How to get more leads

Presented live on Tuesday, January 29, 2019

Are you terrified by all the work required to craft a “funnel” – who has time?!
Have you been putting off creating a real funnel – where do you even start?!
Do you already have a funnel in place but want another path to move people into it?

Join conversion copywriter, Joanna Wiebe, as she welcomes Leadpages’ Bob Sparkins who will show you how to make a new lead magnet in just TEN minutes.

Download the Resource Guide template
Access the free Copywriting Workbook here

TRANSCRIPT

Joanna Wiebe: He wanted to do something on building a lead magnet fast. I was like, “Yep. Obviously, that’s the thing that we want to talk about,” because it’s so hard for people to get their funnels out the door because they’re so busy worried about top of funnel stuff. I don’t have a lead magnet. How will I get people on my list? If you could make one really quickly, it gets you that much further along in your goal of getting your funnel out there and people moving into it. Or, if you already have a funnel but you’re maybe not getting that many people into it, you might need a new lead magnet.

Joanna Wiebe: Bob, I will not say any more, I will allow you to take over from this point on. Please, do so.

Bob Sparkins: Awesome. Thank you, Joanna. Thanks of much for having me on and I don’t know what kind of English they teach you in Canada, but you figured it out so that’s really good with the Q&A. I love to see live calls like this ’cause it’s always a lot of fun and it looks like we’ve got people from all over the place, England, Scotland, New Mexico, Israel is here, somebody from Georgia, Pennsylvania. Some of you are telling me how cold it is. Well, it’s a wind chill of like negative 50 here in Minneapolis today, so we’re going to heat things up though with today’s training-

Joanna Wiebe: Nice.

Bob Sparkins: … which is all about a challenge of 10-minute resource guides because, you’re absolutely right, Joanna, people tend to forget the simple basics of lead generation comes from providing value in exchange for that email address. The fastest way you can do that is through a lead magnet and the fastest way you can do a lead magnet is to not try to be perfect about it. So, that’s what we’re going to do today.

Bob Sparkins: If you are not familiar with me, then this is a very short run down of my background. There’s two key pieces of information you should know. One is, I’ve been doing this for 13 plus years, so I’ve been helping business owners like you for a long time. I know what’s working and what’s not working. I also work for Leadpages, which means I get to see tens of thousands of customers try these things out and see if the data that proves out. The kind of lead magnet specifically I’m going to be showing you how to make today is the first one you should be making after this call even though there’s a bunch of different types that you can think about.

Bob Sparkins: It’s also cool that I have a lovely family, but the other main point I want to share with you is I’m the author of ‘Take Action, Revise Later’. I share that with you not to get you to go get the book, but to take in an adoption of this mantra which is to get rid of procrastination, get rid of perfectionism, take action on what you’re learning today, and don’t worry about it being absolutely perfect, but revise it. Revise it quickly based on the real-world feedback that you get.

Bob Sparkins: That’s the kind of attitude I want you to take on today’s tutorial and please do ask questions in the chat today. If you’re watching this via replay, you can always reach me on social through @BobTheTeacher. If you’re a Leadpages member, ’cause I know Joanna’s a big pal of ours here at Leadpages and you might have already joined in, I do coaching every Tuesday at 2:00 Central Time. If you’re already a member, then make one of these resource guides I’m going to share with you today and come on the call today or any Tuesday if you are a member. You can always check out Leadpages at leadpages.net/joanna.

Bob Sparkins: Normally, I would talk a lot about landing pages versus home pages and so forth and I’m not going to get into that because I want to focus on the lead generation asset itself. I just want to remind you that what I’m about to share with you should be given away from a landing page, specifically a lead page, one that generates email addresses, because we see such a higher conversion rate between those two things. Don’t take that for granted and make sure your landing pages that you’re giving away these things from are super simple, don’t try to extrapolate and make these long-winded things.

