Lead Generation, Part One (of Five): Make Them an Offer They Can’t Refuse

Without leads, everything else in your marketing campaign serves no real function. Your campaign may look pretty and your product or service may offer something that no one else does, but if you can’t generate any leads, everything you’re doing might as well be a hobby. Since lead generation is absolutely vital to every marketing effort, we don’t want to zip through it and simply give you a few tips and tricks here and there. So in this five-part series, we’ll be exploring nearly everything there is to know about lead generation.

Part One: Make Them an Offer They Can’t Refuse

Like an old time gangster, it’s important that you provide potential leads with an offer that they simply cannot refuse. Whether you deal with products or services, what you want is for people to see what you’re offering as not only desirable, but absolutely irresistible. This can be broken down into these six steps:

Create a Shortage

There’s this strange, psychological thing that happens when something is scarce. When the Playstation 2 was released many years ago, the shortage of available systems at launch caused demand to skyrocket, allowing systems to sell on eBay for upwards of $5000 in some cases. While you may not be able to control supply and demand to such an extent, what you can do is create limited time offers, limited quantity offers, or a mixture of the two.

Use the Bandwagon to Your Advantage

Human beings have a tendency to flock where other human beings are. Once a product or service catches on, success can snowball very quickly as people jump on the bandwagon to avoid missing out. You can take advantage of this by declaring sign-up numbers, subscription amounts, and other bits of information on your blog or in a new campaign.

Come Up with an Amazing Title

Have you ever seen a movie or read a book based on the title alone? Yeah … we have, too. Do you think people flocked to see Snakes on a Plane because of its Oscar-worthy screenplay? If you can create a title for your campaign that will immediately catch a person’s attention, you’ve already begun reeling them in, and they haven’t even gotten to the good part yet.

Avoid Overused Terms

The English language can create some beautiful works of art by use of the written word, but when overused, certain terms can quickly turn people off. We’re talking about marketing terms that you’re tired of hearing, like “cutting edge” and “ground breaking.” While those terms might truly describe your product or service, it’s best to come up with more entertaining, and less annoying, jargon to get your point across.

Use the Best Formats Available

When providing information to potential leads, it’s vital to understand which formats are more likely to draw them in. It’s been shown in recent years that ebooks or guides are among the best, followed closely behind by whitepapers and presentations. Blogs have also proven to be a fantastic driving force in lead generation, as long as you continuously post new content on a weekly basis.

Discover What’s Trending and Use It

This sometimes take a little more ingenuity to do it right. What you want to do is look for anything that’s trending that either aligns with a product or service that you’re offering or create a new marketing campaign around it. This is known in the industry as “newsjacking” and if you do so successfully, your company may end up being the new trending phenomenon.

This concludes part one of our lead generation guide. We’re hoping you gleaned something useful, but this is only the beginning. We’ll be back soon with part two, Creating Awesome Calls-to-Action. In the meantime, begin using some of the above tips and have fun with them!