The next few 5 Minute Marketing Tips are going to be about Lead Generation: the vital marketing step of making first contact with potential clients.

In this week's video I reveal the “ACE Formula” for effective lead generation and show you the three key steps needed to generate the right, high quality leads for your business.

Find out about the ACE Formula and how to apply it in this week's video…

 
Find this video helpful? Subscribe to the More Clients TV channel on youtube to get more of them:

Video Transcript

Hi, it's Ian here. Welcome to another five minute marketing tip. In this week's tip, and for the next few weeks, we are going to be concentrating on lead generation. In other words, that vital first contact with potential clients. Today I am going to share with you the ACE framework for generating leads and then I'm going to expand on that in future videos and blog posts and e-mails. I'll see you after the break.

Hi, welcome back. First of all, what do we mean by a lead? For me, the best definition of a lead is initial contact with a potential client in a way that you can follow up on. All three elements there are important.

Firstly, it's initial contact. Buying an e-mail list or a list of mailing addresses is not getting leads because those people have never met you. They have never had any contact with you. They are highly unlikely to turn into anything, so don't count them as leads yet.

Second thing is that they need to be potential clients. It's no good getting loads of visitors to your website or going out to networking events and meeting a whole bunch of people if none of them can become real clients for you.

The third thing is vital too. Again, it's often overlooked. You have to connect with them in a way that allows you to followup. Again, it's no use in meeting with people face to face if you don't get their business card and permission to have a followup phone call or an e-mail with them. It's no good getting people to come to your website if they don't sign up for your e-mails or some other mechanism where you can get back in touch with them afterwards and followup. As I'm sure you know, 95% of the time people coming to your website or you initially meet them, they won't be ready to buy then and there so you need to be following up. You need to be having multiple interactions with them and building credibility and trust all the time. A lead is really only a lead if you are able to follow up, if you have permission to follow up. That followup, these days if it's online, it could be, it has always traditionally been, signing up for your e-mails but these days it could also be signing up and joining a group that you have on Facebook or LinkedIn or it could even be that they come to your website and they get pixeled so you can re-target them with Facebook advertising or Google AdWords advertising. Whatever it is, you need a way of following up.

I mentioned the ACE method, and many thanks to my good friend Lee Duncan for coming up with the acronym. ACE stands for first getting the attention of a potential client, secondly connecting with them and thirdly engaging with them. Let's go through all those case steps.

Firstly, you've got to get the attention of your potential clients, whether you are in the face-to-face world or whether you are online. People are not generally looking out to connect with you to become leads so you need to get their attention. One way of getting people's attention is to shout, but typically shouting, either in the form of advertising that just is big and bold and tries to grab people's attention and doesn't have any value or you throw a bunch of spam at them in groups and stuff like that, that typically doesn't work. You get people's attention but it doesn't turn into anything productive afterwards. When they realize you have nothing of value to add, their attention turns elsewhere.

The best way to get people's attention is through value and it's taking advantage of something known by psychologists as the cocktail party effect. The cocktail party effect is basically that if you are in a kind of crowded room and there are lots of conversations going on, one of our abilities as human beings is to really zone in and tune in to specific conversations and filter out all the rest. Typically, we zoom in on the ones that we find interesting. That might be because we hear our name being mentioned or the conversation is something, a particularly juicy piece of gossip or it's a topic we are really interested in. We find our ears tuned into that conversation and ignoring all the other conversations going on around us.

The same thing happens with your marketing and with your advertising. If you are able to hone in on the things that your ideal clients really care about, so their problems, their challenges, their goals, their aspirations, what they want to achieve, what they are frightened of, things that they really care about, if you are using blog posts or Facebook adverts, if you're doing presentations on that topic, if when you introduce yourself when you're networking you're immediately talking about the kind of challenges you help people with and that's one of the ones they have, then they will pay attention. You will get their attention. You're always on safe ground if you're in their world talking about the things that they care about. That's really what I advise you to think about over the next couple of days. We're going to be talking about some tactics for getting people's attention but the main thing to think about is what's your strategy. In other words, what are you going to create of value that really addresses a big important issue that your ideal clients care about. If you can do that, the tactics are much less important, whether you use Facebook ads or blog posts or you do presentations or whatever. It's much less important than having something of interested and value to people that is going to get their attention.

The second step is to connect. Connecting is that step of getting their e-mail address if they are signing up, getting their business card if you're meeting them face-to-face, getting them to join a Facebook group or a LinkedIn book if that's the way you're going to be interacting with them. That's vitally important because unless they do that you can't followup.

An overlooked step is to engage straightaway afterwards. It's great that they sign up for your e-mails, it's great that you get their business card if you met face-to-face, it's great that they've joined your Facebook group, but if they're not really wowed by the initial e-mails you send them when they signed up, if you get their business card but then you don't followup, you don't call or e-mail them afterwards for weeks, if they join your Facebook group but there's no interaction with them at all, then in the Facebook group they become lurkers. In the real world they just drift away and don't become active contacts and they kind of forget about you. On your e-mail list, they gradually pay less and less attention and they unsubscribe. You've got to engage with them early on by you're sharing valuable information, really interacting with them, asking questions, especially true if you're in the service business where you need to build significant credibility and trust in a personal relationship before they'll be ready to buy. You need to engage with them early on. Start as you mean to continue, get early engagement and you can grow from there. Don't let that initial contact drift away.

We'll be talking about all of those three phases as we go through the next few blog posts and e-mails and videos I'm going to send, starting with different ways, different tactics, of getting people's attention. I'll see you there.