Quick Navigation:
- The Marketing Challenges of Consulting Businesses In the UK
- What Is a Lead Generation Funnel
- Five Most Common Types of Lead Generation Funnel Designs
- Lead Generation Funnel Map Examples
- Working with The End Result In Mind
- How a Lead Generation and Sales Funnel Agency Can Help You
- Turning Your Website into a Sales and Marketing Machine
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There are many businesses in the UK and worldwide that are looking for new ways to generate leads. The old ways of cold calling and emailing are over, and now you have to go to where your potential customers are. And give them what they want, not what they need. That’s where the need to build a profitable lead generation funnel arises.
Whether you want to sell coaching, professional services, or courses, you need to build your audience on one of the marketing automation platforms and communicate your offer with them. This post will look at just how you can do it.
The Marketing Challenges of Consulting Businesses In the UK
Many consulting businesses rely on recommendations and word-of-mouth marketing. While the power of these sources of leads cannot be debated, you will also need to reach out to the segment of the market (also known as niche) to deliver your message, show off your brand, and learn more about their needs.
Consulting businesses – of course- need to maintain their reputation and get recommendations from existing clients. However, at the same time they will also need to build a strong, relatable, and approachable brand to attract new customers. You might be happy with the number of clients you are serving a year, but if you want to grow your business, you might need to think about setting up a lead generation funnel to accelerate your growth.
One of the misconceptions of UK businesses in the consulting industry is that they need to shout louder than their competitors. If you go to any UK-based networking meeting, you will find loads of people from the same area or even franchise, such as travel agents, legal professionals, business coaches, and financial advisors. The competition is tough. If you don’t give them a good enough reason to choose you and not another company, you will have limited opportunities to secure new business.
What Is a Lead Generation Funnel
Simply put, a lead generation funnel is a system that gets you prospects and allows you to follow up with them. It can be anything from a simple newsletter to a free workshop. Your goal is to gather a list of interested people you can contact and present your offers to later down the line. A lead generation funnel’s main purpose is to add people to the top of your pipeline and get their permission to receive messages from you.
Five Most Common Types of Lead Generation Funnel Designs
At LMNts Marketing, we have built dozens of these systems, and they all belong to one of these five designs. It is not hard to come up with a lead generation idea; putting it into practice and making it work for your business is a task for a sales funnel agency. Of course, there are variations of these designs, and you can add or take away elements, but the basic principle stays the same: offer something in exchange for their information.
The Free Download
This is the oldest and most traditional type of lead magnet, and it still works, if you offer something that has a high perceived value for your potential customers. A free eBook you got a freelancer to put together years ago is not going to cut it. You need to promise an answer to your prospect’s most urgent questions, and offer immediate solutions, or they might go and click on the next site in three seconds.
A free download can be anything; from an eBook, report, guide, cheat sheet, mind map, video recording, or even an entire course. The most important thing is that it has to improve your prospect’s life in one or more ways.
The Gated Content
This type of lead generation is still popular, and is often used by people who already have an established audience. You can restrict the access to the content (video, blog post, guide) on your website and ask people to submit their details or become members in order to access it. In a way, this is a simple way as you can build multiple sources of prospects without having to invest time and money into a sophisticated landing page design. You can select the premium (most valuable) pages on your website and ask people to submit their details to access it. If you have a lot of content already, this can be a simple way to generate leads.
Free Trial Offer
Offering a free trial is a great way of removing the barriers to buy and trust you. This lead generation method allows you to take away the risk and allow people to test what you have to offer before they would commit and put down the hard cash. The secret to successfully creating these types of lead magnets is to follow up, educate clients, and give them enough reason to keep on going, beyond the free trial period.
If people don’t know by the end of the trial period what they are buying, you will never get them to commit. Holding webinars, sending out an FAQ section, and educational content will not only help you help your prospects out, but also build trust and positive associations with your brand.
Free Consultation
It is pretty hard for your prospects to see the value in the free consultation these days, since everyone is offering it. However, you can make your offer unique and promise the outcome your potential clients are after. For example, if you are a financial advisor, you can promise to give them an overview of how they can improve their investment performance or free up money tied up in property. The more specific you are the more likely people will take you up on the free consultation offer.
Quiz Funnel
The 21st Century solution to your lead generation challenges must be quiz funnels. They are interactive, fun, help you get to know your audience, and easy to set up – if you know what you are doing – . We are Typeform partners, and have been using quiz funnels for years. They do the following to entice your potential customers:
- Generate interest
- Have a conversation
- Survey the market
- Qualify leads
- Offer immediate answers (fulfil their need for instant gratification).
Any consulting business can set up a quiz funnel to channel and segment the leads, engage with their audience, and improve their reputation.
