing list of people who are desperate to buy your products and services.

Want more essential marketing strategies? Check out some of our most popular articles ever: 

• How to Get More Traffic To Your Website
• The Best Marketing Books: 19 Must Reads
• How to Never Run Out of Content Marketing Ideas Again (Including 8 Free Content Tools) 

• Author Details

Josh Barney

https://joshbarney.blog

josh@einsteinmarketer.com

Josh is the Founder of We Imagine Media, an award-winning content marketer, best selling author and creator of the www.joshbarney.blog. He creates and strategises content, sharing the most successful tactics with his lovely audience. He hates writing in the third person, follow him on the social links so he can get back to writing as himself.