Imagine a digital marketing strategy that gets more sales for your business…
Without posting on social media…
Without cold calling or cold messaging…
Without blindly spending on Google and Facebook Ads…
…instead, you find ready-to-buy leads appearing in your inbox?
Well, you’re about to see a digital marketing strategy that brought in 84 leads and €163,962 in sales within an 8-month period.
And here’s why it should interest you.
The business in this example hadn’t generated a single lead online in half a year of trying. Then they implemented this digital marketing strategy. In the first 30 days they spent just €130.19 on Google and Facebook Ads…and brought in €26,787 in revenue.
That’s an ROI of 206!
But I’d like to make something clear: this digital marketing strategy is not magic.
It works best when:
You sell mid to high-ticket services (€1,000 to €50,000) or charge mid to high-ticket commissions
You serve customers in a localised area
Your service is higher quality than your competition
You are good at closing sales
You combine digital marketing with offline marketing (e.g. a well-located office, print advertising, etc.)
If you do have these elements…then this digital marketing strategy will bring you instant benefits.
If at any moment you want advice on implementing it on your website you can book a free 30-minute call with me.
Otherwise grab a brew and sit somewhere comfortable – it’s a long one!
PART 1: THE LEAD MAGNET
DO NOT SPEND Another €1 on Your Digital Marketing Strategy Until You Have a Lead Magnet
It took me 10 years of writing SEO content before I discovered lead magnets.
I’d hit some home runs:
140,000 visitors to ONE post in a single month
100,000 visitors in 3 months for a brand-new website
1,067% increase in visitors in 4 months to a tiny real estate website in a major European city
But 100,000 visitors in 3 months generated 0 leads and about €70 through Google display ad clicks.
And the 1,067% increase in visitors ?
Just 20 property viewings from 1,640 visitors felt too low to be true.
Why didn’t more traffic = more leads?
I’ll tell you why.
Because there was no lead magnet.
I spoke to two small businesses in Spain in 2023 who’d each spent €30,000 on digital marketing that year. Neither of them had covered costs in added revenue.
This is the problem that you’ll face with any digital marketing strategy.
You can pay an SEO agency to write SEO content…you can pay a digital marketing agency to manage Facebooks or Google Ads…but most of your money will be wasted generating traffic that never turns into leads.
Enter the lead magnet.
After creating one for the business in this case study we generated 11 quote requests from 56 visitors to the website homepage in the first month of going live.
That’s a 20% conversion rate.
According to a recent study the average conversion rate across real estate, legal, finance, B2B and professional service websites is just 2.6%.
See why this digital marketing strategy is so powerful?
Below, I will walk you through the exact changes I made and why.
Will a Lead Magnet Work for My Business?
A quick confession.
I used this digital marketing strategy for a solar installer servicing homes and businesses in a small part of Spain.
But before you think this digital marketing strategy will only work in solar…
There’s a common denominator to every business that sells a mid to high-ticket service.
They all have an extended sales process.
Few clients will pay €1,000-50,000 through an online checkout page without talking to a representative first.
Instead, the sales process usually looks like:
Initial contact
A meeting, call, visit, viewing, etc.
A quote or proposal or offer
Approval
Payment
Data from Klipfolio says that 13% of leads will get a quote.
Prospect Experience says that 30% of quote requests will become sales.
That’s a close rate of 4% across all leads.
Imagine a digital marketing strategy where you have to chase 25 leads just to get 1 sale for your small business?
Well…with this strategy my client closed nearly 1 in 4 of all leads that turned up in their email inbox.
Some leads paid in full within 5 days of filling out the contact form on the website…
How is that possible?
Because we were able to get leads to request a quote during their first interaction with us.
It could be that your sales process doesn’t work use quotes or proposals…
But if you’re interested in focusing your attention on leads who are highly interested to work with you – and aren’t price shopping or wasting you time – then this digital marketing strategy will be very effective.
Cumulative revenue, marketing costs & ROI from April-Nov 2023.The sales cycle can take 3-6 months for this business so it’s likely that more quotes sent in October-November will close in early 2024 (updates coming as soon as data is in).
So What Does a Lead Magnet Look Like?
It’s easier to explain with a direct example.
Below, you can see the text that appeared at the top of this business’ homepage prior to any changes:
Get control of your home or business energy!
[Contact us now!]
