Your 2023 Marketing Strategy: Step 2

Here we go, guys. Well, I hope everybody had a good Thanksgiving.

And you're back at it or ready to get back at it for a good finish to the year. Now is the time, and I'm hoping for a lot of you that renewals are starting to wind down a little bit. And you get some, you get a chance here in the month of December to think about next year. And you know, typically what happens in our world when you sit down a plan next year, first and foremost, if you, if you wait till January to plan next year, you're going to be in trouble. You want to use some time this month to make that happen.

And as you set your goals, what I want you to think about the reason I'm doing these three webinars is because.

We set these big goals every year. The problem is we don't build a system to get there.

And I used to be really guilty of this in the past where I would have a big lofty sales goal every year, really have no plan to get there. And I was just hoping, like, because I had this goal and I threw it out to the universe, it was going to work. And what I want to do with these webinars is to help you build a little system to at least get it started next year. Because your job, here's what I want you to remember. Your job is to not control the result. Your job is to run the process, run the system. If you just do that consistently.

You will hit your goals. I promise you. We are we being.

Complete Game Consulting are part of an organization called Brand Builders Group where we are building our own brand. And one of the exercises we had to solve, maybe a good exercise for you guys to think about is in one word, what problem do you solve?

And that's not about. That's not part of today's webinar. But here's where I'm going with that. So when I met with our strategist and I, we dug down, dug down to that one word. The problem we solve a complete game is underperformance. And the number one cause of underperformance is inconsistency.

And I bring that up because I tell you guys right now, if you build a system for next year prospecting system and you just run it consistently, it'll work. It doesn't have to be the perfect system. Just have a system you run consistently.

So last week or two weeks ago, the webinar was focused on who is your ideal prospect, because now is also the time of the year we start building our lists and the mistake I see too many people make is they just build a list and they try to make it as big as they can, but they don't even know who's in the list. You gotta start with a list that's qualified. Now if you're on the call last two weeks ago, you remember we talked about demographics and psychographics.

The problem with building a list is you can't build a list from psychographics because you don't know a lot about these people yet you build it with demographics. So at least start with the right demographics to build a list.

Now once you know who your target is, the next step is how to, how can you actually capture leads from these people where they're giving you permission to reach out to them? Believe it or not, we call it permission based marketing.

That's what we're going to talk about today is how can we actually start capturing leads. So number one, you're going to build a list this year and my challenge to you is, or next year, excuse me, My challenge to you is it doesn't have to be big, it just has to have the right people in it.

We, we do some content, email content for some clients right now, for some agencies and they all have this lead list of like 3,000 people. And I'm like, but it's a crap list because you just went and pulled a bunch of emails off of some platform like seamless AI or zoom info and you don't even know if these people are the right demographics. You just, you just grab the list. I'd rather have a list of 300 where they're good. So that's what I want to challenge you guys with is you don't need a massive list. But what you want to do though is spend part of your system capturing new good ones.

And that's what we're going to talk about today. So I'm going to share my screen. So we're going to talk about, let me go back to the beginning here.

What we are on right now is phase two, capture. How do you capture qualified leads? And what's funny about our industry, I think I shared this two weeks ago, is we all agree, right? If we're in insurance, we're in a relationship built business, correct? Everybody agree with that? This is a relationship business. It's why our sales cycles are 18 to 24, maybe 36 months when some other industries sales process is like 90 days.

But what's funny about that is if we're in a relationship business and we know that relationships are typically built on trust. Right? Over time. It's interesting that we've all been taught to go grab a list and just start making phone calls immediately. Like do everything we can do to not build a relationship. It's really not relationship based prospecting if you think about it. Because the, the piece we're missing.

Is as we make phone calls, as we send those direct emails or go to those networking events. We have to have some kind of system that is gener is, is creating good content, good education for these people that's bringing value into their lives. That's how you can build a relationship today before people ever meet you.

And to be able to do that, we want to be able to capture good leads. So when you look at this slide right here, you can capture leads three, three main ways. There's other ways to do it, but three main ways with your website.

Lead generators which we're going to talk about.

And a good email sales campaign which we'll talk about as well.

So what we want to talk about is how do we start capturing good leads? Because here is the number one challenge everybody on this call faces. When you pick up the phone or you send an email to a prospect and you ask for an appointment.