Bob Sparkins: You can do that for sales pages. You can do that for landing pages, but always have a short version and see which one converts the best because, for most people, that’s going to work better especially quickly. As you’re learning how to do better copywriting, of course, you can go longer because you have the words to do it. For those people that are a little bit shy on the ability of words as your learning how to do better copywriting, shorter is better. And, don’t forget to test out your landing pages with different variations based on the audience that you’re speaking to because it will convert even better.

Bob Sparkins: That’s just a quick little landing page reminder that although we’re just going to be talking about the lead magnet itself, make sure you’re giving it away from a high-converting, lead page instead of a home page because it will grow your list faster.

Bob Sparkins: Let’s dive into the main core of the training. There’s two parts here. There is a little bit of a discussion about what kind of lead magnet should you make and then I want to give you a 10-minute challenge. The 10-minute challenge, I’m going to actually build for you live a 10-minute lead magnet and I want you to be able to do the same thing. The first eight to 10 minutes, it’s just a couple of discussion points around the types of lead magnets that are there and why you should make them and why the specific type is going to be the one you should do next.

Bob Sparkins: First of all, a reminder, a lead magnet itself is not just to get email addresses. It’s to provide value to people as soon as possible so that they can trust you, know you, and understand what it is that you provide. You want to do this in a concise and easy-to-consume way. As you get to the second stage, third stage of your lead magnet creation, yes, you should have e-books and all these other things. You can have bigger things, bigger videos, et cetera, but we find here at Leadpages that what converts the best, that’s the fastest to create, which means you can make more of them and do so frequently, build your list faster, is something that’s easy to consume and concise.

Bob Sparkins: Don’t think you have to have this big, high, complicated thing. The most important thing you should be thinking about with a lead magnet is it should be a stepping stone towards buying something from you. It shouldn’t just be given away for the sake of a lead, it should be given away for the sake of introducing yourself so that people know you, will want to buy whatever it is that you have. Make sure that your lead magnet is relevant to your primary product as you’re building trust with people.

Bob Sparkins: There’s a bunch of different types of lead magnets, of course. You already know this, but just as a reminder, resource guides, webinars, videos, audios, newsletters, e-course, consultations. These are presented to you in the order in which we find the highest conversions. We’re going to be talking today about a resource guide specifically, but this is the order in which we find most people get higher conversion rates because of the nature of the type of thing it is, the easiness to create, and the easiness to consume.

Bob Sparkins: Notice, that a consultation is the last on the list and e-course and newsletter are last on the list. Generally speaking, people don’t want to sign up for more emails or just a discussion. They want something now. They want to get their hands on it. All of these are good lead magnets, by the way, just because some of these are lower on the list doesn’t mean you shouldn’t have it. It’s just to say if you’re trying to make the most of your traffic, start from the top and work your way down.

Bob Sparkins: Now, why do resource guides work so, so well? Well, they’re very simple to create. They’re very simple to understand and they give people the sensation that they’re getting into action, they’re gaining momentum just by knowing what tools and resources you’re using. Now, there’s a very important thing that I want to make sure you know right away and that is a resource guide is not a series of steps to take, it’s not work to do. It’s not things to think about. It’s is stuff to get. It is golf clubs to buy. It is books to read. It is tools to have in your kitchen. It is things to use for your Facebook ads. It is things to acquire because people want to know what tools they can use to become more professional in what they’re doing.

Bob Sparkins: Yes, there are all kinds of other things that you can give away and yes, it’s true that just having tools doesn’t make you an expert, doesn’t make you better, but it gives people the sensation that they’re in momentum towards it. In your email follow-up, and in your sales letters, you can tell people, “Hey, just having the tool’s not enough. You need the rest of the story.”

Bob Sparkins: A simple resource guide can be as basic as a five-tool resource guide and the example I have on the screen here is ‘Five Tools You Might Use For Facebook Advertising’. So, Canva for doing better graphics, Beacon for making lead magnets, Facebook Blueprint for learning how to use Ads Manager, Drip for doing your email marketing, you’re going to replace that with Active Campaign, obviously, or whatever email marketing platform of choice, and Leadpages for your list building. That’s all this is. A series of tools, description, why you like it, and go. You’re done. That’s as easy as it can be.