Or call us:
[+34 6** *** **]
[+34 6* *** ***]
The text [in the square brackets] means there was a button or clickable link.
Most small service business have the same kind of button on their homepage — it might say [Get a Quote] or [Book a Call] or [Contact Us] – and anyone who clicks it is taken to a contact form to leave their details.
This approach converts few readers into leads (I’ll explain why later).
Instead, I added the following 3 sentences:
Solar Panel Installers in [Name of Town]
We Help Homeowners Cut Your Electricity Bills to €0 with Solar Panels in Spain
[Get a Quote]
*Quote includes personalised break even estimation
Over the next 8 months this short piece of text generated 84 quote requests and €163,962 in revenue.
Below, I’ll explain exactly how and why it worked.
The 5 Elements of a High-Converting Lead Magnet
By now you’ve learned three things about lead magnets:
Lead magnets get more readers give you their contact details
Your lead magnet can generate quote requests or highly interested leads in the first interaction
More direct quote requests and highly interested leads means more sales for your small business
But you’re probably still asking yourself.
What actually is a lead magnet?
The difference between a lead magnet and a standard website contact form is this: a lead magnet is designed to get contact information at a higher conversion rate.
A lead magnet could be a free .pdf that someone offers you in exchange for your email address.
A lead magnet could be a [Get a Quote] with personalised estimation or analysis as in this case study.
A lead magnet could also be a physical service like a free inspection that you offer in exchange for a phone number and personal details.
No doubt you’ve come across hundreds of lead magnets before: you see them on nearly all e-commerce websites where you’re offered 10% or 15% discount in exchange for you email address.
Why are lead magnets important?
As you’ve seen, most service business websites convert readers into leads at 2.6%.
But here’s what we achieved with a digital marketing strategy based on lead magnets:
458 leads generated from 5,140 unique visitors across the whole website in an 8-month period – a 9% total conversion rate
73 leads generated from 362 unique visitors to a single landing page – a 20% conversion rate
42 quote requests generated from 834 unique visitors in their first interaction with our website homepage – a 5% conversion rate
I told you at the beginning of this blogpost that we generated 84 leads using only ONE contact form.
This is because the 84 qualified leads that I passed to my client’s inbox – and which we recorded as a sale attributed to digital marketing – all filled out our [Get a Quote] lead magnet form.
…it’s just that not everyone filled it out on the first interaction with our website.
I will explain this in detail below.
But for now now, I want to explain the 5 elements you need to include to make sure your primary [Get a Quote] or [Contact Us] or [Request a Viewing] primary lead magnet is high-converting.
#1 Ideal Customer
Don’t skip over this one.
If you run a small business (or you’re a sales manager for one) then you already have a good idea of who your customers are.
But that’s not enough.
To create a high-converting lead magnet you need to imagine you’re talking to just one single person.
I get this might make you uncomfortable.
For example, the solar business in this case study had 5 or so ideal customer profiles:
Homeowners who live all year in a tourist area in Spain
Homeowners who rent their properties in a touristic area in Spain
Homeowners with a newbuild home or off-grid property
Construction companies building newbuilds
Business owners
It feels like a waste to focus an entire digital marketing strategy on just 1 of these 5 profiles.
But the truth is you need to reduce your ideal customer profile down even further.
You see…
Even though we focused on foreign homeowners who live all year in Spain, there are still so many reasons why someone might want an installation:
Some people struggle to find electric car charging points in Spain and want an affordable charger at home
Some are worried about the climate crisis and want to do their bit
Some hate paying higher energy bills due to inflation
Some are worried about using their air-conditioning units for too long in the summer or their central heating in the winter
Surely offering solutions to the widest possible range of potential clients is the best way to generate leads and sales?
The truth is the opposite.
You’ll notice one thing about each of these reasons above.
They each have an emotional component.
To convert as many readers as possible you need to connect to people on an emotional level…
…and the best way to do that is offering a solution to a pain point in your reader’s life.
Most small business fail in their digital marketing strategy because they try to speak to every single person in their market and fail to get a real emotional connection with anyone.
It’s a recipe for uninterested leads, price shoppers and wasted marketing budgets.
For the small business in this example, I focused on just one specific person and one specific pain point:
Foreign homeowner living full-time in Spain
Hated wasting money on high energy bills due to inflation
Keep reading to see why.
#2 Desired Outcome
Once you’ve identified your ideal customer and selected one pain point…you need to figure out the desired outcome.