A yes is a really good answer because we're going to schedule an appointment. That's the one we all want to hear. A no, as much as it sucks, at least is a clear answer. They're not interested. It's this one right here I think we all struggle with the most. Maybe not now. We don't know what to do with these people.

And what happens for most advisors is when the not now comes, maybe they tell you call us in six months. We don't do anything between now and the six month mark. So when I call them back, they don't remember me, it's cold again. And they probably are going to tell me no at that point. So the question you got to ask yourself is what can you do between now and that point to get them really interested?

And that's the capturing a good lead. Because.

The mistake we make too is even when you do connect with a.

Prospect.

We love going from that cup of coffee to that marriage proposal as quickly as we can. And remember what our sales cycle is in this industry. It's not two weeks, it's probably 12, 18, 24 months. And so again you have to have a system to capture those leads to make them qualified.

And what we're going to talk about, I'm just going to scroll ahead here is how we can actually capture good leads.

And it's really a philosophy gang, that I will say our industry has not caught on to a whole lot quite yet. Because remember.

We'Ve all been taught that just go find a list and start soliciting list.

But instead, if we had a way to capture leads from people who are voluntarily giving us their information.

We call that again, permission based marketing. When they're voluntarily giving you information, they're giving you permission to reach out to them. Now that reach out can't be a sales pitch every single time. It's got to be informational, educational, valuable. We call that the old drip campaign, right?

But if they are giving you permission to do that, you have a really qualified lead.

Now, here's a great traditional way of capturing a lead without having to create lead generators, because we're going to talk about lead generators next. A great traditional way to capture a qualified lead is when that person gives you a maybe not now.

If you just said, hey, that's fine. You know, I send out emails a couple times a month with some really good information. I'd love to include you on those if you're okay with it. Often they're like, yeah, cool. And you say, okay, what's your email address? I'll make sure I include you. That's a lead capture. They're giving you permission. That's why I loved maybe not now is because I'm like, cool. I got an email campaign I send out. I'm just going to bring them in and I know over a span of a few months, eventually they're going to be bought in. So that's the traditional way to capture lead that I'm going to challenge everybody on this call to think about right now when you get those not nows or, or maybe it's just not a good time. Use that as a positive and be like, cool. We provide content to our prospects. Would you mind if I include you? You'll be surprised how many say, yeah, no problem.

But now let's talk about actual lead generators. Ways you can generate leads. The most traditional way or a traditional lead generator in our industry today is this right here.

If you've been on my webinars, and I recognize there's a lot of you who are repeat customers, which I love seeing. Guys, you know, I've talked about this before. I am doing this exact thing right now.

When you guys sign up for your webinar, what do you have to put in the box to sign up for it?

Your email.

Your email address. Right.

You get an email from me Afterwards, kind of summarizing the webinar, you're now in my email system. So when I send out our weekly newsletters to all of our email list, you, you probably get it. But it's the lead generator. You guys should be doing the same thing. Too many agencies, too many people in our industry use webinars thinking it's going to be a sales. Sales generator. It's not. It's just a lead generator. You got their email, now you can do something cool with it.

And so webinars are the most traditional way of generating leads, but it's a very effective way to generate leads. So everybody here, when you look at next year, I want you to think about how can you incorporate webinars into your life next year, into your prospecting system? And if you work for somebody who already has them routinely. Good. Just leverage that.

Andrew, I would even challenge you guys. I'm looking at you as a wholesale partner. Script sourcing. What can you guys do to generate webinars for brokers? If you're anybody here who's a wholesale partner to the, who sells to, to and through brokers, how can you generate webinars series for brokers? Great. Lead funnel system.

Somebody. Chad, great question. How many webinars should we have per year?

I think once a quarter is to. Once a quarter is not enough.

I used to do them once a month as an advisor, but if you want to do one every other month, that's probably fine too.

Think about what we do at Complete Game now. I do them every other week, but I will, I will tell you, we've done them long enough where we have a pretty rinse and repeat system where once every other week's not hard.

But if you're just starting, go like once every two months. I think once a quarter is not enough.

Unless.

You can make that one court once per quarter webinar such a home run that you can get 100 people to register. If you can do that, where you're bringing 100 people to one place once a quarter, that will be effective. But reality is, most webinars, you probably have 10 to 20 people, and that's still better than one.

Okay, now let's get it. Yes, go ahead.

