 As a marketing professional, your number one goal is sales. Welcome to the We Are Slam show where you'll learn marketing agency insights, best practices and ideas to help your business grow. My name is Tyler Kelly. I'm the co-founder and chief strategist right here at Slam Agency where we help brands to captivate, motivate and inspire people to action through advertising. Now this show is all for marketing professionals, small business owners, directors of organizations, really the people that day in and day out have a focus and have a purpose to generate business, generate leads, generate awareness through marketing, through communications. And as a marketing professional, your number one goal is sales. What does this mean? It doesn't mean that you have to go out and make sales, but really what you do as a marketing professional, the end goal, like the reason you do what you do, the reason you were hired to do what you do, is to make sales. And how do you make sales? It's generating leads. And here we are, the marketing professionals, our job is to generate leads, or at least it should be. And that's what we're gonna talk about today. You know, I've developed what we call this Slam revenue generation model. We've talked about it in previous episodes. It's this idea that there's two ways to generate revenue. The first is acquisition, the second is retention. And on this acquisition side, we have four pillars of acquisition. Look that show up, we'll put it in the show notes. Four pillars of acquisition. The first obviously is a strong brand. The second is market awareness, the market being your customers that they know who you are and what you do, your potential customers, who you are and what you do, they understand that. And then there's targeted lead generation. These three pillars need to be in sync, doing what they're supposed to be doing in order to deliver qualified leads to your sales team, to your website. And then the last pillar, the fourth pillar of customer acquisition revenue is sales proficiency. And this is an important one because you can have all three pillars hitting on all cylinders. And yet, if the deals aren't being done, if the sales aren't closing, then you as a marketing professional are to blame. That's why I say your most important job as a marketing professional is sales. And today, we're gonna talk about the key to making sales and the key to making sales is generating qualified leads. So I wanna explore some of the mistakes that you as a marketing professional probably are making when it comes to generating targeted leads. Are you ready for this? Let's get started. But first, what is lead generation? You know, leads don't just grow on trees, there's actually a process that good marketing professionals utilize in order to generate leads. So what is generating leads? What is lead generation? Well, quite simply, it's the process of attracting and converting strangers, people that you've never met before into people that have indicated and expressed their interest to do business with you. That's what lead generation is. It's the process of attracting and converting the unknown, the strangers, into the known, the people that potentially could be doing business with you. Now, as a marketing professional, I'm sure there's been times when you've generated a ton of leads, but your sales seems like, yeah, these guys just aren't qualified. So what's a qualified lead? A qualified lead is simply somebody that is, number one, interested, number two, able to do business with your business if they're interested and not able to do business with your business, then they're not a qualified lead. In fact, you should disqualify them and the best marketing programs, the best marketing professionals are going to implement processes and solutions that will separate the people that are qualified to do business with you and those who aren't. So what does the lead generation process look like? Well, here's the thing. It doesn't look the way that it used to look five years ago, 10 years ago, 15 years ago. In fact, the marketing model that we all grew up with is obsolete. And so when we think of, what is this process? Number one, I want you to think that it's digital because it is and the digital lead generation process, the process that I want to walk you through today, it looks like this, a visitor's out there, they're searching for something, they come across some of your content, they come across one of your advertisements, they click, they come to your landing page, they look at your landing page, they see something on the landing page that captures their attention and on that landing page there's a CTA or a call to action and the user, that's stranger. Somebody you didn't know previously, they complete that call to action, thereby identifying themselves as a potential lead and then on the back end of that lead generation process, you're gonna make sure that they're an ideal fit for your business, okay? That's what the lead generation process looks like and so what are some of the mistakes that you could be making when it comes to generating leads? And I'm gonna give you five today and the first is that you're buying them, okay? You're buying leads, you're going somewhere where there's a database or a warehouse, a clearinghouse, they have email addresses, you're putting those email addresses into your CRM and you're spamming them and you think that if we can get these people here to our site at a less than 1% conversion rate that they're gonna probably qualify. Well, this is the wrong way to think about it. In fact, the lead generation process that I talked about, it all starts with this vehicle of search, okay? It starts in the search engine. This is a requirement. It does not start with email marketing, it does not start with spam, okay? So there's no point in buying leads for a solid lead generation process. The better way, the ideal way is to create content that you can distribute into the places, into the search results in a way that when the right person comes along, your qualified potential customer, your qualified prospect, when they come along, they're gonna see it, they're gonna be attracted by it, they're gonna be drawn in by it, they're gonna come to your landing page and they're gonna complete the action that identifies them as a quality lead. When it comes to advertising, I'm all about buying email list, email list that we can use to target, to remark it, to generate what we call market awareness, which is this idea that your potential customers understand who you are and what