What does this mean?
Everybody who is suffering with a pain point in their lives will have an irresistible emotional pull towards a resolution.
It’s genuinely a ‘magnet’.
Your task here is to find out what would turn your ideal customer’s current negative into a positive…and frame it in as few words as possible.
It sounds simple.
But there were so many different desired outcomes I shortlisted to create a lead magnet that could generate solar panel quote requests:
Saving €10,000s in the next decade
Paying €0 in your monthly electricity bill
Being able to run your AC all day all summer without worrying about the bills
Raising your property’s sale value
Being able to drive your car on your own sunshine (for as good as free)
Why did I go with ‘cut your electricity bill to €0’?
There’s no hard-and-fast rule. But I find the more your ideal customer can imagine the desired outcome in their minds…the better.
For example, saving €10,000s in the next decade means very different things to different people.
But a €0 electricity bill?
That’s concrete.
Anybody can imagine opening the envelope of their monthly electricity bill and seeing €0.
If you can imagine it, it’s easier to believe it.
Get the desired outcome right…
And it will be impossible for your ideal customer to stop reading and find out how you’re going to get this desired outcome for them.
#3 Belief Bridge (Positive or Negative)
You won’t find this element in anything you read about lead magnets.
I invested over €6,000 in marketing courses before I stumbled upon it…
And now I know the ‘belief bridge’ to be the single most important aspect in creating a high-converting lead magnet.
Let me explain.
There are 5-6 competitors all advertising in the region where my client is based.
Their Facebook Ads and websites all say a variation of the same thing: “Go solar and save money in your monthly electricity bill!”
Now.
Imagine you see an ad that says “We Help Homeowners Cut Their Bills to €0 With Solar Panels in Spain”. It’s an improvement on the other ads you might see…
…but it’s not enough.
Put yourself in the reader’s shoes. Would this promise be enough to give your telephone number to this business?
You might have thoughts like:
“I don’t have time to fill out a form right now…”
“I don’t want an uncomfortable conversation with a salesperson…”
“Solar panels are probably way too expensive for me..”
Each of these are a negative belief.
Unless these are taken care of, you will never get readers giving you their contact details via your lead magnet.
What to do?
You could neutralise these negative beliefs by adding text in your copy like:
“Takes just ONE minute!”
“We won’t ask for your phone number!”
“See if you qualify for solar with €0 down – repayment from as little as €35 per month!”
These neutralising sentences can all turn an unexciting contact form into an irresistible lead magnet….
But the higher the price of your service the more you must play into a positive belief your ideal customer holds.
Bear with me.
I researched the ideal customer I selected for my solar client and discovered they worked in finance and had several high-value investments.
(Yes – I picked ONE specific past client and based an entire digital marketing strategy on them.)
Now.
To this person the idea of a break even estimation and annual savings analysis would spark a different kind of curiosity.
They are passionate about putting their money to work effectively.
If our break even estimation reveals that a solar installation can have an annual return of up to 33-50% (if your monthly bills are high enough this is possible)…then how could our ideal customer resist such a thought?
See what we have done?
Instead of triggering negative beliefs by saying ‘Get a Quote!’ we are creating an irresistible opportunity…
And it so happens that ‘Get a Quote’ is the button they need to click to satisfy the curiosity burning within them.
Building a bridge between your service and a positive belief your ideal customer holds is the best way to craft a lead magnet that converts like crazy.
It’s simple, but not easy to pull off.
If you want to learn more about identifying your ideal customer, locating their pain points and uncovering their deeply held beliefs…you can book a 30-minute strategy call with me below.
#4 Free Offer
Think about it like this.
A lead magnet is an offer that your reader ‘buys’ with their contact details.
As a service provider you should be passionate about providing more value to your clients than the price of your actual service. Similarly, your lead magnet should provide more value than the cost of a contact detail.
This is what most distinguishes a lead magnet from a contact form.
Most of the time, businesses think about their [Get a Quote] form or [Contact Us] only as a means to get more sales.
Readers will feel uncomfortable about leaving their contact details unless they’re desperate, they’ve had a recommendation or they’re just price shopping.
Don’t underestimate this.
In Joe Girard’s book How to Sell Anything to Anybody he talks about people leaving him a $20 deposit to get out of a sales conversation…and then even never coming back for their money.
Some people are that uncomfortable about being sold to.
