Can we get straight to the point?
There is only ONE way to get the best qualified local leads and that’s to generate them yourself.
Self generated leads, which are leads acquired exclusively by your business’s own marketing efforts, will outperform third party leads any day of the week.
The problem is that most small businesses have notta clue as to how to go about generating the best qualified local leads. You will after reading this article!
Before we get to HOW let’s see the major benefits of investing in your own self generated leads.
1) Never Pay For Third Party Leads –
Obviously, the #1 benefit of developing your own qualified local leads is that you won’t have to pay someone else inflated prices for subpar leads.
Paid third party leads can be used to nail a few sales. I have nothing against lead generation agencies and the services they provide, especially for startup businesses. However, we know there are some pitfalls to be aware of.
One pitfall is you don’t own the lead. For example, if you’re in the home improvement industry and purchase leads for local businesses from a source like HomeAdvisor, you are actually renting each lead.
Every lead that you receive will also be sent to 3 to 5 of your direct competitors. Because of this, you’re instantly thrown into a “price battle” with the other service providers.
Pitfall number two is the quality of the lead itself. Lead agencies rarely pre-call leads to be certain they are qualified to speak with a professional.
As a result many of the leads you’ll pay for will be “tire-kickers”, price shoppers, competitor snoopers, and plain duds. There will be some sales in the bunch, but you can see why third party leads are far less superior than self generated.
2) Your Local Leads System Will Appreciate In Value –
The system you build to generate qualified local leads will be a business asset.
Let’s imagine you’ve been in business for a good while, your profitable and your self generating lead system is up a rolling.
BOOM! Something comes up that forces you to sell your business.
How much value would it be to the new owner if you could say, “This business is equipped with its own fine-tuned local lead generation system. It drives 50% new business acquisition.”
Do you think that would affect the business’s overall value? Of course it would!
But forget about selling… How great would your business be if you had a steady flow of the best qualified local leads available? Less stressful I bet.
3) You’ll Finally Control The Other 50% –
When you first started your business, you may not have realized that it would be split into two parts; generating leads and then servicing customers.
Most business owners are prepared to service customers, that’s the whole point, right? But few new owners are aware that in order to service customers you have to first get them to call you.
By having your own local lead system you can gain full control over your business. Instead of purchasing leads from an outside third party provider, you can generate a steady flow of quality leads yourself.
Plus the benefits of managing your own lead generating system can be extraordinary. It can open up multiple sales and promotion opportunities to fatten your bottom line.
How To Create A Digital Event Campaign For The Best Self Generated Qualified Local Leads.
Now that you understand the profitability of controlling your own lead generation system, it’s time to discuss the HOW.
I’m going to start by saying, creating a local lead generation system should be a fun task. Fun for both you and your community.
Ultimately your goal is to attract people and the quickest way to capture the attention of people is to host exciting, entertaining events.
Nothing draws in the people like a great event. Especially one that is jam-packed with entertainment, activities, and value for those who attend.
I know what you’re thinking, “I don’t know how to organize an event and even if I did, who has time for that?”
Don’t worry, it gets better!
What you’re going to host is a digital event. Which is an event that mostly takes place online using the internet.
A digital event can easily be managed 100% online, giving you the ability to collect qualified local leads while you focus on serving your customers.
Types of digital events include uniquely themed campaigns in the form of video courses, live webinars, a short series production, digital products or services, pretty much anything you can imagine.
Why would you settle for shabby third party leads when hosting digital events will not only get you qualified local leads, but can also position you as an expert in your community?
Why waste your hard earned money on lead generation companies every month when investing into a digital event campaign can grow your business’s value over time?
Now let’s dig into how to attract qualified local leads with digital events…
1) Identify The Fun & Entertaining Aspects of Your Industry-
If you want to entice the people of your community to participate in your event it has to be an entertaining experience.
It also must be out of the ordinary and valuable to in order to reach your target customer.
To help you come up with ideas, just take a look at Hollywood. They’ve been successful at producing award winning shows on just about any topic you can imagine.
Home improvement, baking desserts, cooking foods, dangerous jobs, diy crafts, rebuilding cars, flipping houses, weight loss, on and on.
You don’t have to produce a TV show, but what could you do to grab attention and build a local audience?
For example I recently did a campaign for a dog groomer. After putting our heads together in brainstorming session, we came up with doing a digital pet yearbook for local pet owners.
The campaign is an entertaining and effective way to gather qualified local leads. Each person that lists their pet in the yearbook is a potential customer for the groomer.
As more and more people sign up it opens opportunities for the groomer to send followup products like pet supplies, pet foods or even throwing a live pet event.
And since the pet yearbook is owned by the groomer, she can generate additional revenue by acquiring ad sponsorships from pet stores, veterinarians and other relevant businesses.
So she’s not just getting great leads, she’s also making more money directly from her lead generation system.
Can you say… Free Leads!
That’s what you’ll get when you create a powerful digital event local lead system and get other non-competitive businesses to join the fun!
Still can’t come up with an idea? No problem, get in touch and we’ll figure it out together!
2) Strategically Plan Your Digital Event –
Once you’ve discovered a fun & entertaining way to connect with your community it’s time to plan how it will be delivered online.
In the example above, the pet groomer decided that a digital yearbook in PDF form would work best. You could go an entirely different route and get better results.
A business owner in the home improvement industry might want to target the do it yourself market.
Think of all the wanna be handymen who start a project just to find they got in a little too deep and need to hire a professional. Cha-ching!
The owner could host online DIY Q&A sessions that could be in the form of blog posts, videos, webinars, etc.
Anyone who participates in the Q&A sessions is a qualified local lead.
Why?
Because you know this person needs something fixed or remodeled on their home or they wouldn’t be asking questions. You also know that they need help, like right now.
Not all of these leads will become sales. But for those who go on to successfully complete their project by themselves, they’ll remember you helped them out and may use your services in the future or better yet, send some referrals.
If this was a real lead generation project, I would suggest that the business owner create a “DIY Consultation Fee”. This way they could offer to stop by and check out the project to be sure it was done efficiently.
Wouldn’t it be awesome to make money just for consulting on the work of others? A completely new income stream!
Again, if you aren’t sure of the best platform to setup your digital event lead system, leave it to me and my team.
3) Advertise Your Digital Event Lead System –
Your system is setup! Now all you have to start receiving qualified local leads is send traffic to it.
Unfortunately, this part is a bit trial and error. If you already have a certain advertising medium that’s been working for you, then that’s where I would start.
Otherwise you’ll need to test various mediums to see which works best.
Once you’ve found the best advertising platform to drive targeted visitors to your self generated lead system you’ll be well on your way to getting fresh new customers.
Without knowing your business, I can’t confidently suggest an advertising medium as there are many.
What I can say, from my experience working with local business owners, Facebook advertising, YouTube advertising, social media marketing and PPC pay per click advertising frequently get the best results.
In Conclusion –
I surely hope that I was able to clearly communicate why you need to setup your own local lead system using digital events.
A self generated local leads system will dramatically increase the long-term value of your business, while giving you 100% control over sales.
If you’re interested and don’t know where to start, please contact me at support@ulivewv.com and let’s work together to design the perfect digital event local lead system.