Bob Sparkins: I would like to challenge you to do this today. I’m going to be going through this in 10 minutes. You can use this link here. I think Sarah’s putting this into the chat. Leadpages.net/joannaguide is going to give you a zip file of two resource guides. One’s in PowerPoint, one’s in Keynote, and I’m going to be using this in today’s presentation. It has a title page, a CTA page, and this five tools page that we’re going to work from. You can download that, use that. If you do post it up online, especially on a lead page, please do tweet me or post it on Facebook or whatever. I’d love to see what you make out of what I’m talking about.

Bob Sparkins: Before we do the challenge, I do want to give some advice on what to name your lead magnet. Of course, you’re learning from Joanna all the time so you have a pretty good sense of what copywriting can look like. She did a fantastic copywriting, fill-in-the-blanks e-book with us a couple months ago and I think that’s going to be shared with you if it’s not already. It looks like it’s there too. You want to make sure that you follow some formulas. Heres one that works really well for a resource guide.

Bob Sparkins: The top number of things and then what kind of things they are, tools, apps, books, or websites, to get a result without some other big thing that would be not normally assumed. As an example, the only three pieces of exercise equipment that you need to lose 10 pounds this month and they all weigh less than five pounds. If you are in different industries, here are some examples of that. I’m not going to run through all of them, but I want you to be thinking to yourself and then you can share some titles if you want in the Q&A box, what would be a good title for your next lead magnet and keep it as simple. Think about those conversations you’re already having with people. They’re already asking you for advice on equipment or gadgets or books or podcasts you listen to, even Netflix movies that you binge on. Think about the ones that would be relatable to your audience and then let’s get those people on board. Okay?

Bob Sparkins: Now, another key part about a lead magnet, the first one you make is not the last one you make. I want to encourage you to take this idea of a resource guide and then turn it into five more lead magnets. So, you’ll create your first lead magnet as a resource guide, those five tools, and then over the next say 30 days, try to commit to at least one, if not all five, of these other lead magnets that you could use to provide additional value while also building your list in multiple ways.

Bob Sparkins: Another lead magnet could be … By the way, these are all basically the same five tools. You have your five tools in your resource guide, now let’s do another lead magnet on how I used this first tool to get a result. Then, let’s look at tool two in an inside look with a video. Let’s look at a user’s guide to the third tool. Let’s look at a cheat sheet for tool number four and then let’s say ‘Seven Hidden Features of Tool Number Five’. So, get your brain spinning that this is not the only thing that you’re going to make to build up your list. If you really want to hyper-drive it, let’s spin it off into sitcom sequels, if you will, and turn it into those spinoffs.

Bob Sparkins: That’s going to be really helpful for you. All right, before I go into the challenge, any comments or thoughts on that, Joanna, or anybody else in the chat that wanted to share a thought before I get into the 10-minutes of a lead magnet creation?

Joanna Wiebe: So far, all cool. There’s something here, but I think … Todd just asked something, but I think it might go somewhere else. No, but one question, Bob, that’s come up a few times is, after this because there’s so much good information on each slide, we will be sending out a replay, or there will be a replay available. Is there a way to download these slides or should they just be taking screenshots?

Bob Sparkins: Not yet, but I’d be happy to give them out. We’ll talk offline and you can decide-

Joanna Wiebe: Yeah, cool. Yeah-

Bob Sparkins: For those of you that are blowing up the zip link, if you’re on the phone, it’s not going to work. It needs to be something that you do on a desktop and it will be a zip file that has two files in it that you’ll unzip. If there’s a continued problem for some of you, let me know, we’ll send out the Keynote and PowerPoint slide deck individually instead. Okay?

Joanna Wiebe: Cool. Everybody else, just in the interim, please do if you see something on the screen that you love, take a screenshot ’cause you might want to do this right now. All right, let’s do this.