And Joe Girard was the 12-times holder of the Guinness World Records ‘Greatest Salesman in the World’ who once sold 1,425 cars in a single year!
The more you can break down sales resistance and make a customer feel valued…
…the more leads you will generate.
I settled on a free break even estimation and savings analysis for my solar client for three reasons:
It was an existing part of a high-performing sales process for my client
It played into a positive belief that our ideal customer held
It meant we could provide a quote without triggering any of the negative beliefs our ideal customer held around entering a sales conversion
So the million-dollar question…
What should you offer in order to create your own high-converting lead magnet?
The answer is most likely already inside your sales process.
But if that doesn’t help you…then I’ve got 10 examples of some of the most famous lead magnets in history to share with you below.
These will help you realise just how creative you can be with the free offer you’re giving away on the other side of your contact form.
Here they are:
Legendary carpet cleaning salesman Joe Polish started offering a ‘free room of carpet cleaning’ as the lead magnet in his paid advertising.
He instantly saw more people get in touch and closed more clients after giving them a sample of his work.
He saw his monthly revenue increase from $2,100 to $12,300 within the next 6 months.
Marketing coach John ‘JD’ Dwyer launched an advertising campaign asking readers to send in pictures of broken garden fences.
The winner of ‘The Ugliest Fence in Australia’ contest would win a free $5,000 fence makeover.
In just 3 days this strategy generated two years’ worth of highly interested phone numbers for a small fencing business to call and close.
America’s fastest growing roofing repair and replacement business (Blue Hammer Roofing) grew revenue 19,510% in three years by knocking on doors.
Their sales people offered anyone with a damaged roof a free service to get confirmation from the homeowner’s insurance adjuster for full coverage of any roof repairs.
It means the homeowner didn’t have to lift a finger…and potentially would get a new roof for free.
ERA All in One Realty became America’s #1 ‘small team’ real estate agency with over 800 transaction sides in a single year.
Their lead magnet worked by including a special number on ‘for sale’ signs that passersby could text for instant information on the property (price, features, etc).
This generated 21,300 leads alone in 2019 and 60% converted into viewings.
Content marketing guru Chris von Wilpert started his marketing career by writing ONE blogpost and winning a $100,000 contract.
He did it by reverse-engineering the marketing strategy of a popular company, then offering their ’22 growth hacks’ as a free download accompanying a blogpost.
He then emailed every person who got the download and asked if they wanted marketing support.
One of the oldest lead magnets in history was launched in 1900 by the two French brothers who manufactured car tyres – the Michelin brothers.
There were fewer than 3,000 cars on French roads when the free Michelin Guide was launched, so the book explained how to change tyres, where to buy fuel, what hotels to visit and (of course) the best restaurants to eat at.
By 1903 France was the world’s leading automaker and sold 30,124 cars – Michelin and its Michelin Guide grew in step with the industry.
Another of the most famous lead magnets in history was launched in 1948 for the investment and wealth management company Merrill Lynch.
It ran as a newspaper advert until the 1960s and offered readers a free booklet call ‘How to Invest’ in exchange for their address.
The campaign generated over 3 million leads and is known as the most successful financial lead magnet campaign ever.
The experienced copywriter Everte Farnell cut his teeth writing adverts for his friend’s animal infestation clean-up service in a small area in the United States.
The problem was that potential customers all phoned up wildlife trappers – not cleaners – when they had an animal in the attic.
To capitalise on this, Farnell ran a contest offering a free truck to the animal trapper who referred them the most leads – in 30 days they made $100,000 profit and bought a truck costing just $15,000.
Polaron is a legal service provider who secures European citizenship for Australians on the basis of their ancestry.
The company employed the top marketing agency in Australia – King Kong – and started creating ‘citizenship eligibility assessments’ directly into website landing pages.
These assessments generated highly qualified and highly interested leads automatically, and hence Polaron saw 300% more leads and 325% more revenue in the first 6 months of using lead magnets.
Rich Feola’s Solar Exclusive is the largest solar lead generation agency in the USA – but they’ve only used one lead magnet to generate more than 3 million leads.
The company uses educational paid ads to send readers to a landing page where they can ‘see if they qualify’ for state incentives like tax rebates.
Solar Exclusive sells this contact information on to installers, some of whom close up 40% of all leads that enter their inbox.
So…
I hope these examples help you get the picture of what’s possible with a lead magnet!
