Six Steps to a Stronger Online Brand

February 21, 2017

Why Your Business Needs to Hire an Inbound Consultant

March 10, 2017

Published by Jillian Vanarsdall at February 27, 2017

The specific target number does a quarter of the work

If you’re intimidated, replace 100 with 50 or even 20. Don’t replace 30 days. A month is a good schedule to adhere to. Not too tight to choke, and not too lax that you and/or your team could slack off.

This is SMART goal setting, by the way. You’ve probably read about it. No? SMART stands for:

Specific – What are you going to do? How? How many? When? For what?
Measurable – How do you know you’ve accomplished your goal? Give it a number.
Attainable – Divide the task into smaller, more specific chunks. There’s nothing more gratifying than the feeling of accomplishment and striking an item from your to-do list.
Relevant and Realistic – It’s got to be important enough that you can’t delegate it or skip it, and it’s got to be part of a bigger picture you have in mind for your business. For example, getting these 100 targeted leads in 30 days is part of your goal to increase conversion by 25% this year.
Time-bound – Put every task and every goal in its place. Create schedules and deadlines. This way, you and your team know what to focus on, instead of flitting from one to the other and accomplishing nothing.

So for this challenge, your goal is to get 100 leads in 30 Days. That’s 3 to 5 leads a day, even with 10 days gone for implementing your strategy.

This is the SMART version of the goal, “Get more leads.” Does that sound familiar? It might even be in your To-Do list, huh? Well, go edit your to-do’s right now and make them all SMART.

You must get into this mindset now. I’m about to give you several SMART To-Dos on your way to getting these leads.

Get 100 Targeted Leads in 30 Days

Here’s the lowdown on our strategy. We’ll get the leads through:

Market research
Targeted, high-converting landing pages
Facebook advertising
Blogging and gated content
Limited Webinars
Optimized emails

How to do market research to get leads

SMART goal:

Find and list all your commercial keywords in two hours.

We’ve talked about buyer personas before. Neil Patel puts it succinctly:

Market research hasn’t really changed. It all boils down to knowing what your target audience wants and where they usually go to look for answers to their problems (most often, a search engine).

– Neil Patel

But now your market research is targeted toward getting leads. So you find the commercial keywords: the ‘buy now’ and ‘product’ keywords your buyers are using.

Brian Dean of Backlinko calls it keywords that show your audience’s commercial intent. There are four: Buy Now, Product, Informational, and what Dean calls “Tire Kicker–” this commercial intent won’t buy now or very unlikely in the future. Tire kicker keywords include ‘free’ ‘download’ ‘for free’ and ‘torrent.’

Informational keywords contain ‘how to’ ‘guide’ ‘best ways to…’

You CAN get targeted leads with that. But focus on the Buy Now and Product keywords to generate leads.

Buy Now keywords	Product keywords
Buy Coupon Discount Deal Shipping	Review Best Top 10 Specific brand name Specific product Product category Cheap Affordable Comparison Brand name vs. Brand name OR Product vs. Product

Find what your customers search for when they use Informational keywords, Buy Now keywords and Product keywords. You can optimize all the next lead generation steps in this article according to what you dig up.

For example, if you are an accounting firm, you’d likely find your target customers search for bookkeeping and tax preparation discounts and deals.

Use that information as a sweetener on your landing page
Create a Facebook ad with that exact offer
Offer a guide on “What to ask your accountant” or “How to reduce your property tax” as a lead capture in your blog.
Talk about it in your newsletters to get your audience to click through.

Targeted, high-converting landing pages

SMART to-do’s:

Identify your service categories and your target audiences.
Create separate landing pages for every service or audience category in two days.

To get targeted leads, you need targeted landing pages. Once your audience finds you, do they see themselves in your landing page?

For example, one of my clients created an app that gives you a live video connection with a veteran, trained security person to give you peace of mind (and instructions and help should you need it) in dangerous situations. Their target clients fall in three categories: caregivers, doctors and nurses; realtors; and college students.
They created a landing page for each. It was awesome. They talked to each of their target audiences in each landing page, giving them the ability to really sell their product. In the landing page for nurses, they focused on the pain points of a nurse clocking out and doing errands late at night, facing unpredictable patients and patients’ relatives, traversing empty parking lots.

The nurses end up signing up to learn more or activating the app immediately– because the landing page was hyper-focused and benefit-driven on the needs of the nurse.

Your landing page should:

Have ONE purpose, one target, one focus. This is why you need one each for every service and every target audience. Someone looking for bookkeeping has enough pain points you can focus on without talking about tax preparation.
Be benefit-driven. Don’t talk about what you’ve got. Talk about what you can do for your target audience.

As for the other elements, here’s a handy graphic on high-converting landing pages from Neil Patel, and a sample below (also by Neil Patel in his guide about content-based lead generation):

high-converting-landing-pages-from-Neil-Patel Notice that you can easily identify Chris Ducker’s target audience in this landing page for the New Business Bootcamp: entrepreneurs about to start a business.