you do. But the use of those email addresses is not for emailing them, it's for identifying them in social media and other means so that we can target advertising to them, okay? If you're buying an email list and expecting that you're going to be able to just email them two or three times, 10 times, 20 times, and that they're gonna eventually respond, let me ask you this, have you ever responded to an email like that? Does it not just get number one, archived or number two, deleted, number three, sent to spam? I mean, really. The point is buying emails are never a good lead generation strategy. The better strategy is to approach it organically. And what I mean by organically is create the content that has the potential to appear as a solution, as an answer to a search. You know, when someone goes to a search engine, they're expecting an instant answer. And if your site can develop content and produce content and have content that is that instant answer to that searcher's search, then that's how you generate organic leads. And I guarantee you those organic leads are always gonna be of the highest quality. Number two, the number two biggest mistake that marketing professionals make is they just think that it's a one size fits all, meaning that they're just gonna have one CTA, one offer and they expect everyone that comes across their site to be moved by and captivated and convert on that offer. And what you have to realize is that there's a buyer's journey and not everyone that comes across your site is going to be ready to fill out a 10 page application or be ready to pick up the phone and give you a call. So you have to have what's called low threshold content, low threshold content meaning that maybe it's an ebook, maybe it is a checklist or some sort of spreadsheet that they can use today. And so give me your email and I'll give you the free report, right? Or there's the high threshold. The high threshold is I want your name, address, your credit card, whatever the case may be, that's a higher threshold. You need to develop content for people wherever they may be along this buyer's journey knowing that not everyone is ready to buy now. The third mistake that I think that marketing professionals make is that they've given up on their blog. You're just not using your blog and your blog really is the best way to generate these organic leads. Take it from me, blogging works. Now, blogging of yesterday is not necessarily the blogging of today but there are some things that have remained the same and number one is this idea of pinging the robots. I like to call it pinging the robots and if you're using a blog engine then what happens when you press publish? Is that your blog engine will shoot out a signal to all of the robots. And you know robots are another name for spiders or search engine crawlers. They crawl the web looking for content to add and to cash into their systems so that people can find it later if it's relevant. And so when you ping the spiders, when you ping the robots what you're doing is you're saying, hey, there's new content here come crawl it. So that's something that I think is relevant in terms of distribution. But blogging today is so much more than just pinging a robot and getting search engine distribution. As a matter of fact, you have to make sure that your blogs are not only relevant to the users but that once they land on that search result that they're gonna stick and they're gonna stay there because if they click bounce it's gonna hurt your search engine results and you just don't want that. So you wanna be able to develop not just content that's good for the search engines but content that makes sense to the people that you're trying to attract and convert. And so think about using your blog to answer the questions that your prospects are asking not only to your business but in search. If you can become the thought leader in that space in the space that says, I'm gonna tell you everything you need to know about doing business with me in this industry, in this space then you're gonna be a step ahead of your competition. Number four, for those of you that are blogging is this idea that you just, you blog it and forget it but what makes a good blog is optimization. You have to continue to optimize your content. So take a look at your analytics and figure out what pages are attracting a crowd, what pages are bringing in the most visitors and those are the pages that you need to go back to on a regular basis. You need to put them on crazy egg and see how people are interacting with them because those are the pages where the traffic resides. Number five, you're just not using the right tools. And when I think about tools, I think about analytics. I just mentioned crazy egg, which is heat mapping and how are people interacting with your content once they're on your site. It's CRM tools like HubSpot and you just have to think about what tools are gonna serve me best, where can I get the best information, how can I make sure that my KPIs that I'm paying attention to my KPIs so what tool sets, what apps can I be using so that I have the best information, that I have a clear view of the information and that I understand the information. These are the questions that you should be asking as a marketing professional. So these are the five, you know, my big five mistakes that you're probably making if you are trying to generate leads. You know, leads don't grow on trees so there has to be a process you have to think through. You know, how am I gonna get the best bang? The most bang for my buck in terms of advertising dollars, in terms of content generation, content marketing, and then ultimately, you know, how are we gonna get these people to not only convert on the CTA, but ultimately, how are we gonna get them to sign on the dotted line and to become our customers? Now if you've enjoyed this show, do me a favor and let me know in the comments if you're watching on a social media network, if you're watching on YouTube, if you're listening on a podcast network, thank you. First of all, second of all, please like, subscribe, rate, review, all of these things make a huge difference. The more people that come across this content, the more people we can help understand marketing insights, best practices and ideas to help their businesses grow. So thank you for tuning in. I will see you next week. Thanks for watching. If you like what you saw, subscribe and hit that bell. You'll be the first to be notified when new content goes live. 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