If you want my advice on what you should offer in your lead magnet to improve your conversions then book a call with me below.
#5 Authority Signal
It’s crucial your reader trusts you.
Nobody wants to waste time with an inexperienced service provider.
So you need to demonstrate some kind of authority – whether that’s by mentioning the projects you’ve completed, the results you’ve got for your clients or something similar.
In the case of my client I added 5 short ‘authority signals’ right below the top section of the homepage:
Number of years in business
Number of 5-star reviews on Google
Number of installations completed
Location of their office (our ideal customer profile appreciated a local business they can talk to face-to-face)
The qualifications held by the business, which are necessary for legal paperwork and registrations
The authority signals you should include inside or next to where you present your lead magnet depends on your ideal customer’s positive and negative beliefs.
If they appreciate a high-quality service…show them quality.
If they appreciate speed…show them how fast you are.
If they appreciate competence…show them your awards or qualifications.
Why You MUST Make Your Lead Magnet Irresistible for a Successful Digital Marketing Strategy
In case it hasn’t sunk in yet…
A lead magnet will save you a LOT of time, money and energy with your digital marketing strategy.
I know this to be true because I track every single €1 spent on ads, every lead coming in and every sale made for my marketing agency clients.
And so I know that for two months I missed a huge opportunity.
You see…
I was running a Facebook Messenger Ad campaign for my client in this case study and we spent €696 in a 30-day period to generate 11 leads.
Not one of them converted into a sale.
What was wrong?
I believe it’s because we were missing three of the elements you saw above:
The ad copy didn’t really touch on any one single pain point…
There wasn’t any high-value free offer except a request to ‘contact us via Messenger for more information’…
There was no belief bridge that presented our free offer as an incredible investment opportunity or similar…
And so, here’s what happened.
Eleven people got in touch to ask for a quote request and then never responded to any more messages.
This is partly an issue common to Facebook Messenger Ads.
But it’s also what happens when there’s no emotional resonance with your ideal customer.
They forget about you quickly.
I went back to the drawing board and created an automated break-even calculator that someone could use to get a result within 2-3 minutes.
Suddenly everything changed.
We closed 2 sales for €80 each within the next fortnight.
Instead of spending €696 without a single sale…we spent €159.78 and generated €13,574!
This should help you see the power of weaving the 5 elements I just shared with you into your lead magnet.
But it also begs the question…
Why create an automated break-even calculator? And how did an automated calculation turn into a quote request in my client’s inbox?
I will answer these questions below.
PART 2: LEAD QUALIFICATION
A Digital Marketing Strategy with a 22% Close Rate
I told you earlier that I generated 84 qualified leads in an 8 month period and my client achieved a 22% close rate on them.
But this isn’t the whole story.
The digital marketing strategy we put in place actually generated 458 leads.
But here’s the thing.
I didn’t pass any leads over to the sales manager of my client until a lead had requested a quote.
I did this by:
Creating marketing funnels that turned unqualified leads into qualified leads
Increasing the difficulty of the ‘Get a Quote’ form so that only highly interested leads would get to the end of it
You’ll probably find what I’m about to say tough to accept.
You see, most business make their contact form as simple as possible by only asking for a name, email and telephone number.
But one of the first changes I made was to update the ‘Get a Quote’ form to include:
Installation request (e.g. solar panels, solar pool heating, electric car charger, etc.)
Town
Name
Phone Number
Electricity Bill
Comments
These updates might seem like overkill.
But these small changes make a huge difference in the quality of your leads.
For starters, you enter the sales conversation knowing exactly what your lead wants and knowing exactly what their pain point is (e.g. you’ve seen how much they’re paying for electricity each month).
But there’s something else.
Only highly interested leads would be willing to share their electricity bill with a company they don’t know.
If you’re so worried about losing leads that you don’t ask for details like this…
You’re likely to get so many unfiltered, uninterested and unqualified leads that you spend all their time chasing them and do a worse job of closing high-value leads!
Instead, you should worry about making your lead magnet so irresistible that EVERYONE wants to get in touch.
Then, when you disqualify leads you can achieve two things:
You can instantly see if a lead is qualified or not before spending your time on them
If a lead has already shared personal information with you, they’ll be much more likely to pick up the phone and hear what you have to say when you call
The combination of a lead magnet with a lead qualification system is crucial to implementing a digital marketing strategy with a 22% close rate – or better!
