How do you make $15,000 in sales in one week of launching a product within a highly competitive niche? Ryan Robinson, the side hustle connoisseur will tell you how – lead generation marketing. The affiliate blogger recently shared how he took a brand new business validation course from $0 to $15,000 in sales using lead generation marketing.
To understand what lead generation marketing is, it is important to clarify who a lead is. A lead is someone within your target audience who expresses some interest in your product, with the potential to become a customer at some point. The process of taking this person or ‘lead’ from being just ‘someone with an interest’ to ‘paying customer’ is known as lead generation marketing.
Lead generation marketing begins with attracting and identifying who your leads are (or ‘qualifying your leads’), and this step is important to ensure that your marketing efforts are focused on the group with the highest likelihood of purchasing your product. There are so many creative ways to attract and qualify leads, and for Ryan, the process started with the creation of a business validation challenge. Through the challenge, he shared the steps he took to achieve his business validation goal and his leads, in this case, consisted of people interested in validating their business ideas in a similar way. These people subscribed to the challenge updates (to the tune of 3,000 subscribers in one month!), giving Ryan access to communicate with the group of people most interested in hearing about his progress.
Once you begin to acquire leads, the next step in the process is to keep these leads engaged and interested in your product. Successful lead generation marketing campaigns will involve providing key information that keeps leads interested and engaged to the point where they eventually warm up to the brand. Getting the audience sufficiently warm is important because this removes most of the resistance involved in making a purchase.
Whether you do it through a sales team or by outsourcing, taking your qualified leads from interested strangers to paying customers involves a lot of communication. For Ryan, this meant regular storytelling showing how he used his own proven system to validate his business idea and how this earned him some income. For you, it might involve getting your sales team to nurture leads through regular updates ranging from product information to case studies on how others have benefitted from your product.
The prospect of sending out regular emails might seem intimidating, but thankfully we live in a time and space where the process of regular outreach has been made simpler with Marketing Automation Software such as Act!. Act! simplifies lead nurturing through features such as automated campaigns, for example. You just set up your campaign at the beginning, and every new lead you get is automatically sent a series of emails pre-determined by you at regular intervals of hours, days or weeks also pre-determined by you. You can then monitor their engagement to determine when a lead is ready to buy before you hit them with your big money offer.
Think about it. If you were looking to improve your eating habits for example, how likely would you be to impulsively purchase a healthy eating plan you saw advertised in the corner of the lead generation article you were reading? Would you be more likely to purchase or sign up for a plan at a time when you were actually searching one, having come across a free 3-day mini challenge that came with a free downloadable eating plan?
This type of marketing where complete strangers find and contact you through the information you put out is called inbound marketing. Inbound marketing is so much more effective than outbound marketing (where you make the first contact with strangers regardless of their interest level, through product advertisements). Hidden Depth found that inbound marketing generated 54% more leads than outbound marketing tactics and this is just one illustration which shows how powerful lead generation marketing can be. This makes sense for businesses because the need to spend marketing efforts to convince complete strangers that they need your product is eliminated.
Lead generation marketing only scratches the surface of what is a more effective, more profitable marketing strategy. If you need help to set up your first lead generation marketing campaign, download our free beginner’s guide to lead generation.