Better Leads Playbook

Lead generation isn’t rocket science. Most web professionals and agencies face the challenge of offering the same commoditized services that dozens, if not hundreds, of others, are making to the same leads.

Here are the foundational elements you need for a successful lead generation campaign. Put them in place, and you’ll see better results. That is a promise!

So, do you have the following already in place?

• Target Audience: A very specific ideal customer persona (ICP). Not just anyone who can pay you for your services.
• Great Offer: Do you have a compelling offer that appeals to your ICP and can grab their attention? The best way to do that is to have an offer that solves an expensive problem or desired outcome for your ICP. A good offer positions working with you as an investment, not an expense.
• Trust: Do you have ways to show your ICP you’ve solved this for others like them? Case studies or reviews.

Tip: Not every prospect is ready to buy. Do you have content on your site that takes them from the Awareness > Consideration > Decision stage where they hire you? If not, work on those AFTER you implement the steps in this playbook. Doing so will ensure you don’t lose leads who may be interested in your services but aren’t ready to buy.

The next step is optimizing and systemizing your lead generation for a repeatable and scalable process. That is how you can 2X or more your agency revenue over the next 6-12 months. Once these are in place, you’ll see much better results from your marketing and lead generation efforts.

I’ll cover each of these elements in more detail in the next few sections of this playbook.

You may feel like your agency is a jack of all trades that serves any business owners who need your help. That can be your reality regarding sales and fulfillment of your agency services. But the truth is, when it comes to lead generation or marketing in general, you want to pick an audience and a specialty. In other words, your success depends on you niching down and targeting a specific audience.

Does this mean you pick one niche and one specialty and then focus on those two things forever? Of course not. You can expand your audience and offerings in the future. But to start getting results from your lead generation campaign ASAP, you need to focus on one audience at a time – So select a target audience whom you can serve REALLY well by delivering a specific set of results they WANT or NEED.

Now, you probably think, why should I focus on only one audience? I can help almost any type of business. Here are a few reasons why I recommend you focus on a particular target audience when executing your lead generation campaign.

1. Less competition: When you serve a specific audience, significantly fewer competitors provide the same offering.
2. Experts close more deals: When you offer a specialized service for a specific target audience or niche market, you can position yourself as the expert who not only understands their problems but specializes in solving them. Your offer automatically becomes more attractive when your messaging or offer directly connects with your target audience’s specific needs.
3. High-profit margins. When you understand what expensive problems your target market has and you know how to solve them. You no longer have to offer a commoditized service but a high-value offer that is appealing because they NEED or WANT their expensive problem solved.
4. Lower investment, higher returns: When you have a target audience defined, you know what platforms to reach them on and their interests; it takes less testing of messaging and offers to identify what works. Ultimately this means you spend less time, effort, and money to get better results. LinkedIn outreach may work well for accountants, but Google Business Profile or email for small business owners like an electrician. Both use different terminology for who they serve and their services and describe their business problems differently.

Which audience? And what will you be offering this audience?

The answer is to look at the clients you’re already successfully serving. You may want to evaluate your clients on the following factors:

• The type of client/industry.
• What specific service did you perform for these clients?
• Can you fulfill the same service if demand increases by 2X or more?
• How much money do you make from these clients?
• Did you enjoy working with these clients?
• What measurable results were you able to deliver as a result of your services?
• Did your clients indicate if they liked or valued the results you delivered?
• Are you able to get in front of other clients just like them? This is important for obvious reasons but is often overlooked by agencies.

Ideally, you’re looking for a profitable client who loved the work you did for them and working with them. As soon as you identify what type of client that is, that’s who you will want to focus on.

For example, you may really like working with “mom and pop” type shops, but you may realize it’s not a very profitable audience. These businesses have small marketing budgets and thin margins, so you’d have to lower the price of your services for them to be a good investment.

On the other hand, perhaps you have clients such as remodeling contractors, where each client is worth tens of thousands of dollars to the contractor. If you charge $5000 or $10,000+ for a website and $2500 for your marketing services and can generate a dozen or more leads a month for them, that’s going to be an excellent investment for the contractor (they’re happy), and it’s going to be profitable for you too.

The point is, to focus on a target audience that can comfortably afford your services and for whom you can deliver great results.