How to Turn Unqualified Leads into Quote Requests – Without Wasting a Minute of Your Time!
Each of the 84 qualified leads generated with this digital marketing strategy entered via the business’ [Get a Quote] contact form.
But only 31 filled it out on their first interaction.
If we look at revenue generated, it means that €112,174 came from leads who felt comfortable asking directly for a quote.
But what about the other 53 qualified leads and the remaining €51,788?
These came from a digital marketing strategy I call the ‘One-Step Upsell’.
If you like, you could stop here and skip to PART 3 where I talk about generating traffic.
But if you’re interested in implementing a digital marketing strategy that you can scale with paid ads…
We’ll need some theory.
I swiped this image from Australia’s fastest growing agency owner Sabri Suby.
It’s called the ‘Larger Market Formula’.
After spending millions of dollars in advertising and running 100s of tests Sabri discovered an interesting fact: just 3% of your market is currently ready to buy.
What does that mean?
It means roughly 3% of all the people who have the need and have the money to buy your service are actively looking for a quote or proposal or sales conversation.
A further 17% are gathering information and not sure they want to buy yet.
Another 20% of your market knows that have a problem that needs solving but they’re not motivated to look for the solution yet.
Finally, the largest 60% of any market aren’t even aware they have a problem.
Let me repeat the most important takeaway for you:
No matter how effective you make your [Get a Quote] or [Contact Us] lead magnet, you’ll only reach 3% of your market!
This the paradox of marketing.
You focus your efforts of the smallest 3% of your market because these are people most likely to buy from you – and buy more quickly than everyone else.
But if you ignore the full 97% of your market you will face four problems:
The number of ready-to-buy leads you can generate will be limited
You won’t be able to scale your digital marketing strategy unless you expand the size of your market (by offering a new service, opening up in a new location, etc.)
You experience feast-and-famine cycles depending on when people are most in market for your service
Your ready-to-buy leads will probably be talking to other service providers and have other quotes on the table
If I hadn’t generated quote requests from people who were at the problem-aware or information-gathering stage…I would have missed out on €51,788 for my client.
So how to get quote requests from up to 40% of your market?
You won’t do it by waiting for someone to land on a lead magnet on your website homepage or Contact page.
(I’ll explain why in Part 3.)
Instead, you need to add at least 2 channels to your digital marketing strategy:
Blogposts & Landing Pages
Facebook Ads
Let me quickly explain how this digital marketing strategy generated 458 leads.
Further on, I’ll explain how I turned these into 53 quote requests and €51,788 in revenue using an automated lead qualification system.
145 Leads from 4 Blogs & 1 Landing Page
At the beginning of my marketing career in SEO I used to optimise everything I wrote for the maximum number of visitors.
I’ve told you how this panned out.
(I once brought in 100,000 visitors in 3 months to a brand-new website and got 0 leads for my trouble.)
And then I discovered lead magnets.
Suddenly my focus changed to generating as many leads from as few visitors as possible.
As a result, I achieved something I’d never come close to before
I had a blogpost converting readers into leads at a rate of 24%!
Over a five month period we generated 58 leads from this one blog.
During one of those months we were getting 5 leads a week.
When you consider this happened without €1 spent on paid ads…you can see just how effective adding blogposts to your digital marketing strategy can be.
So how did I generate the leads?
With a lead magnet, of course. Just this time I wasn’t offering a quote request or hinting at any kind of sale.
Instead I was trying to add value to the reader’s experience.
Here’s an example.
The solar installer I worked with said a few customers were interested in heating their swimming pools with solar.
I did some research…
And local forums and Facebook groups had a number of questions about pool heating.
There was a lot of pain here too – lots of complaints around spending money to maintain a pool year-round but only using it for 2-3 months in summer.
So I ran some calculations and created a .pdf document showing how much it would cost to run three kinds of pool heater:
A conventional electric heater
A thermal solar pool heating system
A photovoltaic solar pool heating system
That’s it!
A lot of people who found the post in a Google Search wanted that extra information.
I applied this same strategy to three more blogposts and in total generated 109 email addresses over an 8-month period.
On top of this, I created a landing page.
This landing page housed an automated break-in calculator, and instead of being a long piece of text just took people straight to the calculator.
This page generated 20 leads over an 8-month period from free Google traffic.
The numbers don’t really matter here.