The question I had for you is, since our business, my business course, fourth quarter, can you do like maybe every three weeks in the summertime or, you know, I'm saying when it's slower and then in the fourth quarter kind of drop off, does that affect your building your trust?

Yeah, right, right. You got to go with what you can go with what you can run confidently or excuse me, what you can run consistently confidently. Okay. We backed ours off in the fourth quarter every two weeks. We used to do them every week and we backed off every two weeks in fourth quarter because we know you guys are busy.

Gotcha.

Yeah, just go with the flow, just go with what feels good. But don't, don't overwhelm yourself. Yeah, if it starts feeling like a part time job, you're doing too much.

Thank you.

Now let's get into some of the more non traditional ways to capture leads.

How about PDFs? This one that you see on the screen here is one I actually created a few years ago as an advisor. I wanted to get the attention from CFOs. So I built this thing I call the Healthcare Confidence Assessment. It was about a six page PDF. Took time, guys, took work, but it was worth it. And the first three or four pages was just, I wrote like an article basically teaching CFOs how to build a better health plan for less money. And then at the end of that six pages was actually an actual, an actual assessment they could take.

And I would put this out in emails. My agency was kind enough to put it up on their website and our whole goal was to get CFO to download this thing. And it worked. We got CFOs, we got emails. So now I can drip on so a PDF today. We often hear them known as like ebooks.

Are great lead generators.

Like I said, it takes work. But what the goal is is that work is now going to generate leads. I could use this one generator, guys, for an entire year just to generate leads.

What I did with this one is I wrote it out, created the assessment and because we didn't really have somebody on the team to do it, I went to fiverr.com and I had somebody create that.

For about 20 bucks.

Anybody can do that if you put in the work.

So PDFs are a great way. Has anybody ever gone to a website and after about two seconds that box pops up that says, hey, download this. That's what this is, is if you have a website. Like on your website, if you just had a little box that had the, the, the, the name and the email thing to download. You could put something like this there, you could put it in your email signatures, put it on your LinkedIn profile, throw it out on LinkedIn as a post. These are all ways to get, to capture leads.

Because remember I'm going to say it over and over to I'm blue in the Face. When somebody puts their name in voluntarily, they're giving you permission.

About videos. I have two right there. We act. We now actually have the 2023 broker marketing plan that just came out. I did one called creating a stellar LinkedIn profile. These are videos I created.

That teach a lot of good stuff. But to get them, you got to give us your email address. Anybody can do this. If you like video for anybody on this call who's good at video and likes it, create a really valuable video where you share some really golden nuggets that you put out somewhere. Again, email signatures, LinkedIn, your website where people can download, but to download, they've got to give you their information.

White papers. Anybody likes white papers? Writing articles. Those are all forms of lead generators that you can use to capture qualified leads. Because here's the name of the game going into next year that I got. I want to challenge everybody because it goes against the grain of what we've been taught.

Bigger is not better.

You don't need a list of thousands.

If you had a list of 300, heck, 200, 150.

Of qualified people, especially if it's mostly people who have given you their information.

Your list will generate more opportunities than you know what to do with.

And so if you have a lead generator, whether it's a webinar, a video or PDF, and you just throw it out in your emails, you throw it out on your LinkedIn content, you throw it on your website.

People now can, all of a sudden, all of a sudden, now you can. You can be generating leads that you didn't have to put a lot of work into, except for the upfront work of creating the video or the PDF.

And like I said, the easiest place to start, gang, is hosting webinars, because that's probably the most traditional one. But again, remember, the point of webinars, they're not to generate sales immediately, they're generate leads.

Because what we're going to talk about next week or two weeks from now is now that you've got these captured leads, what do you do with them?

And again, the mistake often made in our industry is we get lead and we want to marry them right away. So I remember working for agencies where we would have 20 people show up for a webinar and our sales manager would tell us the next day, hey, Andy, you take these five. Greg, you take these five. Jill, you take these five. Go call them. Let's try to get appointments. I'm like, that is not the point. You don't go, hey, thanks for Attending a meeting. Can I have a meeting now? Or thanks for attending the webinar. Can I have a meeting now? It's not how it works. They actually get offended by that.

So you want to think about, now that you got the leads, what can you do to drip on them with email content.

Social media content, which we're going to talk about next week, which is the content portion of your marketing plan next year. So if you get really clear here in December who your ideal prospect is.

Challenge yourself to go. The more narrow, the better.