Tip: Make sure you determine your monthly revenue goals and how many clients you need to hit that goal.

Then move on to the next step, where you create a compelling offer for your target audience.

Now that you’ve selected your audience and determined how many clients you need to achieve your income goals, your next step is to create a compelling offer.

Once again, take a look back at what you’ve done for your past clients. Ask yourself, which task is not only really profitable for you, but it’s something you or your team can do well?

The key here is to specialize in solving expensive problems your ideal customer is facing. For example, if you offer web development, it’s more profitable to develop e-commerce sites versus brochure-type sites for small businesses.

So, this brings us to the important question: what do expensive problems look like? Here’s what we focus on with our agency:

• Little to no online visibility. A new company may have no online presence whatsoever. Or you may have a company established for a decade with little visibility. You can find dozens of these types of businesses in your location.
• Little to no quality traffic. Some companies don’t know how to effectively market their business online, so they cannot get any traffic. Others may get some traffic, but it’s untargeted and therefore doesn’t convert.
• Not enough leads or sales. This can be a problem with untargeted traffic, a poor offer, poor sales copy, or even a poor sales process. You can specialize in identifying and fixing these sorts of expensive problems.
• Manual, time-consuming processes. A business owner may be doing a task manually on their website or elsewhere within their business. If they’re paying someone to do it, it may be expensive. Plus, doing it manually can lead to errors, which is even more expensive. If you can automate this process, you’re solving an expensive problem.
• Bad online reputation. Sometimes a company buys out another company and then needs to deal with a bad brand reputation online. In other cases, you may have a company that didn’t prioritize customer service, but now that they do, they need to boost its reputation.

As you consider your client’s issues, you’ll discover that these expensive problems can often be mapped out to desired outcomes. Specifically, here are the outcomes many businesses are looking for:

• Increased quality traffic.
• Revenue growth.
• Build a trusted brand reputation.
• Offer reliable solutions that deliver a good ROI.

Note that in all of these cases, the business owner isn’t looking for a “beautiful website.” Yes, a good website will help them achieve their desired outcomes, but your messaging needs to focus on the outcome (the benefit), not the way you create this benefit.

Your overall goal is to communicate with your leads in a way that makes them feel like YOU are the solution to their problems. YOU are the one who has identified their pain points, and you are the one who can create their desired outcomes. And when you effectively do this, you become someone your lead is willing to give a little more time by clicking on your ad, watching a video, or perhaps even replying to your cold email outreach.

For example, imagine someone sends you a cold email saying, “I helped this agency close $30k in the last ten days… and I helped ten others do that too last month….”

I’m betting you’re going to want to know more, especially if the sender provides social proof and speaks to you in a personal manner. Your prospects are the same: put the right offer in front of them, back it up with social proof, and they’ll want to know more.

Tip: A good offer positions working with you are like an investment, not an expense.

Even interested prospects are generally a little skeptical because they have probably worked with other agencies or freelancers who made many big promises, but none of it panned out. We need to empathize with their skepticism and know it’s not about us but them.

Here’s how to overcome this, provide proof. You can do this through testimonials and case studies from your other satisfied clients who have invested in your services. For best results, present case studies from other business owners similar to the prospect in terms of industry, business size, etc., and results delivered.

Don’t have any case studies or impactful testimonials? Get some, it isn’t that hard. Start by doing the following today:

• Make a list of your best clients – the clients you were able to produce great results and liked the work or results you delivered.
• Ask these clients if you can feature them in a case study. Be sure to gather as much data and information as possible to create a comprehensive, compelling case study.
• Ask these clients if they would provide a testimonial for you. Ideally, this would be a video testimonial, as then you can use the video, the text transcript, or both items in your marketing materials.

Closing Warm Leads — If your lead shows interest and is willing to jump on a call. I recommend a strategy that delivers value and establishes you as the expert. It can be one of the fastest ways to close a sale. By doing this, you won’t have to do any hard selling. You just provide a lot of value to the prospect in the form of actionable advice on how to solve their expensive problem and envision a better future for their business. They’ll naturally want to hire you to implement that advice.

One really good way to do this is through audits. Here you show your prospective clients exactly where the problems and opportunities lay on their site and then give them the actionable steps they need to take to fix the issues and take advantage of them. And, of course, when done right, they’ll usually want to hire you to do the work.

