Ep 475: How To Create A Converting Lead Gen Offer
Creating a high-value, free lead generation offer – one that creates a roadmap to your paid offer – can be a crucial part of your marketing strategy. I often see business owners make serious mistakes with their free offer, though.
Today, I’m coming in hot with what TO do and what NOT to do to design a free offer that is of high value, but still maintains a gap that only your paid offer will fill. If you have a lead gen offer that needs tweaking or you are in need of creating a lead gen offer, this one’s for you. Listen in!
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READ THE EPISODE TRANSCRIPT
Emily Hirsh:
And here’s where people get tripped up. They think this and they go, okay, well I have to hold back on what I give out for free. And so I’ve had clients go, well, I can’t teach that because that’s my offer. And so the free offer is the what your paid offer is the how. It’s not about holding that content, it’s how you deliver it.
You are listening to the Not For Lazy Marketers podcast, episode number 475.
Hello you guys, welcome back to the podcast. I hope you are having an awesome week. I’ve had trouble this week getting my podcast recorded because we are remodeling a portion of our house. One of the, we did a huge remodel a year and a half ago, and so we have like little spots left, basically our upstairs in my kids’ bedrooms and that’s it. And so we decided to pull the plug on the upstairs and rip out all the carpet and redo the floors. So they’ve been here working and that makes it challenging to record. So I am just having such an amazing, like last couple of weeks. I’m so feel like I’m still on the high and gratitude from the boot camp last week and just in a really good season right now. And I posted about this last week on Instagram of like the fact that there are seasons, there’s seasons of ease.
There’s seasons of ease and abundance and there’s seasons of struggle and constraint. And so I don’t have the hack to feeling how I feel right now because it’s a season and there will be another season of struggle in the future. And what, how you act in those seasons of struggles and the work that you put in and the way that you show up, I believe really creates the outcome for the next season. And so right now I feel like I’m in this place of really reaping the benefit of all my hard work the last six months especially on my team, especially on our delivery. And just in the company itself, like I have worked really hard and really like put in the grind the last six months and it’s just really starting to pay off and it’s paying off for me a big part in client results.
We had a client last week who came in, she’s only worked with us for 45 days and she got a 40 x return on her ad spend from her live launch and sent this email yesterday about how we, you know, under-promise and over-deliver and her experience. And we have other clients who just made their very first $7,000 in a live launch, like hadn’t made sales before then. Just so many wins and I just feel like it and it, when it happens, it’s like, okay, this is all working. How I envisioned it and how it’s supposed to of having an entire marketing team. And when you have the components of a marketing team and you have all of those things come together, messaging, copy, strategy, ads management, and it all comes together, it always works cuz marketing always works. And so I’ve been just feeling amazing on that.
I’m on 75 hard, I’m doing a two minute cold plunge every morning. And just feeling really good and feeling really grateful and especially grateful coming off the bootcamp last week with all of you guys and how many people gave me their time and feedback and I just personally felt so aligned with the content I created and like it was some of the best that I’d put out there, which is awesome. So, okay, today what I wanna talk about on the podcast is what should your free offer be? So I get asked a lot and so does my strategist, what should my lead na lead magnet be? What are you seeing working? What should my webinar topic be? How should I structure it? What should I teach? What should my free offer leading people into my business and eventually to my paid offer? What should that be?
And I answered this question last week with I think an answer that somebody wasn’t expecting me to answer with. And so I thought, you know, if a lot of people are asking this, you guys will benefit from this. And so when you ask a lot of people that question, what they come back with an answer is, do this thing, do this free checklist, do this you know, PDF guide, do this quiz, do X, y, Z because I did it and it was successful. And so follow somebody else’s format. And what I answered with is it has to be custom to your business. And you have to remember why we create free offers. So why do we create free offers aside from attracting people and growing your email list, right? Which might be the answer that you thought of when I asked that You create free offers to do two things.
