Never run out leads using these 4 proven lead generation methods.

Regardless of what industry you are in, lead generation is the lifeblood of your business. Without leads you have no cash flow and without cash flow… well you have no business. 

Every business is fighting to get more leads but every lead someone gets, someone else loses; so how do you make sure that no matter what happens in your industry, your lead generation mechanisms will keep going strong?

I ‘ll tell you exactly how to do that, but first, a disclaimer; even though these strategies work for every single industry out there, not everyone can implement them…

This article is NOT for you if:

You are looking for a “get leads quick” guide. Yes you can get leads fairly quick BUT, this is a

long term plan not something you can do in 1 night and then boom… all of a sudden the next day you have thousands of leads lined up.

You want to set the systems up, and then forget about them until the end of time. Just like

anything in a business, this also needs some form of maintenance in order to run smoothly and produce the best results possible. 

You want to skim through the article, find which way fits the least to your business, and then

claim this doesn’t work for your specific niche. 

OF COURSE each niche will have a favorable lead generation mechanism. 

That doesn’t mean that the rest won’t work. It means that while focusing on the one that’s best for you, you can also have alternative methods of lead generation for 2 main reasons. 

The first one is… well, you get more leads. The second reason is that if you have alternatives, you will never have a problem getting more clients in case something goes wrong with your main source of leads.

Relying on a single lead generation method is a disaster waiting to happen...

So, here is how to create a well-oiled lead generation machine…

Cold outreach

Any kind of communication whether it's a phone call, an email or literally any other way of contacting people who do not know about your business, is called cold outreach. 

The more of it you do, the higher your chances of getting someone interested in your product, so volume is a huge factor. 

The best thing about cold outreach is you can predict how many people you need to contact in order to hit a specific goal. Let's say, for example, that every 100 outreaches you do, you get 10 people interested and out of these 10, 2 buy what you offer.

That means that for every 50 outreaches you gain 1 new client, approximately. So if you want 10 new clients, you need to outreach to 500 people. It gives you a way to predict your revenue and adjust the intensity based on your goals. 

Since this is a time consuming process, most business owners usually outsource or automate it. Manually contacting dozens of people yourself, quickly starts filling all your calendar, so automate this as quickly as possible.

As effective as cold outreach might be, there is something even better.

Warm outreach

You basically reach out to people that are already aware of your products or services. This comes in many different forms like mailing your email list about a new product, or posting about it on your social media page so that all of your audience can see it.

Any kind of platform where you have an audience that knows about your brand can be used in order to do warm outreach. Think of all the YouTube content creators who let you know they are running a limited time offer for their product, that’s another form of warm outreach.

This of course requires trust in order to work, so if you just try to sell with every piece of content you put out… you will quickly realize not many people are interested.

However if you first provide your audience with valuable content, then it is much easier for them to trust you and buy your product. 

The minimum ratio of value to sell content is 3:1 but I would recommend doing 5:1. Meaning, for every 6 pieces of content you create, 5 are focused on giving value to your audience and 1 on selling..

If you do that, you will realize how amazing warm outreach is.Your audience already knows you and it is much easier for them to trust you and buy your products. 

Also since you know your audience as well, your products can be focused on their needs to further increase sales.

You do this long enough, and you will end up with a loyal audience that trusts and supports your brand. Every brand that has that kind of audience did it that way, by offering them valuable content and good quality products.

I think the next one is the most controversial of all four, you either love it or you hate it and that is because most people do it the wrong way (and it’s not their fault).

Advertising

Consumers hate it and business owners usually feel like they are wasting money on it. That’s because most ads are extremely bad. And we have the modern way of marketing to blame for this.

It starts from business school, where everything they teach you is based on billion dollar companies, meaning that they have an 8-9 figure budget to spend on advertising. 

Of course most advertising agencies operate the same way and then business owners (who have nothing to do with marketing) copy them too because that is the safe choice. Before you know it the majority of people are copying a strategy that only works for the minority of the businesses.

It goes without saying that trying to use a strategy that requires so much money to work is just like trying to cut down a tree with a butter knife, you are bound to fail. So what’s the correct way of advertising?

You start by NOT advertising for “getting your name out there”, you just don’t have the budget for it. You will go bankrupt before you see any kind of  ROI.

If you want your ads to be profitable, they must have a clear goal, which is to either convert leads into customers or convert cold traffic to warm traffic. Meaning, get people to sign up on your email list, follow your social media page etc. so you can later on turn them into customers.

This all sounds ideal and easy but there are a lot of businesses who have tried ads and nothing seemed to work for them, does that mean advertising only works on specific industries?

Well… not really, it just means that the nature of advertising, amongst other things in business, is front-end heavy. 

In order to start seeing results you have to do most of the work early on to figure out what works and what doesn’t. You need a testing budget, but once you get your ads right, that’s when you will start to see some good numbers. 

The moment you know you have a winning ad that brings you more money than you use to run it, that's when you want to double down on it and scale it to the moon.

Advertising has the most potential, all you have to do is make sure you are not blindly throwing money at it, instead always measure your results and keep improving your ads to get the most out of them.

Time to move on to the last one, and this one has endless possibilities, your creativity is the only limit.

Affiliate marketing

Before you start screaming “pyramid scam” let me quickly tell you this is nothing like that. Affiliate marketing is basically any kind of marketing that involves selling a product of another business and you keeping a portion of it. 

Take supplements for example, lots of gyms sell supplements and they are not making them themselves, they get them from another company. Then, gym members can buy what they need, at a better price most of the time, and everyone wins from that transaction.

The supplement company sells more products because the gym is promoting them, the gym is taking a portion of each sale and the customer is getting the product they need at a better price or with any other perk that it usually comes with.

Another example is Amazon, they offer similar affiliate programs as well, and they are not a pyramid scheme. You see this happens in so many different industries that sometimes you don't even notice it.

And you don’t even have to limit yourself into digital affiliate marketing, you can do the same with any kind of business with a physical location. Other businesses or existing clients can help you get more leads and they can also benefit from it. 

An example would be a grocery store giving out discount coupons for a car wash nearby. These 2 businesses have no conflict of interest yet they can help each other. I will say this again, creativity is your limit when it comes to affiliate marketing. 

As long as all sides are profiting from affiliate marketing, you can, and should, scale it…

These are not some heavily guarded big secrets (well, at least not anymore), something I invented or a recent breakthrough, they are the basis of all marketing, it’s been here for as long as humans created businesses, probably even before that. 

Proven and tested by thousands of people long before we were born, they have worked and they will still work for years to come, because that's how businesses work.

So these are the 4 ways that show you how you will never out of leads

• Cold outreach

• Warm outreach

• Advertising

• Affiliate marketing

If you want to learn how your business can benefit from these, get in touch for a free consultation.