Now the next step…

I’m not sure why agencies keep saying they are struggling to find leads who need their services. The real problem is that most agencies cannot convince leads that they need the agency services they offer. If you put the foundational elements I mentioned above into place, you’ll be able to convince many more leads that you are the solution to their problems.

I believe it is easier than ever before to find leads. You can find them on LinkedIn, Yelp, Facebook, business directories like BBB, and websites that list the fastest-growing companies in a country or industry, like Inc 5000 List.If your agency works with lawyers, you can do a simple search like”fastest growing law firms in the USA” on Google, and you’ll find a list of the top 100 law firms in a few seconds.

Now you see why I think that finding leads isn’t that hard and why I don’t believe it’s not the real reason agencies struggle with lead generation. If you happened to skip the sections on the foundations of successful lead generation, I highly recommend you go back and read it.

If you want to build lead lists with dozens of businesses that need your services in minutes, check out Better Leads. Watch this short video to learn more.

The next section will cover how you can leverage Better Leads in generating quality leads in just a few clicks using the different features available, from finding local leads based on a keyword to those running ads or by a tech stack like WordPress or Shopify.

Suppose you serve a specific niche or target audience and want to find them in a particular city. Check out the steps below to start creating a lead list of local businesses in just a few minutes following the steps below.

STEP 1: On your Better Leads Dashboard, select Find Local Leads.

STEP 2: Next, you will have to enter keywords connected to a profession or industry like lawyers or plumbers, location (city or State), and select the lead list you want the leads added to.
You can pick an existing lead list or create a new lead list. To create a list, specify the name of the Lead list and click on to proceed.

STEP 3: Once done, click on the Find Leads button and sit back and relax while our app collects the data for you. This may take 5-15+ minutes based on the number of leads found and the demand on the server.

Once completed, you are usually notified by email that your leads have been generated.

To see a complete guide, please check out this link Finding Local Leads Using Better Leads.

This strategy works best for agencies that want to generate a lead list based on a tech stack like WordPress or Shopify.

STEP 1: On your Better Leads Dashboard, select Find Leads by Technology.

STEP 2: Next, you will have to enter keywords connected to a profession or industry like lawyers or plumbers, location (city or State), and select the primary technology from the drop-down menu.

You can pick an existing lead list or create a new lead list. To create a list, specify the name of the Lead list and click on to proceed.

STEP 3: Once done, click on the Find Leads button and sit back and relax while our app collects the data for you. This may take 5-15+ minutes based on the number of leads found and the demand on the server.

Once completed, you are usually notified by email that your leads have been generated.
To check out a complete guide, click on this link Finding Leads By Technology Using Better Leads.

I enjoy working with companies that have a budget for marketing. The easiest way to find leads with a marketing budget is to see which companies are currently investing in marketing. How? Just see which ones are advertising on platforms like Google, Bing, and Facebook.

Better Leads automates this process for you.

STEP 1: On your Better Leads Dashboard, select the option Find Leads Running Ads..

STEP 2: Next, you will have to enter keywords connected to a profession or industry like lawyers or plumbers, location (city or State), and select the primary technology from the drop-down menu.
You can pick an existing lead list or create a new lead list. To create a list, specify the name of the Lead list and click on to proceed.

STEP 3: Once done, click on the Find Leads button and sit back and relax while our app collects the data for you. This may take 5-15+ minutes based on the number of leads found and the demand on the server.

Once completed, you are usually notified by email that your leads have been generated.

To check out a complete guide, click on this link Find Leads Running Ads Using Better Leads.

You may have a list of websites you purchased or scrapped or had a VA enter into a spreadsheet as part of your lead generation process.

Better Leads makes it easy for you to import a lead list to process it against our predefined tests so you can easily identify which companies to reach out to or not.

To import your file, please follow these steps. Please note that the maximum file size is ten mb.

STEP 1: On your Better Leads Dashboard, click on the Import Leads CSV File button.

STEP 2: Next, drag or drop the file in the box provided or upload the file or click to browse and upload.

STEP 3: Your file will take a few seconds to process. Next, you have to match the column headers in your file with our system headers.

STEP 4: Once the headers from your file are mapped with the system headers, you are now ready to import the file into the app. Just click Process & Create Lead, and the app will take care of everything else.