One, your free offer should showcase a roadmap, a path, a journey mistakes or things that people have either been doing wrong or haven’t realized they needed to do in order to achieve the desired result that you helped them achieve in your paid offer, in your business as a whole. So for example, for me, I help people create successful marketing strategies, launch them and get more leads, get more sales, right? So when I create free content in any format, webinar, bootcamp, training, pdf, I’m trying to showcase to people how they can have successful marketing, what they are missing with their marketing and the mistakes they might be making, things they maybe haven’t realized or the path, the steps they need into a marketing strategy, for example, or into their Facebook adss. And then the second thing I’m trying to do every single time with a free offer is create a gap that my paid offer fills.
And this is very, very important because if you take your free offer and you completely solve all of your audience’s problems, then they don’t need your paid offer. And here’s where people get tripped up, they think this and they go, okay, well I have to hold back on what I give out for free. And so I’ve had clients go, well, I can’t teach that because that’s my offer. And so the free offer is the what your paid offer is the how. It’s not about holding back content, it’s how you deliver it. So for example, I might do a live training where I teach the roadmap, I teach the outline the ingredients that goes into a strategy. But I’m not sitting down with you and saying, okay, step one, you’re gonna pull up this projection calculator, you’re gonna type in this step two, you’re gonna build this opt-in page, right?
I’m not giving you the how, that’s my offer. I’m showing you the roadmap, I’m showing you the overview, I’m showing you what’s possible, I’m creating the mindset in you, in my free offers that you can have this desired result that it’s possible for you. And you see the way to get there. Now you need me to go and execute that. And my free offer actually created that belief for you and reinforced that belief. And so I’ve had clients say, well, I can’t teach my method in my free offer because that is my paid offer. And I said, yes, you can, you can tell them what it is, right? You can’t hide that. That’s gonna take someone five minutes to learn. That’s not the value of your paid offer. It’s not like it’s this big secret, right? Information is not a secret. I can go find any answer I want on YouTube, on podcasts online.
And that’s not the value of your offer. The value of your offer is the handholding, the how, the step-by-step. So when you’re thinking about your free offer, it needs to do those two things. So ask yourself one, what would be the best journey that I could create leading to my paid offer? Is it a video? Is it a lead magnet? Is it a quiz? Like what is that actual tangible medium that I should use to lead there? Number two, how do I create the belief and the vision and the understanding of how I get to my desired result? And how I show my audience what they’re missing, what is possible and the steps to get there. The what? And number three, how do I create the gap that then leads to my paid offer? So here’s that. That’s the questions you ask yourself and see what comes up.
So here’s some other questions you can ask. First, you’re focusing on the what. So have that in the back of your mind, always focus on the what. I just was doing a strategy with a client and I said, okay, if I was to just sit down and ask you what are the three things that somebody needs to create this desired result, which for her it was to launch a successful social media marketing agency and she’s teaching people how to do that. And I said, okay, so what are the three things? If you were to tell me like the three ingredients to do that, and she told me what they are. And I said, okay, that’s your webinar. Those three things you’re gonna teach the what? And they’re gonna need the how for the, for the details, for the trainings, for the strategies, for all those things that go with it.
But you’re giving them the actual path because in order for somebody to buy, they have to believe they can be successful. And in order for them to believe they can be successful, they have to know how they’re going to there, right? And they have to, they have to know the what. So you’re gonna focus on the what. And so here’s some questions you can ask yourself. What transformation could you show somebody through your free offer? So what could you show them that’s like, if you do 1, 2, 3, you will achieve x, Y, Z result. And these are the ingredients, these are the things missing, these are the things you haven’t done before. The second thing is, what mistakes could you point out that they’ve been making? That’s another big one because if you get someone to have an experience where they go, oh, that’s why it hasn’t worked for me.
