Mastering Lead Generation to Attract High-Quality Clients

In this engaging episode, Maree unpacks the three key steps to winning at lead generation: attracting, capturing, and nurturing leads. She emphasizes the importance of targeting the right audience, aligning your free offers with your paid services, and maintaining a strong follow-up process. The episode identifies common lead generation mistakes like casting too wide of a net and failing to have a clear action plan for nurturing potential clients. Maree uses relatable examples to illustrate how businesses often miss the mark but also highlights how minor adjustments can lead to significant improvements. She assures listeners that success doesn’t require a massive email list and provides actionable insights to start implementing right away. From creating compelling lead magnets to leveraging technology for automation, this episode is packed with practical advice for entrepreneurs eager to boost their client engagement and, ultimately, their sales.

Key Takeaways

• Always target your ideal client rather than a broad audience to increase effectiveness.

• Align your freebies with your primary services to ensure your leads will convert.

• Develop a consistent follow-up process to nurture leads effectively.

• Customize your lead generation strategies to suit your personal strengths and business values.

• Remember that valuable lead generation doesn't require a large email list to succeed.

Get ready to attract, nurture, and convert like a pro. If today’s episode resonated with you, share it with your network and start conversations about transforming lead generation from a necessary task into an exciting opportunity for growth. Let's lead the way in effective business strategies that really work.

Connect with Maree:

Email: [e-mail]

Website: Mareekirkpatrick.com

Social Media: @MareeKirkpatrick

 

Thank you for tuning in to The Sales Show! If you found this episode helpful, share it with your network and tag Maree Kirkpatrick on social media.

 