Bob Sparkins: Excellent. Very cool. I’m going to pretend for a moment that I’m a wedding consultant, a wedding planner, and that’s the kind of business that I run. I know there’s a bunch of different businesses here, so extrapolate this towards your own idea. Here’s the thinking process. The thinking process is if I’m a wedding planner, I want to find grooms and brides, most likely brides, who are looking online to make their wedding day awesome and to make the process of their wedding day awesome.

Bob Sparkins: If I’m a wedding consultant, I want them to hire me to do that for them, but I know that a lot of people who would be my ideal client wouldn’t actually want to initially try to hire me. They are trying to find either ways to save money or do it themselves or just get shortcuts towards what they would want to know. If I can meet them where they’re at, and give them some of that key information, and then in the follow-up series of email I can say, “Look, don’t try to do this on your own. There’s a lot of stress and pressure already. Let me help you. Blah, blah, blah.”

Bob Sparkins: I would be thinking about what tools can I share. The tools I’m going to share with you in this example are actually true tools. These are tools from my wife and I when we got married four and a half years ago. These are things that we utilized quite a bit. I’m just going to run through them real fast so you can see what I’m talking about. For one, I know that as a wedding planner, people want to know where they can buy flowers and not get ripped off. We found fiftyflowers.com. That’s resource number one for my pretend business.

Bob Sparkins: Resource number two is Honeyfund because we had a lot of fun with getting gifts of money that we’re translated into activities on our honeymoon. This was something that was on Shark Tank. There’s a lot of fun behind it. They just teamed up with Target, so they’re a well-organized group. Imagine instead of people buying you another Crock-Pot, they’re giving you $50 towards scuba diving in Bali. That’s essentially the kind of stuff you could do.

Bob Sparkins: For getting out invitations and keeping track of them, RSVPify is really cool. For changing your name after you’re married MissNowMrs is really cool. And, if you do want to send out invitations or save the dates, the Wedding Shop from Shutterfly, which used to be called Wedding Paper Divas is a really great tool. Those are the four tools. I know that those exist. I know that those are good things that my ideal client base would want to know about. I could make a blog post about these or resource page about these, but I want to make a resource guide about these.

Bob Sparkins: I’m going to come back over into my PowerPoint, my Keynote deck and let’s turn this little formatter off. I’m going to make myself a resource guide. Let’s just make this full-screen here real quick. This is the same template that I just gave you and we’re going to just change this out. Now, I’m not going to spend the time switching out the logo and the image for now, but you can do that of course. But, we do want to change out the title, so ‘Five Tools to Make Your Wedding Day Awesome’.

Bob Sparkins: Let’s get that formatting back so we can get the font better. Let’s choose something cooler than what it is, something like that. We’ll do a little shift-enter. Then, in this part, we’ll say “Without breaking the big day budget.” Then, in this page, this is the CTA page. It can go second or third if you want. You can move it around. It’s up to you but basically, this is the idea that they’ve downloaded your thing and you want to give them a call-to-action to learn more. Something like, “Why Do This All Yourself?”

Bob Sparkins: You could say, “Weddings are stressful enough. Let me take off the bulk of the heavy lifting,” or, “Let me take the bulk of the heavy lifting off your shoulders. Contact me now for a free consultation.” Okay. Now, I mentioned earlier free consultations are not very good for generating leads, but once you have them on your email list, they are great for getting them to become a customer, especially if you’re a service provider. Then, we would do something like, “Let’s chat.”

Bob Sparkins: Then, we get to the resource guide page itself and this is where we’re going to take each thing. We’re going to say fiftyflowers.com. The link here, we would put in fiftyflowers.com, and we would make sure that that links in an actual hyperlink. You could make it fancier. Then, you’re just going to describe it. You’re going to say something like, “A lot of grooms and brides, a lot of weddings … ” Hang on. I’ve got a little font problem there. “A lot of weddings go over budget because of the decorations. Save a bunch of money with your flowers through this great site.” And, then you delete the rest of the template, and you can add more description, et cetera.