Now that we have given you an overview of the most popular types of lead generation funnel models, it is time to demonstrate how consulting businesses can implement them.
Lead Generation Funnel Map Examples
Below you will see some of the examples of lead generation systems we have built here at LMNts Marketing. Of course, every client had a different goal, product, and audience, so the systems had to be designed with the end in mind – as usual.
Example One: Life Coach
We have created a free download offer for a life coach in London a while back. It is a simple process and has resulted in loads of new clients.
Here is the screenshot of the landing page:
The links to the page were placed in related blog posts and the footer of the blog, too. After completing the search engine optimisation process, we put this automation in place. The client already had MailChimp in place, so we simply created a follow-up sequence that encouraged followers to read more, book a free meeting, or engage with the consultant through other channels.
The funnel map of this lead generation campaign was very straightforward:
Example Two: Solicitor
We have also worked with a solicitor’s social media campaign which was focussed on educating the audience before converting the leads to prospects. For this, our client created some great guides that were free to download, and they had a follow-up sequence added to them. The contact details and call-to-actions were also included in the documents.
Here is an example post we have sent to the company’s landing page that offered the free download:
The funnel map was similar to the previous one, so we are not including it here. The only difference was that there were multiple topics the guides covered, so the company could channel the leads and send out personalised information based on the interest of the prospect.
Example Three: Dance Meditation Coach
In this funnel, we have added an upsell right after the free download. The dance meditation coach we worked with had some free playlists ready to download, so people could use them to practise at home. However, after they submitted their details, the confirmation email invited them to a workshop or to join the “Love Spa” which is a low cost membership programme for people who need a boost every now and then.
Here is the landing page and funnel map for you to check out:
As you can see, there were two offers at the end of the top of the funnel; one was direct for signing up for the membership and the other added the workshop as a “lead warming” stage. We tested the two designs and both did achieve a high conversion rate.
Working with The End Result In Mind
When companies contact us with a lead generation funnel in mind we always ask them what they would like to achieve. That said, you will need to know where you want to go, or you will never get there. It’s like the Cheshire Cat quote from Alice in Wonderland:
“Alice: Would you tell me, please, which way I ought to go from here?
The Cheshire Cat: That depends a good deal on where you want to get to.
Alice: I don’t much care where.
The Cheshire Cat: Then it doesn’t much matter which way you go.
Alice: …So long as I get somewhere.
The Cheshire Cat: Oh, you’re sure to do that, if only you walk long enough.”
So in a way we reverse engineer the campaign and simulate the funnel map based on what the individual goals of the client are. For example, if you would like to get 5 new clients a month, we work out the average conversion rate (or minimum and maximum), find out how many qualified leads you need, how many leads you need to get that many qualified leads, and how much targeted traffic we need to drive to the landing page. That’s how we engineer every custom bespoke lead generation funnel here at LMNts Marketing.
How a Lead Generation and Sales Funnel Agency Can Help You
If you already know what type of clients you would like to attract as a consultant, you just have to find a way of getting them to know you. In the competitive world of social media, this is not a job for the faint of heart. You will need to create a message that stands out, represents your brand, and allows you to showcase your talent and the benefits of your service.
If you are not clear about your target audience yet, you can download our free ideal client exercise. It will help you qualify your leads and target the right people who are the most likely to engage with your professional services.
Once we have tapped into your target market’s mind, we will be able to design a lead generation funnel that will work for them. We will also optimise your content, your conversions, take care of all the design and copywriting tasks, so you can get the best results and a great return on marketing investment.
Of course, you can go ahead and start using one of the drag-and-drop sales funnel design platforms that are great for starters, but they will have a limited number of designs and custom features, so your pages will never be completely “on brand”. After designing and connecting the different stages of your customer journey, we can start optimising the conversions so you see a return on your investment.
Turning Your Website into a Sales and Marketing Machine
Simply put, lead generation is only the first step of making a website and a funnel work. You need to take care of the middle and the end of the pipeline, too. If you have loads of followers and subscribers but no sales, there is no point having a marketing campaign set up. Marketing – despite the common misconception – is not a popularity contest. It is a numbers’ game. You want to get more out than what you put in.
A well designed online sales pipeline works like a well oiled machine for many years to come. It is robust, easy to customise and change, and you can also measure the output. After all, if you don’t know where your sales are coming from and where you are losing prospects, you will never be able to optimise your sales and marketing machine.
A great automation and email marketing management system can replace a team of salespeople and administrators. It can save you money long term and streamline your processes. Most importantly, it will be able to improve your customers’ experience and help them get to where they want to be faster than any sales agent could. That’s why investing into a lead generation funnel can be a highly profitable move for your consulting business.
Are you wondering whether your consulting business could benefit from a funnel? Take our sales funnel quiz to find out.
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