In episode 2 of the Mistakes Series, we delve into common mistakes business owners often make in their lead generation strategies. It’s vital to implement a strategy that complements your business, audience and offer. Instead of copying what’s popular or working for someone else, it’s crucial to recognize the unique challenges your ideal customer encounters and pinpoint the best solutions, whether that’s through a webinar, challenge or downloadable content.

The messaging has to be both clear and engaging, compelling your audience to become leads.

Throughout the episode, there’s a strong emphasis on perceiving marketing as an experience. Every facet, from social media activities to lead generation initiatives, should forge a positive and memorable interaction for your audience. 

This episode provides insights into viewing lead generation from this perspective, along with actionable tips for crafting an impactful strategy. So, if you’re ready to overcome the common lead generation mistakes and see more success in your business, jump into the episode now. 

Key Points:

• Choose the right lead generation strategy:

• Avoid choosing strategies solely based on what worked for others.
• Consider your unique audience, offer and business personality.
• Identify the micro problems your ideal customers face and create solutions for them.
  

• Create an experience for your audience:

• View marketing as an ongoing experience.
• Focus on how you want your audience to feel during the lead generation process.
• Pay attention to the details of your content and engagement to enhance the overall experience.
  

• Adapt and optimize your lead generation strategy:

• Understand that different strategies have pros and cons.
• Experiment with different approaches to find the most effective one.
• Be willing to adjust and pivot your strategy as needed based on data and feedback.