Episode Transcript

Hey, hey, and welcome back to the podcast. I'm so sorry about today's topic, because we're diving into something that can literally make or break a business that, my dear friends, is lead generation. So today I want to give you the ultimate guide to building a lead generation strategy. Now, if the idea of lead generation makes you want to roll your eyes back in your head, or you feel like you're about to fall asleep or would cast a hang with me. Because today we're not just talking about collecting emails or throwing spaghetti at the wall with fake ads to get people onto your email list. We are actually going to be breaking down what it takes to have a really great lead generation strategy that works. And I mean, like, really works. I even have a special gift for you. That I'll share with you are 52 ways to generate more leads in your business. So it's worth waiting for. If you also feel like you've been working hard to get leads, My inbox is filled with a whole heap of people that aren't your ideal client, aren't ready to buy yet, or worse. You're just getting crickets, and nothing's happening. You're doing a whole heap of social media work. Maybe that's not working for you either. This episode, I promise, is specifically for you. And by the end of today's episode, you're going to have a clear strategy, a simple framework to start attracting and converting. Because if you've been here for a while, you know that all about conversion, we want to convert those high-quality leads into paying clients. So grab a beverage, grab a coffee, grab your earphones, and get comfy. Let's do this. So let's start with the basics. I always like to break things down to really simple terms. And I want to start with what is lead. Generation lead generation is that process of attracting potential clients. Aka leads and capturing their information so that you can nurture them towards making a decision. Now, a lot of people will say it's about making a purchase or making a buying decision. Yes, lead generation can be about that. But I also want you to understand that lead generation can be used to help your clients or help people that are following you to decide whether you are right for them, whether they are right for you, and self-select either in or out. So it's about getting them to make that decision. But let me be real with you. Not all leads are equal. It's not just about getting any leads. We want to have high-quality leads coming into your funnel. It's about attracting the right leads, the right ideal clients, the ones who actually need what you're offering and are wanting to take that step forward now. It's not just about filling your bucket. I speak a lot about buckets. When people come to me for help with sales, lead generation, marketing, or messaging, They always say to me, Maree, I need help with lead generation. I need more clients coming in, but what we don't want to do is put more leads into a sales process that has holes in it, and so there's no point in filling up your leads bucket. If your sales bucket has holes in it. So I want you to understand that it's not just about filling up that bucket with random names and random email addresses. It's about creating a system that builds the trust and, naturally, connectively, authentically moves ideal clients closer to working with you. So that's what we're going to be diving into today (00:00):
a system that's actually going to work with you. Now let me tell you a few things about why some lead generation strategies work. If you've tried it before and it hasn't worked, it is probably because of one or multiple of these reasons. The 1st mistake, I see, is people are targeting the wrong people. They're targeting everyone instead of specifically their ideal client. Now, my ideal client, I actually name her. I'm really clear on her demographics, messaging what her biggest challenges are, and what she's looking for. But when we try to talk to everyone. we're speaking really to no one. And so we really need to be crystal clear on? What is it that your ideal client is looking for? What are the words that they are using? What's going to attract them in and bring them into your beautiful home, your business, that you can help serve them? So if you are, let me give you a perfect example. Let's be real here. One of my beautiful, amazing clients I was working with is in the health and well-being industry. They are this. And when they came to me, they were saying, you know, they want bigger launches. They want more clients. They obviously want to increase their revenue. When I was looking at what they were doing. It wasn't from a lack of trying to do lead generation. It was the fact that their messaging and the language that they were using were not right. So it wasn't even that they were trying to attract everyone. They were trying to attract people using their language, their speciality jargon. If you want to look at it that way, their language. And so what we want to do is we want to be so specific that when our clients read our posts, when they look at our websites, when they see us up on stage, When they see us across Facebook ads, they know that we are the right person for them. So we want to know who it is that we're talking to specifically, and we don't want to be talking to everyone. Some people will say me, Maree, but I don't want to cut people out of the market, or I don't want to cut people off, because I know I can help everyone. You probably can help everyone. Do you want to help everyone? I don't know; that's totally up to you, and it's something that you need to think about, but from a lead generation perspective, we don't want to be targeting everyone. Target your specific Sally, and then you will also end up catching other people within that net as well. Okay? So I want you to make sure that that attraction strategy that you're looking at is also aligned to you as a business owner and something that you enjoy doing, something that you're happy to do over and over and over again. So, the first step is to track. You also want to make sure that your content needs to solve a problem and a specific problem for your ideal client. It doesn't mean that you need to just solve one specific problem across your whole business, but target a few of them and align your content and your attraction strategies to that. For example, if you help women, entrepreneurs, or business owners with marketing, your content might focus on how to create a promotion plan, how to price your services, how to attract more leads, how to show your value, and looking at your unique selling points, and all that sort of stuff. But we want to make sure that that strategy is specific so that our Sally can sit there and go. Yeah, I know I need more leads coming into my business. I need help with my lead generation strategy. I know that Maree does that because content specifically tells me that. And it specifically shows me that she can help me. Okay, step number one is your attraction strategy. Step number 2 is to capture once you've already attracted your audience. So we need a way to capture the information, whether that's phone numbers, names, email addresses, or D or the above. That's totally up to you. And this is where a lead magnet comes in. So, for example, a lead magnet isn't just about DM, either. The word lead magnet, and I will send it through to you. What we want to do is send people through a page where we can capture their information and then send it through that. Maybe opt in to the information that they're looking for. The reason why we do that is because you are alright. I'm going to get a little bit ranty here. What I see business owners do is they will deliver a freebie and give their ideal clients a false sense of hope. A false sense of this opt-in will fix all your problems. Now you and I both know one download is not going to double people's turnover. It's not going to 10x their business. They're going to need a little bit more hand-holding, a little bit more