He doesn’t talk about the features of the boot camp. Instead of saying, “Outsourcing Tips and Techniques” and “Ebook Creation Guide,” he says, “Create Raving Fans With Free eBooks” and “Grow Your Empire Through Outsourcing.”

Always answer the question: “What’s in it for me?”

Getting leads through Facebook Advertising

SMART to-do:

Create a targeted Facebook campaign using intersecting interests.

Facebook advertising is a whole ‘nother BIG kettle of fish that would have its own blog post, but for the purpose of getting leads, here’s a technique you can immediately employ with Facebook advertising.

Before I continue, let me point out how awesome Facebook is in helping you map your buyer persona. Analytics and reports from Facebook ad campaign can give you insight about who’s interested in you age, gender, likes, location, job titles). You then optimize your strategy for them.

When you set up a Facebook campaign, you’ll be prompted about your audience’s interests.

Pick two of them for this particular campaign, use “AND” not “OR.” Target that audience overlap.

You reduce the size of your audience, you’ll reduce costs AND you’ll be able to optimize your ad for that specific audience. Because of that hyper-focus, you’ll get leads.

For example, if you are a Shopify app provider and you target an audience who likes blogging and knitting, you get to use an image related to knitting or knitted products, and mention “selling in your blog” in your ad copy.

If you reach out to a specific audience– they take notice and respond.

Connect a targeted landing page for every Facebook ad. Make sure what they see in the ad is what they see in the landing page. Don’t mislead your audience. If you offer 20% discount and the landing page has no mention of that discount whatsoever, you’ve lost a lead, not gained one!

Lead capture through blogging and gated content

SMART to-do: Research and publish an informational blog post coupled with a commercial intent lead magnet in a week.

Publish a guide or how-to.
Create a Top Ten/Review/Best post to go with it.
Promote on Facebook, separately and together, using intersecting interests.

Use informational intent keywords to blog. It’s the age of information– get leads and get ahead of your competitors by providing the best, most comprehensive information in your niche.

Startups can find it hard to break through in search results, so:

Promote it on Facebook ads through visual and ad copy optimized for pairs of intersecting interests
With an irresistible bonus gated content

Gated content are content with gates– another name for lead magnets. You capture leads at the gate. The gate is a requirement for important visitor information; like an email address. In exchange for the visitor’s information, they receive access to the content. The act of getting a visitor to provide their information in exchange for your content is called a conversion.

How-to’s and Guides are in high demand. Use the Skyscraper technique to read all the resources already out there on your chosen topic, and then create yours to be the better choice of all of them.

And then add a high-value, premium content as a bonus to capture leads.

Your article: 10 Techniques Influencers Use to Win At Facebook Advertising

Your lead magnet bonus: The Best Automation Tools for Facebook Advertising: Save Money and Time!

Keep blogging and keep offering gated content, promote it on social media, guest post with spin-offs, offer high-value premium content every time, and you’ll start and maintain lead generation for months and years to come. You’ll definitely get 100 in a month.

Lead generation through ‘limited’ free webinars

SMART to-do: Shoot a high-value, premium webinar.

Research a topic according to your target audience’s commercial intent. Write the script.
Edit. Add slides for visual retention.
Offer it for free. Watch the leads come in.

Webinars are just like gated content, except it’s in video (Livestream surveyed people and found that 80% prefer live video to blog posts and 82% prefer live video to social posts) and it utilizes the ‘scarcity trigger.’ It’s there for a limited time, so people sign up.

These are your targeted leads. They want to know what you’d say, they already have an amount of trust in you, and you can cement that or convert them through a valuable webinar.

Link to it in your promoted posts. Promote it in your social media and newsletters. Use urgent and powerful conversion keywords.

Don’t forget to update your landing page about the webinar! Mention it even after it is over, so your audience who finds their way there don’t feel lost and neglected.

Optimized emails

SMART to-do:

Setup an email tracking tool for lead intelligence

Emails? Aren’t they leads already? Well, yes. But you want a lead you can nurture into a sale. So you need another step to know who would convert sooner rather than later.

People sign up for everything, and if they signed up through an informational post, they might take a long time before converting.

Let’s Tie it All Together

You performed market research and you used those commercial intent keywords to create targeted landing pages, content, ad copy and webinars. Now you’ve got leads. Who among these leads are really, truly leads?

Those who do what you want them to do in your emails, of course. The ones who:

Open your emails
And click on your links

Mailchimp, Constant Contact, and numerous other email platforms and tools let you know what you’re doing right and what’s not working. Use them so you can optimize everything: from your landing page and blog posts to your ads and offers.

We’ve come full circle.

You start with market research, and every lead generating effort powered by market research also provides more insight on your target audience, and how you can turn more of them into leads and paying customers.

Many of these techniques– a mix of inbound and outbound marketing– become sharper and more effective as you analyze, learn, refine, and implement again.

Have questions? We are happy to answer them.

Get your 30 day challenge going. Let us know how it turns out for you. Got any other techniques to share? Post it in the comments! And of course, contact us for help with one or all of these!

Interested in learning more?