I’ve been doing this all along when I need to be doing this. I do this all the time in my content and it’s all legitimate. Like it is all things and mistakes that people are making and I give so much value to help them understand, not to make those mistakes because it builds trust with me. But it also then goes, okay, I’m making these mistakes and I see the possibility. I don’t wanna do this by myself. I need to hire Hirsch marketing, right? How could you give them a clear path to their desired result? Most of you guys have some sort of framework or model or step-by-step roadmap or things that you do in order to get to a desired result for your client. So how can you lay that out clearly and teach that without giving them the how, but giving them the what in a valuable way?
It’s still valuable. Giving somebody that what and that clarity is very valuable. What can you also give to them to create ideal customers? So sometimes I ask myself, okay, what’s a problem I need to solve for somebody so that they become an ideal customer for my offer? Right? And so an example could be understanding how much they have to spend on ads to get results. It could be figuring out what their marketing strategy is and what they’re gonna run ads to. It could be refining their offer so they feel confident in it to run ads. Those are all ideas and things I can do for my freebie for what I offer in a training or a pdf, PDF or whatever in order to create ideal customers and confidence in them, in hiring us in our offer. And then how can you create a gap that your offer fills?
This is so important because at the end of consuming your free offer, whether that’s a training to download whatever you wanna say, okay, now you’re here, like you solved this and I gave you the instructions and the ingredients for this, but you still need X, Y, Z. And so that’s where my offer comes in. And so the best webinars out there, it doesn’t matter the template, the format, anybody’s, you know, Russell or whoever that you follow, they do these two things. They showcase the fact that you can achieve that desired result and that you understand how or what you’re missing or the steps you’re gonna take to get there. And you can clearly see it as someone experiencing the webinar. And number two, they create a gap that the offer fills. It doesn’t matter. Like if they do that, it will be a successful webinar.
And so it’s the same thing with the lead magnet. So when you’re trying to think of what should my free offer be? Think through these things and create something custom for your business, custom for your audience and also custom for the offer you’re trying to lead people to. Because there’s times where I’m trying to lead people to a specific offer compared to a different one. I’m not gonna have the same experience because I’m trying to lead people very intentionally somewhere in my journey. And so the other thing I wanna note on this is you really don’t have to hold back value when you have your free offer. And this is a big kind of hesitation I sometimes see people have is they’re like, well, I don’t wanna give it all away. Information is honestly not valuable in the, in the terms of your offer.
It’s valuable in the sense of building trust, but like I said earlier, anybody can go find the answer to anything. So you holding back and saying, oh, I don’t wanna teach my method, or I, oh, I don’t wanna give all that away or give all the steps away. They don’t, that doesn’t matter. Like that’s not gonna convince someone to you know, not buy your offer because they have the steps, right? So instead of focusing on that and not giving away too much, it’s how you deliver it. And the best way to serve your audience, especially in a freebie, right, where you have limited time, you have an hour on a webinar you have limited to a pdf, is to not give them the how because that nobody’s gonna follow it. Nobody’s gonna be able to do it. If I was to do a how-to on like building an entire marketing strategy and setting up your ads, I would lose 80% of the people watching.
That’s not valuable. But if I showcase the ingredients or what they’re missing or what they need to think about or how they create that in terms of the ingredients and the steps and the what, that’s valuable. So it’s not about holding back value, it’s about delivering it in the most serving way with the time and the space that you have. Because when I then have a paid offer where I have way more time with someone, way more resources, I would be able to now give them way more, which is where I can give them the how. All right you guys, they’re making noise in my house. I finished this episode for you and I think we’re good cuz I don’t wanna have to deal with the background noise. But I wanted to make sure I, I shared this and I I got through all my notes here.
So if you’re thinking about this, and the other thing I’ll add to this is creating new free offers like 2, 3, 4 times a year is a really good idea. And sometimes that can be wrapping paper around the same exact steps, the same exact concepts, and you just change the title or how you’re teaching it or how you’re delivering it. And so sometimes people go the way of getting distracted with coming up with like a bunch of new paid offers and changing their business channel, that creativity and those ideas into what is a new free offer that I can create to attract people to create.