Bob Sparkins: Then, the second one is going to be … Which ones did I have second here? We’ve got the honeymoon registry at Honeyfund. Hang on, it’s on my other screen. That’s why I’m having trouble getting back to that because I have too many windows open on my Keynote deck. Sorry about that. Here we go. We have Honeyfund. Say something like, “Do you really need another Crock-Pot?” Feel free to do registration marks to whatever. “Why not turn your families gifts into activities on your honeymoon,” or something like that. “This site lets you do that.” Then, again, you do “Check this resource out now.” And, you can do same thing I did before, honeyfund.com.

Bob Sparkins: We repeat this for each one, and the fifth … you notice that I have four, but I have five here. I’ve got Fifty Flowers. I’ve got Honeyfund. I’ve got RSVPify and MissNowMrs and I also have this other one. I have five here, but I do want to mention that it is ideal for you to think about whether you want to have all five here be something else or maybe your fifth thing is yourself. So, if you have this call-to-action on your resource guide pdf that you’re going to do, then that’s fine. You don’t have to do the fifth one being you, but if you’re coming up short with you only have three things you want to share with people or four things you want to share with people, then feel free to put your own thing as number five.

Bob Sparkins: All right, so the third one we’re going to do is RSVPify. RSVPify is a great way to keep track of your reservations or your RSVPs. Don’t forget to save a seat for Aunt Imelda. Use this online RSVP tracker to make sure you keep tabs on all your guests and their plus-ones and their food choices or whatever. Okay. We delete the rest and then we put the thing in here as rsvpify.com. Then we add MissNowMrs and we can say something like, “Changing your name is a pain in the do do do do do do do. This site makes the post-wedding logistics a lot easier. Save over 13 hours of annoying work with this program.” And, we delete that.

Bob Sparkins: I forgot to set up a timer. How are we doing on time and my 10 minutes?

Joanna Wiebe: We’re doing awesome. We’re coming up to the end of it, but everybody’s still going watching you work through this, so it’s awesome.

Bob Sparkins: Awesome. Then, the last one is going to be the Wedding Shop by Shutterfly. We’re going to do, “For those VIPs on your guest list, send them a fancy invite or save-the-date through the post. This site makes it incredibly easy and beautiful.” We delete and we check our spelling and then we’re good. We say, let’s see, this is shutterfly.com/wedding.

Bob Sparkins: Now, at the very bottom, you’ll notice that I have leadpages.net and then, “Get the most up-to-date resource guide here.” This is where you would put your site.com, whatever that is, and then you would link it to your S3 link or whatever your landing page link is. I prefer it be your landing page link so that they would get the most up-to-date resources guides. If this happens to get passed around, somebody actually forwards it to their friends or their colleagues, any time that they have it for a year or two, they might want to come back and see if there’s a fresher version of it. So, linking back to your site of where the landing page was where they got it is a really good idea. Okay. Then, you’re ready to go.

Bob Sparkins: The last thing I would show you … This is just a real quick reminder that once you have this in place, you can set up a landing page to give it away super fast. I’m going to utilize this quick template and then I want to show you that you can then give your lead magnet away from your list-building system if you’re using Leadpages especially. ‘Wedding Demo’. I’m not going to build this whole page, I just want to show you the technical aspect of it, that you don’t have to have a full-on, everything else in place, you can just have it from one thing.

Bob Sparkins: One thing I’ll change is this image and I happen to have one of my wedding pictures here as the background image. We’ll take this content … I would take this and wash it out and then with this, we’re going to make sure that we give it away simply by connecting it to either my email list or we can just have it straight there but I can add a lead magnet of my wedding tools, ‘Top Five Money-Saving Wedding Tools’. I can upload it. It’s ready to go and I publish and I’m done.