Now you go, okay, what can I do to target that market and try to capture leads from it? Whether you choose to use a webinar, video, white paper, PDF, I don't care.

Some people, now, some of our clients use sales assessments. If anybody here has a sales assessment that your team uses, why not? Why not take a piece, maybe one section of that sales assessment and turn that into a lead generator. Fill this out to find out what your score is, whatever.

Those are all great ways to capture.

Leads.

Because when you capture leads, you will get more done with a smaller list.

So with that being said, I'm leaving a little time today to shut up. And then you guys can fire any questions away that you have on lead generators or even going back to two weeks ago, identifying an ideal prospect, what questions you guys have, you can either throw them in the chat box or just unmute yourself and ask away.

Go ahead.

And it's Dalene, on your email stuff, like with the clients and stuff. A lot of my leads, I do have the emails, but I think I get your idea as giving them permission to sign up for my whatever, PDF, webinar, whatever I'm going to do. If I do a PDF file, how do I obtain them to download it? Like, I'm not tech savvy as far as.

That's a good question. Daleyne, do you work for an agency?

Yeah, I do.

Okay, I would. And guys, this, some of this, I'm going to be very honest. Sometimes some of this stuff may cost money in a subscription to something, but it's completely worth it. A PDF. Here's what you could do, Dalene, with a PDF, typically what you'll do is create what's known as a landing page.

And if you have a website and you have a web developer, they could probably create a landing page just from your website. And all that website or that landing page will have is like the title of the PDF, maybe like three bullet points of what they're going to learn from the PDF and then the form where they put their name email download.

And that's what's known as the landing page.

Now when they hit download, what happens? What I would recommend is that you have an email, preferably automated, maybe it's not automated at first, where once I hit download, that individual is going to get an email giving them the PDF where the PDF is just attached to the email. Make sense?

Yeah, yep.

I know it sounds. This is where technology comes in, guys. You do need a landing page and again, if you got a web developer, they know how to do that. If you use any kind of CRM, your CRM may have the ability to do that, but you want to try to automate at least one email where once they hit download, email automatically goes to that individual with a pre written email that has the PDF attached.

Perfect, thank you, that helps.

We'll talk about that next week. Guys. Automation. Sales campaigns are very effective if you have automation. Automation is key because you can set up an entire sales campaign that's automated. Once somebody downloads or triggers something that now they're part of this automated campaign. Very effective if, if you or your team is leveraging the automation to do it. So.

Couple other questions have come in. Let me go back. I got a ton of RSVPs via LinkedIn live, but very low yield. Is this a time of day issue? Great question, John. John, do you mind unmuting yourself and just giving a quick description of what you're one of my former academy members, John Hansbrough, you there with us?

Yeah. All right, talk to quickly talk about what you're doing with the LinkedIn Live.

Yeah, so I am hosting events on LinkedIn Live, blasting it out to prospects who are connections and they're not posting much about it ahead of time and just trying to drive attention there. So it ends up getting a lot of people who just click. Sure, I'll sign up for this. Because it's two weeks in advance, three weeks in advance. Everyone says he has something three weeks in advance and then the day actually comes. I feel like they're probably just busier and didn't get on the calendars. Um, so like I had 60 something people sign up for one previously and there were like eight people who actually were on maybe. Um, it was something like that. It was really. I was just surprised how low it was. I didn't think it was gonna be everyone obviously, but I thought maybe like 20 to 25% was more realistic.

Okay, I'm gonna, I'm gonna have you make one little mental shift on your LinkedIn lives that I think Will make it a little easier for you if anybody here is not using LinkedIn lives. Great concept. All you got to do is turn your creator mode on. There's a. There's a thing in your profile that says, do you want your creator mode on? Yes. Now you get access to just going live on LinkedIn. Hitting record, you can talk. John, I wouldn't be worried about who actually shows up for the live itself. What I would focus on is recording it and then using that content for emails directed at people.

That's I do, I interview, I do my broker's voice every week on LinkedIn Live. Guys, I don't care if one person shows up live because I'm going to use the content, the recording, to direct the content at people.

Gotcha.

And if somebody happens to show up lives like, oh, awesome. And they connect. Icing on a cake.

Gotcha. Okay, that makes sense.

Cool.

I also figured there's a lot of value just people seeing my name and clicking on something.