STEP 5: After successfully importing the file, you will need to specify if you want to add these leads to an existing list by selecting it and clicking on Add to List or creating a new list.

Please check out this guide if you need more info on how to Import Leads via a CSV file.

Once completed, you are usually notified by email that your leads have been generated.

You should be able to see your lead list on the Better Leads dashboard, or you can click on the Lead Lists menu in the top navigation to see a listing of all the lead lists you’ve created.

Once on the Lead Lists page, click on the View List button to the right of the list you want to view.

By default, when you view a lead list for the first time, all the records are put under a Not Processed tab.

You’ll see a list of all the businesses and what problems the sites may have that your agency can fix.

We currently check to see if all the lead sites

• Use responsive design
• Have a SSL
• Google Page speed scores
• have Open Graph Tags configured
• have Schema Tags / Markup
• have Google Analytics
• have a FB pixel

You can identify what records you want to contact and mark them as a lead based on the results.

When you select a lead in the lead list, you can perform the following actions:

• Find Contact Info — This action leverages our data enrichment functionality to find contact info for that lead (name, email, phone, and social media profiles). This works best for larger companies.
• Mark As Lead — Before a lead in a list is marked as a lead, you must select the record and click the Mark as a Lead button. This moves the record from the Not Processed list to the Leads tab for that list.
• Move To List — This allows you to move leads from one list to another.
• Re-Run —This will scan the leads site to see how it performs under our predefined test cases.
• Move to Trash — Use this to delete records you don’t want to contact as part of your lead generation campaign.

You can use our search filters to find companies that failed a specific test or use a specific tech stack and export the records to another application like MailShake or Woodpecker to begin a cold outreach campaign.

Not only does Better Leads help generate leads, but it can also help you with enriching the lead record with the lead contact information like phone, email, social profiles, and more.

We provided you with email templates and sequences to reference and customize as needed to make it easier. These resources are only available to users on a paid subscription.

Provide steps to enrich a lead & view their contact information here.

At this point, you have a great offer, and you know as much as possible about your ideal audience. You need to get your messaging/offer in front of this audience, as this will be a critical factor in successfully executing your lead generation campaign.

Although Better Leads is positioned to be used with outbound marketing strategies like cold email, cold calls, and LinkedIn automation, there are many other successful forms of lead generation.

Below you’ll find a variety of proven methods for agencies to get their message in front of their ideal audience. You don’t need to implement all of them. In fact, you should only choose one or two to focus on so that you don’t spread your efforts too thin. I highly recommend starting with ONE method and focusing on that one method until you’ve got it up, running and delivering results for you before you try another.

Here are a few lead generation methods to consider:

• Paid ads on platforms like Google, Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn
• Getting featured on podcasts, guest blogs, or webinars
• Strategic partnerships with others that share the same customer as you. I.e., partnerships with business coaches, CPAs, IT consultants, and lawyers.
• Outbound marketing, like cold emails, cold calls, and LinkedIn automation
• Creating and nurturing via communities like Facebook / Linked Groups
• Attending events and tradeshows
• Content marketing

Tip: No matter what strategy you use. Ensure you consistently get your offer in front of your ideal audience..

Better Leads is a premium add-on you can add to your My Web Audit account. If you want to learn how you can add Better Leads to your current My Web Audit subscription, check out this guide.

Want Better Leads for free? Get access to our revolutionary Better Leads system for FREE when you sign up for a Pro annual or Agency annual plan. The Pro annual plan comes with 300 Better Leads credits a month, and the Agency annual comes with 900 Better Leads credits each month.

Our team has invested a lot of time and effort to ensure we do our best to answer all of your questions.

Listed below, you’ll find our FAQs:

• How do I get access to Better Leads?
• Can I buy more Better Lead credits?
• How are my Better Lead credits used?
• Can I access my leads if I cancel the Better Leads add-on?
• I am getting incorrect results in Better Leads with the GEO search. What should I do?
• How do I move the leads from one list to another in Better Leads?
• When does the Better Lead app import duplicate websites?
  

Need additional help? If you have any questions, feel free to get in touch with our email customer support at support@mywebaudit.com.

Generating relevant leads that need your services has never been easier! If you haven’t checked out My Web Audit and Better Leads, we hope you do today.