Bob Sparkins: Okay, that is your quick tutorial on your lead magnet. Oh, there is one thing I forgot to show you. File, export, pdf. Very important step. That’s all you have to do to make it into a pdf and just make sure that you have image quality on as best and you just save it as a file name. When you save it as a file name, I would recommend that you save it as the title of your thing, so ‘Five Wedding Tools’ or something like that and then put a dash and then put your brand on there. Because, when people are searching on their hard drive, they don’t want to just see ‘ResourceGuideTemplate.leadpages.pdf’ or whatever. You’re saving from my download, rename to be something that’s branded for you so when they see it on their desktop or in their downloads folder, it’s easy for them to remember what it was.

Joanna Wiebe: Nice.

Bob Sparkins: You just click on export and then you’re all set to go. All right.

Joanna Wiebe: [inaudible 00:26:25]. Bob, nice. That’s the prevailing message in chat is nice. That’s awesome. Thank you. Then, sweet, save, boom, they continue and then they’re so fantastic. I wonder, sorry, I know that this isn’t about Leadpages, but I just saw that … Was it lead scoring or something?

Bob Sparkins: Yeah.

Joanna Wiebe: What’s that? Is that new? I haven’t seen that and I’m in Leadpages all the time.

Bob Sparkins: Yeah, this is called Leadmeter. This is the only thing in the world that will in real-time give you updated conversion advice as you make changes. For example, let’s say you want to get fancy and you change this button to white. So, now you’ve got white with white text and you can’t see the text anymore. Leadmeter automatically says, “Whoa, you made a mistake.” When you click on it, it says, “The button text is hard to read.” You click on it and it zooms down to that area. If you then change this to green and maybe the text is purple, then you say, “Okay, I love that. I love the way that looks.” Well, it doesn’t actually change Leadmeter yet because it’s still hard to read ’cause we’re able to …

Bob Sparkins: We have some scientific stuff behind the scenes that’s taking a look at accessibility of the text versus the color schemes. Oops. Once you have that in place, then you’re good to go. So, we could take the purple, make the text white, and have that contrast.

Joanna Wiebe: It’s cool.

Bob Sparkins: That’s what that … Basically, Leadmeter is going to check on the layout, the call-to-action buttons, making sure your text isn’t too long on your headlines, the readability, the opt-in form is in place and using the right number of fields. This is the beginning of stages. We’re actually continuously improving Leadmeter so it gets better and smarter at what it evaluates. When you have tens of thousands of customers and over … It’s close to a million published pages I think. I don’t remember the latest stats. We know what’s converting and what’s not and we put it into Leadmeter.

Joanna Wiebe: Dig it. Love it. That’s cool. Thanks. Just, yeah, I hadn’t seen that before, so that’s awesome. For those who want to follow-up with you and ask you more or learn more from you, I know you’re showing the perfect slide right now so they can just get you on Twitter. Is that right?

Bob Sparkins: Yep.

Joanna Wiebe: And, then if they’re a Leadpages customer, they get weekly training with you.

Bob Sparkins: That’s right. Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, I’m BobTheTeacher everywhere, so whatever’s your preferred place. I like Twitter in the sense of these shorter ones because I know you can ping both Jo and me at the same time and then we can respond. But, feel free to hit me up on those zones. Again, if you are Leadpages member, join me every Tuesday. It’s part of the membership. It’s already included and show me your pages. Let’s talk about them.

Bob Sparkins: I think we’re going to have a feature webinar here soon with you, Joanna, so we can share some other copywriting ideas, but I’d love to help you guys out as you implement this and would to hear about how you implemented it. So, let me know about it.

Joanna Wiebe: Fantastic. Awesome. Bob, thank you so much. Everybody, thank you for attending and asking such great questions. The replay will be available in about a week’s time. Sarah chatted about that link and we’ll have other links in that replay so you can keep getting access to the resource guide template and everything that Bob showed us today. Thanks again, you guys. Thanks, Bob. Have a great week and we’ll see you next Tuesday. Bye.

Bob Sparkins: Thank you.

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