What I want to get across here is that none of these 5 website pages pushed people into getting a quote at all.
Instead, the lead magnets were designed to generate email address from people at the ‘problem aware’ and ‘information gathering’ stages according to the Larger Market Formula.
Though 145 leads might sound good these leads convert at a much lower rate than people who directly ask you for a quote.
But still, €51,788 from just 5 extra website pages is not to be sniffed at.
76 Leads from 1 Facebook Ad Campaign
Setting up a successful Facebook Ad is a topic for another day.
If you are really interested in running Facebook Ads or want to cut your cost-per-client acquisition using lead magnets I recommend you book a 30-minute strategy call with me.
Otherwise, I want you to understand that you should only run Facebook Ads designed to generate leads in the ‘problem aware’ and ‘information gathering’ stages.
Why is that?
The problem with Facebook Ads is that you will show your ad to everyone (within the audience targeting settings you choose).
Remember how just 3% of your market is currently ready to buy?
Facebook charges you based on a changing cost per 1,000 impressions. This means you’re paying every time you show your ad to the 97% of readers who aren’t ready to buy PLUS the however many more people who aren’t even in your market.
I told you earlier how we spent €696 to generate 11 leads and 0 sales…
And then I ran an ad campaign to the landing page with the break-even calculator and generated 23 leads within a fortnight.
Note.
The break-even calculator worked by asking someone for their email address.
Why stop there?
When you’re generating leads in the ‘problem aware’ and ‘information gathering’ stages they have a much higher resistance to being sold to.
They’re not ready for a quote yet.
Handing over their email address is an affordable ‘price’ for the high-value information you’re giving them in your blogpost and landing page lead magnets.
And this opens the door to something I call the ‘One-Step Upsell’.
I used the technique to turn the 221 leads generated using blogs and Facebook Ads into 53 quote requests and €51,788 in sales.
I will now tell you exactly how the ‘One-Step Upsell’ works and you can put it to work in your own digital marketing strategy.
How to Turn Email Address into Quote Requests with the ‘One-Step Upsell’
This section won’t be long to read.
Because the ‘One-Step Upsell’ is incredibly simple and only takes 5-10 minutes to set up…
Basically, I automated a short email to go out to every single lead who requested one of the lead magnets on my our blogs and landing pages.
This email gave the person their requested information…and then pitched them the personalised break-even calculation lead magnet.
Here’s an example:
There’s a lot more I could have done here.
I could have sent multiple emails as part of an email sequence…
I could have retargeted these leads by entering their email addresses into a specific Facebook Ads or Google Ads campaign…
But if I was on the other end of a digital marketing strategy, I’d like to be marketed to in a way where my email address is respected and it’s my choice to get back in touch or not.
(It’s possible some of these leads also called the company directly or dropped in for a visit, and these weren’t attributed to digital marketing.)
So anyway, this is how I turned roughly 427 leads into 53 quote requests and generated a further €51,788 in sales.
PART 3: TRAFFIC GENERATION
A Digital Marketing Strategy with a 35x Return on Investment
Can you guess which digital marketing acquisition channel provides the highest ROI?
It’s not Facebook Ads…
It’s not Google Ads…
In fact, it’s not any paid ad platform at all…
It’s SEO.
Optimising your website to rank on search engines like Google, Bing and Duck Duck Go will bring you the most revenue for the least investment.
According to WebsiteBuilderExpert.com the average ROI made from investing in SEO is 21:1.
But in the digital marketing strategy in this case study…
We achieved an ROI of 35:1!
My client brought in €110,273 over an 8-month period from leads who found our website pages in a Google or Bing search.
With my marketing agency’s costs at €3,145 over this period…it was returned at least 35 times in revenue (not inc. VAT).
And what about paid ads?
My client spent a further €2,254 on Facebook and Google Ads to generate €53,688 – an ROI of 24:1.
We will be here for days if I explain how to get your pages ranking on Google and how to set up Google Ads and Facebook Ads campaigns.
So instead, I will tell you how to structure your digital marketing strategy to make use of these channels.
If you do want specialist advice on SEO or paid ads then book a 30-minute strategy call with me.
Otherwise let’s dive in!
The 4-Step Structure to Achieve Maximum ROI From Your Digital Marketing Strategy
The biggest mistake I made as an SEO content writer was believing that any traffic to a website was good.
An example.
I once wrote the website copy and blogposts for a website selling premium airport transfer services.