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READ THE EPISODE TRANSCRIPT

Emily Hirsh

Hello, my friends, welcome back to the podcast and episode two of our mistakes series that I am doing this week. So we’re gonna have five total episodes. It’s not five mistakes. I’m categorizing it. So yesterday, we talked about all the mistakes the most common mistakes that people make with their brand awareness and visibility strategy. Today, I’m focusing on lead generation and the mistakes people make there and then I will be doing sales and sales conversion and then optimization and scaling and then just general top marketing mistakes. So each one has quite a few like top mistakes within the episode. So if you haven’t listened to yesterday’s, you can go back and listen to the top mistakes that people make with brand awareness and visibility. And today we’re gonna dive into lead generation. I am excited for this series. I hope I always try to create series where it’s like I want you guys to have actions. I don’t wanna just give you more inspiration, but I also have been feeling like I’ve done a lot of tactical like three things here and three steps here. And so I almost didn’t do a series that was like more tactical based. And then this came to me. So here we are. All right. Let’s talk about the top mistakes people make with their lead generation strategy. OK?  . And then they’re like, I should do that. I can do that for my business. And the problem with that is every business has a unique ideal customer that we’re trying to attract and obviously a unique offer. And then I think CEOS and business owners and businesses have unique personalities and strengths and weaknesses. So sometimes if you were to tell somebody to go and run a challenge, who, you know, that’s not the way that they would nor mally deliver content, it’s not going to convert as well as somebody who can totally rock a challenge and delivering content in that way. So that’s the first thing is thinking about what should the lead generation strategy that I create be based on what I’m trying to sell where I’m trying to bring those leads and also who those ideal people are that I want to become leads. So one thing I teach with this and is a step that I teach. When I do trainings around, this is the first question I ask you to identify is what are like 10, what I call micro problems that your ideal customer has. You have an overarching problem that’s probably like they want to make more money or they want to lose weight or they want to improve a relationship or like a big overarching problem. And then under that, you probably have a lot of many problems, things related to not having enough time or not knowing how to do something or being afraid of it, right? And so think through 10, 15 different micro problems. So if I bring that into context for myself, the big overarching problem that I solve is successful marketing, successful business growth, right? How to have successful business growth, how to have a successful marketing strategy. But some of the micro problems are, I don’t know what my lead generation strategy should be. I don’t know what platform to create ads on. I don’t know how to come up with topic ideas. I don’t know how to write good ad copy. I don’t know how to create a good webinar, right? Those are all like micro problems. I could probably come up with 50. So thinking through what those are then trying to pick out the top couple top micro problems. That’s like if you said that to to your ideal customer, most of them would be like, yep, I struggle with that and taking that and then asking yourself how could I solve that with something of value? Is it a webinar? Is it a PDF download? Is it a quiz? Is it a challenge? Is it a swipe file? Like, what’s the best way to solve that? An example that I gave on one of my trainings was if the micro problem that you wrote down was something like I don’t have time to meal plan and then you go create a webinar about how to plan your meals. That’s obviously a terrible experience, right? If someone is saying I don’t have time to meal plan and then you’re like, well, let me add to your not having time and tell you how to do it. They’re not gonna watch that. That’s not a good, that’s not a good experience. And so that’s why then what happens is there’s a business owner who’s like in a program that’s telling them create a webinar and then they create a webinar about that and it doesn’t work and they’re like, well, it’s the webinars. No, it’s because that’s not right for your audience, right? So the first biggest mistake that people make is they don’t connect what your audience needs. So the way you do it is you do that step one. What are all the micro problems? What are the top ones? OK. And then what’s the best way to solve this? Is it a webinar? Is it a challenge? Is it a PDF download? And then the third? And the last thing is how do you talk about this in a way that is so clear and obvious that this is valuable for them, that they will flock to signing up for it. That’s kind of like a side note piece to this. But the first thing that I always do when I’m developing a lead generation strategy for a client is I really first understand the ideal customer and then understand the offer that we’re trying to sell and like what someone would need to overcome or experience in order to see that this offer is what they need. And then we develop the strategy and we choose what it should be because there’s a lot of pros and cons to all these different types of strategies, like for some people, a challenge is a terrible idea. If I was trying to attract our done for you clients, I really wouldn’t do a challenge. But when I do a challenge, I’m trying to attract our done with you clients who are at a different stage in their business and have the capacity to participate in a challenge and the desire. But if I’m trying to attract business owners doing more than six figures for the most part, they don’t have the time to participate in the challenge, right? So there’s pros and cons to all different types of strategies. And ultimately, some of the time, you just have to try one, see how it does and try another. But the biggest mistake, number one is people don’t think about first what they should create based on their offer, their audience and their strengths and weaknesses as a business. The second biggest mistake people make is they don’t look at and create their lead generation