information, a little bit more strategy, or help around that. That's why they've come to you. So what we don't want to do is we don't want to deliver that information and not have a way to help them through anything else that comes up in that process. So that's what we want to capture their information. We want to serve them. We want to nurture them. We want to connect with them. We want to build our business as well. That's just an added bonus. But we want to make sure that we're really capturing their information so that we can help them along the way. The other thing that I want to let you know is we want to make the capturing process called the way. I say, Capturing process sounds a little bit like you're a fish, and I've caught you in my net. You have no choice. That's not what I'm saying. The way that we want to engage people in our business is we want to make that process really freaking simple. Okay? So I have gone to websites where people have gone to download my freebie here, and I've had to search and scroll down to find their opt-in or to find the information that they're talking about. We want to make it really easy. Use a landing page where they can sign up and give their email in exchange for the information or the freebie or the tools that you're offering. I use tools like Kajabi; you can use lead pages you can use. Even Canva will help you with those sorts of things. and we just want to make sure that we are capturing those leads into a database or into a container that we own. I know I've said this before on other podcasts. But if you're new here, let me say it again. You do not own Facebook; you do not own Instagram. You do not own social media. You do not own a lot of the places where we are doing our lead generation. So what we need to do is we need to gather people from that tool. So our social media, our YouTube, our LinkedIn, our whatever into a container that we own, for example, our database and onto our website. So that is the goal of the capturing side of it. And then step 3 is to actually nurture them. This is where the beautiful magic happens now; nurturing can take anywhere from a week for people to purchase from you or potentially years. My goal, when I work with my clients, is to make that sales cycle, or that nurturing sequence, as high-converting as absolutely possible, because once people say that they need the help, we want to get them that help. And so we want to capture that information. It's then time to build that trust. And I talk about passing the assessing safety system. That's what the ask that stands for, and it talks about what it goes through. Are we connecting with people? Do people feel safe with us? Are they feeling like... We understand exactly what their challenges are. Are we building that report? Do they feel like we have what it is that they're looking for? Is that opportunity there for us to work together? So we want to make sure, in our nurturing sequence, that we are passing that ass test. And so we also want to then use email sequences to follow up, to share valuable content, to give really practical tips that they can use, and to really position yourself as the expert. It's not just about sending 5 billion emails without a strategy behind that. So some of those emails you can send are things like your is to saving your unique selling points. It's the saving objections that people can sometimes come up with when they're working with you, whether it's finances or whether it's buying a course, and they don't want to just buy another course. That's not going to get them anywhere, or they're not going to have to support or whatever that is to overcome their objections in some of your emails. Introduce yourself. Who are you? Why are you here? What do they need to know about you? You may have come across me. And this may be the first time you've ever met me in my email. You're probably going to want a little bit more information about who this crazy woman is that was talking to you about lead generation on a podcast, so introduce yourself, share who you are, what you do, your expertise, your background, all of that stuff as well. So they are the 3 steps that I highly recommend for you in your winning lead generation strategy that I talk about to attract them, capture them, and nurture them. Then, in that nurturing process, we then get them into becoming a paying client and helping them along the way we share masterclasses. We share webinars, we share tools, tips, and all of that. So another great question that I want to cover today, because a lot of people ask me, is about the tools and resources that we use to create our lead generation strategies for our opt-ins. So you're going to need an email platform so that when people come into our business and opt in for that, we can actually generate that nurturing sequence. Now, I like to be able to streamline and automate things with a big dose of making sure it's personable and connecting. So on that email platform, you can look at things like ConvertKit, Mailchimp, ActiveCampaign, Kartra, and Kajabi. All of them will do those email sequences to help you with your lead generation. You are also going to need to have a landing page. And that's where we're going to capture people's information. So on that landing page you may have a little bit of information about the opt-in and a little bit of information about you. You may even like to add it in down the bottom. You know some services that you offer and things like that as well. On your landing pages, from a place of tools and resources. You can use things like lead pages, Kajabi Weeks, WordPress, and all of that to build out that landing page, and it's just that place where you will have your form for people to fill out where you will grab their name, their email address, maybe their phone number. And whatever it is that you want to. Yeah, for some people, this is optional. You may want to have some faith ads or social media ads. However, this is very optional. It's very powerful if it's done correctly, but I would consider it an advanced strategy. And the reason why I say this is if you are going to go and create a lead magnet and landing pages and email sequences. We want to make sure first, if we put any money behind it, that it is converting; it is a high contact. lead generation strategy that people actually want. Because, as I said before, we don't want to turn up a strategy that has holes in it and that is not working, and when I say, Turn up, turn up. A lot of the time means throwing money into more focused marketing and things like that. So be very careful with your Facebook ads and your social media ads. Just make sure that everything that you're doing is by converting 1st and then absolutely to the livings out of it. If you want some more tools on how to create these lead generation strategies and your sales, funnels, and things like that, You can go and check out her sales. Hub! There's a whole heap of documents and tools that I offer you. There they are at quite a low price. They range from $49 for things like developing your unique selling points, your pricing opportunities, your lead generation, and all of that as well. And so you can check that out at Maree Kirkpatrick. Dot com forward slash hub. But remember today, you've also got that freebie mareekirkpatrick.com forward slash lead, and so I would recommend before you go and buy anything. 1st go and check out the freebie and see what in there that you want to do, what you align with, and then ask yourself, Do I have the tools, the strategies, and the knowledge to implement this? And if I don't, what am I missing? And where would I like to get that information? Now I want to give you a quick action plan because I don't want to be one of those people that you just go and listen to and be like, Oh, yeah, she was lovely. She was funny. Ha, ha! I don't know if I've actually been funny. But whatever. But I actually want to give you that quick action plan. So here's the practical side of it. Step number one