The website quickly shot to 100,000 visitors in its first 3 months…but none of those readers turned into leads.
Why not?
Because I made the mistake of writing blogposts on tourism-related content and news – instead of writing about airport transfer services.
This might sound like an obvious mistake.
But I’ve worked with countless businesses since who’ve shelled out €1,000s for a marketing agency to write 1 blogpost a week on content completely unrelated to the service they’re selling.
So how to fix this problem?
Let’s revisit the Larger Market Formula I showed you earlier.
As soon as I began to match every website page, blogpost, landing page and paid ad to catch readers at one of the stages of the Larger Market Formula…everything began to improve.
Like I said earlier, in the first month of implementing this digital marketing strategy we only got 56 visitors to the homepage.
But we achieved a 20% conversion rate into quote requests and made €26,787 in revenue.
How did we pick up these readers?
By getting the website to appear on Google Search for high-intent search queries.
These were searches like:
“[name of the business]”
“solar panels [name of town]”
“solar panels in [name of town]”
“solar panels in [name of region]”
“solar panel installations near me”
“solar energy system”
“solar panel companies”
Now.
There aren’t a lot of these searches.
For example, the search term “solar panels [name of town]” for where my client is based has only been search 270 times in the past 9 months.
But we’ve appeared as roughly the 4th search result.
Again, we haven’t picked up a lot of traffic from these searches.
But high-intent Google searches like this are extremely valuable.
How do I know?
Because anybody making a Google Search for a term like “solar panels [name of town]” is very likely in the Buying NOW stage.
They are the 3% of your market who make up the majority of your sales.
Think about it.
If you’re on Google, you’re actively searching for something.
Nobody goes onto Facebook because they want to find Facebook Ads from local solar companies.
They’ll go to a search engine.
Does that make sense?
You could argue someone might go on Facebook to ask in a local group for recommendations about a good solar company in the area…
But once they see your name, they’re going to Google it and find your homepage.
When you look at your digital marketing strategy in terms of where your readers are at in the buying stage, everything will start to fall into place.
This is the 4-step structure to maximising your ROI from your digital marketing strategy.
And I really advise you start at the top and work you way to the bottom.
Yes, I’m saying DO NOT start with Facebook Ads if you want to maximise the ROI of your digital marketing strategy…
You will get the highest return of all by getting your website to rank on Google Search for high-intent terms that someone looking to buy your service would use.
Then, consider putting a Google Ad on those terms.
In fact…
That’s exactly how I generated the first €12,742 for this business ON THE SECOND DAY of launching this digital marketing strategy!
I put a Google Ad on the business’ own name, generated a click for €0.12, the person filled out the personalised break-even estimation…and a couple weeks later the sale closed.
It’s likely this person was a referral.
But that shows the speed with which this digital marketing strategy can capture and convert leads for you.
After you have your primary lead magnet functioning, you can start considering blogposts and landing pages each with their own specialised lead magnet.
Do the One-Step Upsell…and start turning them into quote requests.
Then, you can start running Facebook Ads to those same blogposts and landing pages.
Do the One-Step Upsell…and turn them into quote requests.
See how this digital marketing strategy can work?
I took this exact step-by-step approach with the business in this case study, and I am constantly building out more lead magnets and Facebook Ads as I try to get deeper and deeper into the 80% of the market that’s ‘problem aware’ or ‘unaware’.
Since I already have the ‘Buying NOW’ and ‘Information Gathering Mode’ segments locked down…
It means we have a digital marketing strategy that is constantly generating high-value leads even while we focus on scaling in other areas.
In the image below, you can see how organic quote requests stayed fairly regular, which freed up time to focus on improving our Google + Facebook Ads.
How to Implement this Digital Marketing Strategy in Your Own Business
There are only a couple of tasks standing between you and getting this strategy up and running:
Turning your primary website contact form into an irresistible lead magnet
Building out your primary contact form into a lead qualification system
Getting your website homepage ranking for high-intent search queries
Setting up a Google Ad campaign for high-intent search queries
Just these four tasks helped me to generate €112,174 in revenue for the business in this case study.
If you have a website and contact form…then you’re just days away from more leads and more sales for your service-based business.
There’s enough in this post to get started yourself.
But if you want my advice or even my direct help in implementing this digital marketing strategy, then do book a free 30-minute call with me.
Just click the link below.