into an experience. And I always look at marketing as an experience. You are creating an experience is for somebody to see you for the first time. And from that moment on it is an experience you’re trying to fulfill your Instagram is is an experience, your social media, your podcast or your content. That’s an experience for somebody, your lead generation. It’s an experience when I talk to my team about creating a challenge or if we do a three part series or we do a webinar, I use the word all the time experience. How do we want this experience to be? How do we want it to feel over email? How do we want the actual webinar experience to be the engagement? How do we want people to feel? Everything you do in marketing is actually an experience. You are creating an experience for somebody to have the space to make decisions, to have realizations, to get clarity, to not feel overwhelmed anymore, to understand the pathway to success or to solving their problem. And ultimately, then you lead them to your offer and then your offer in itself is an so a lot of times, a lot of your marketing questions when you’re like, should I do this or should I do this can be solved by you putting yourself in the shoes of your ideal customer and then asking yourself, how do I want the experience to be? And that will answer the questions of how many emails do I send? And what do I say here? And what do I do here? Most of the time can be answered there where people mess up and not creating an experience is usually they follow some sort of template where they’re like we do five emails, we send one email every day. It looks like this and then we do the webinar like this and it becomes in this box and this kind of templated experience, I guess, but it doesn’t really feel like an experience. And if you think about when I use the word experience, like what do you think of? I think of something that leaves an imprint on me. I felt something I got clarity, I got understanding. I had a realization. I solved a problem. I set a goal, right? That’s an experience when you go and you do something and you actually aren’t just like listening to information, but you personally have an experience and that’s gonna be individualized obviously for people. But you’re trying to create an experience with your lead generation. This will come out in your copy, this will come out in the way that you structure your emails, the way that you structure video, the way that you engage people. And so you can think about what do we want that experience to be? And you honestly can constantly be improving it. I’d say that’s another mistake people make is they create their lead generation and their strategy and then they never look at it again and they never look at how they can improve it. I guarantee, I guarantee every one of you, if you went and looked at your lead generation today, if you have one already existing, you’d find like 3 to 5 or even more things that you could improve that you didn’t see before. That’s the way it works. We’re always refining, we’re always optimizing, we’re always improving. OK. The next biggest mistake that people make with their lead generation strategy is not creating clarity and a belief that there is a better way or a possibility for the lead. So one of the number one jobs of your lead generation. So whether it’s a PDF, a challenge, a webinar or whatever it is, one of the number one jobs of it is to create clarity, create the understanding or the belief or the the ability to see that there is possibility that there is a better way for them to achieve their desire. So you have to understand what’s the ultimate desire that your ideal customer wants to achieve And now how do I get them to see that? This is absolutely possible and within reach for them, sometimes we can do this by saying, hey, here’s what you’ve been doing and here’s a better way. Sometimes we can do this by laying out the pathway. I do this all the time when I talk about our formula and I show you the pathway and the different pieces that go in your marketing. And once you have those, you will create success. Once you see it, you’re like, oh I can do this, success is possible for me. And therefore I could justify investing in that success, right? So creating that clarity is so important because it’s it’s like the setup to selling your offer where people make big, big mistakes is instead of creating clarity, they create overwhelm because they confuse value with overwhelm and value with volume providing value in a lead generation experience does not mean giving people as much information as you possibly can packed into a PDF or a webinar training or whatever it is, that’s not valuable, right? What is valuable is you taking the time to intentionally be able to explain something and teach something and break something down so that somebody can understand and see the path, see the possibility. So when you’re creating a PDF or a webinar or a challenge or an experience thinking through how to keep it simple and clear. And so that by the end of this, people see that possibility and they have that clarity because the one of the main reasons they’re not gonna buy is if they don’t, if someone does not think that something will work for them or is possible for, for them or they are able to achieve that desire that they want, they are not gonna buy. If somebody is overwhelmed after experiencing your webinar or experiencing, you know, reading through your PDF, they’re not gonna buy. Also, this is going to go into the next one. If somebody has about 15 things to go and do before they would be ready for your offer. Do you think they’re gonna buy? No. So it’s this very fine line of a lead generation experience needs to provide value but value in the sense of creating clarity and the view of possibility or understanding. Oh I was doing it this way and I need to do it this way, but it can’t also give people all of the action items they need to go do because the next mistake is not creating a gap that your offer fills. So a lot of times your offer, it should be the how it should be the the deep level work. The step by step tactics, it should be like everything you need to accomplish the result. Your lead generation is the what it’s you giving the overview at a high level. Like here are the pieces to the puzzle. Here are the steps but you still need that support. And so you want your lead generation experience to set somebody up for going, oh, I see the pathway. I have the clarity. I don’t feel overwhelmed and I still now really need help because I want to do this, but I need to know a lot more. So for example, when I do trainings, I’m teaching in whatever way I’m teaching at a high level like steps. So I’ll walk through our, you know, three step Facebook ad system or I’ll teach steps to how to put together your fall marketing strategy. I’m telling you what needs to be inside of it. What needs to be there from messaging, from strategy to the ads to the copy and creative. But I’m not sitting there and saying, here’s exactly how to write a good ad or here is how to build a sales page or here is how to set up your Facebook ad and find your targeting, right? That would number one be really overwhelming because I wouldn’t be able to give enough context to it. And number two, that would take away from my offer because if I gave people a bunch of things to go do, they would be like, well, I don’t really need your help anymore. So it’s a very fine line. It’s something that we work with clients on all the time. And again, it’s something that maybe also takes refinement because there’s definitely been times where we have executed something and then I’ve gone, oh I created an objection in that and I didn’t realize it until I actually did it and then got feedback and then realized what happened. And so that’s happened to us, even in successful launches, sometimes that’s happened to us. And so we just make a refinement after but always working towards that. How do I create clarity? How do I create lack of overwhelm while also creating a gap that may offer fills? And the only way we can create a gap that your offer fills is to make sure that you’re lead is not overwhelmed and doesn’t have a mile long or even a short to do list leaving the lead generation experience. It doesn’t mean that they don’t have value, like don’t mistake that you’re still providing value because giving somebody a pathway and giving them clarity, that’s super valuable, right? But you don’t have to give them the entire how and it’s not like I think people confuse this where they think that they need to like teach, you know, like here’s the five steps and I’m only gonna give you three and buy my offer to find out steps four and five. Like that’s not, that is not what this means. You’re still giving the entire like you’re, you’re closing the loop and you are giving the information and you are creating the experience that creates the full depth of clarity, but they still should land in a place where they’re like, well, I need and want more help because I want the how I want the deep level, right? There’s only so much you can do in a PDF or a challenge or a webinar experience. And then the last biggest mistake that people make with their lead generation is not having both evergreen automated every day type of lead generation and a live launch a part of their entire marketing strategy. This is what I teach as a best practice.This is what majority of our clients do. Unless there’s a strategic reason that we’re not is have automated like ongoing lead generation strategy, whether that’s a PDF or a webinar, whatever that we create around that and then pairing that with about once every three months a live launch. So a date based live webinar or live challenge or three part series. And this is the most effective way to have your lead generation because you’re able to address the two most important things, which is one consistency. So you’re adding leads to your list every single day and then two, a surge of sales, a an exciting event that kind of engages your warm and your cold traffic. And it creates an experience that you just can’t replicate in an evergreen way. You cannot replicate the engagement and the experience of a live webinar in an evergreen way. And that doesn’t make Evergreen a bad strategy. And that’s where people mess up is they’re like, oh, well, if you can’t replicate live webinars, then evergreen webinars are just never gonna work. No, they might work a little less. But you’re getting consistency, you’re getting sales consistently. So that’s why you need both. It’s not one or the other. They serve different purposes and so you need both and, and doing something where it’s like you only live launch and then you just shut off your ads and you don’t run them for the times in between your live launch, that’s gonna impact your live launches because you didn’t build your list in between. But if you only run evergreen, you’re leaving money on the table because I guarantee you, if you did a live launch, you’d increase your sales conversion and you get a surge of sales. But you also can’t do those too much because they take a lot. You have to reinvite your audience like it’s a lot of it’s a lot of work, it’s a lot of energy and you can’t burn your audience out. And you also have to build enough of your audience in order for that to work. So evergreen and live launches working together is the best lead generation strategy. It’s not one or the other because again, they serve different purposes. So those are the top mistakes that people are making with their lead generation strategy. It’s really more so about the experience and the really the experience, the experience that you’re trying to create because all of these almost tie back except for the last one to the experience, thinking about what you need to create in order to solve the micro problem, creating that clarity, creating that gap. It’s about the communication and the experience that you create. And if you nail that, it really makes your selling very easy and it’s part of the formula, you do that and then you nail the offer and you nail the offer positioning and selling becomes really easy because these leads had such a great experience. And then you combine that with consistency, which is very, very important because you never know if a lead, you know, not, you never know, you can figure this out with data as you track, but most of the time leads take over a month to convert. So that means they hang out on your list and then you do a live launch and then they convert. So it becomes this long game that all feeds into each other. So those are the top mistakes with your lead generation strategy and I will be back tomorrow with the top mistakes as it relates to your sales conversion, your sales strategy and converting those leads or traffic if you are e-commerce. So talk to you guys tomorrow.