And by the way, your live's gonna live on your feed for a while, right as you do it, so people will see it. Absolutely. Number one, it's on your feet. And number two, you now can use a recording for other content. So it's a win win. And if You've got a YouTube channel, which I highly recommend these days, guys, because it's the second largest search engine in the world, I would throw that live up on your YouTube channel.

What about LinkedIn automated messages? What do you use? Would you use that? If so, how do you use it? Great question, Joe. Depends on what you're doing. There's two types of automated messages I see out there. There's the robotic versions, and then there are actually companies who are humans that will go into your profile and act as if they're you and be sending out messages that I'm cool with as long as they sound like you. The automated bot stuff, No, I think people can sniff that out immediately and we've all gotten those messages and I. Those people I unfollow or disconnect with immediately. So if you're going to go with any kind of automation for messaging, there are teams or people who can actually act as if they're you, but they're human sending it. That's the way I would go.

Andy, remember, you always encourage your students to showcase a little bit of you and your marketing. Probably easiest to do via LinkedIn post video. Not all of us can get by on the life. I know not everybody's sexy like me. Andrew. I get it. But no, my, my point is, guys.

This is the stuff that's going to help you stand out. And I know we're at 10:30 my time, but if you got one more, two more minutes, I'll share. Guys, I'm just going to say it this way and I can't say it any more bluntly. The way people prospect and market in our industry is still pretty outdated and archaic for 2022. And the way we market in our industry, by and large has not evolved. And the pandemic fast forwarded everything light years ahead of what we expected. If you guys just take what you're hearing and apply it, you're going to look very different than your competition. And this is a blue ocean in our industry.

So spend time figuring out who your ideal prospect is.

Then spend time going. Even if it's just one kind of lead generator, maybe it's webinars, maybe it's a PDF. Just create one and go. Okay, what can I do next year to start capturing clients, qualified leads. In two weeks we're gonna talk about what you do with content to draw them to you. Now they got leads, how do you draw them to you? Because they're not going to go in the sales funnel immediately. But you gotta butter em up the right way. And I say butter up in a very positive way, not a spammy way. Last thing, guys. Before I let you go in the chat box, I put my link to my calendar. We do have our next broker Branding Academy coming up. January 18th. 12 week course live. I teach virtual for 12 weeks, one hour a week.

12 different modules. We've had some former academy members in the group today, so thank you. If you want to know more or you have teammates, let's jump on a call. We cap it at 20. I require a call because we don't just accept anybody want the right people in there. So anybody want. If you want to know more about how you can be a part of that or how that can help you launch 2023. John, you said great program, you are part of it. You are kicking ass, people. Go check John Hansbrough LinkedIn profile out. He's a model you should follow. So thank you, Wendy. Academy is fantastic. If you want to know more guys or you have teammates, click that link in the chat box. We'll jump on a call and I'll tell you about it. So with that being said, guys, in two weeks we go into part three which is creating the content. How can you draw the prospects to you? And then we'll wrap up for the year and you will go into 2023 ready to kick some serious ass. Any final questions before I let you go.

Rhett?

I have one just for the fact is. So I'm sitting here, your email came through about this message about this meeting right now. Is that a LinkedIn pre message? Because I know you didn't.

Oh, that email.

Yeah. So I just got an email that says you've just received step two.

I mean, it's perfect. I use. Great question. Love that, Rhett. I use an email platform.

Okay.

So when we set up these webinars, it is automated that the second you register, you get the great. You're in, everybody. You got the email that said, hey, you're registered. You got the email that said 24 hour reminder. You got the email that said one hour reminder. And now you got the email at the end that said, hey, thank you for attending.

Right.

Those are all automated.

Okay?

Yep. So one thing, guys, honestly, when you look at next year and what you're going to invest your money in, one, think of our academy. I say that in jest, but I'm serious. But two, with marketing guys, invest in automation. There's some email platforms that are very inexpensive that allow you to set up this kind of automation that's just going to make your life easier. Heck, I should probably do a webinar on automation because I think a lot of people still don't use it the way they should in our industry. The more you can automate this stuff, guys, the easier your life's going to be.

So Andy, because I can't tell you the number of email services I've purchased in technology and they, and they just, they died. They burnt, you know.

Yeah. Here's what I would tell you guys. If you're going to invest in automation next year for marketing and prospecting, I'd want something that I can, I can use to create email campaigns so I can automate things out to people. I would want to have a system that automates my sales process. Guys, believe it or not, I use calendly to automate our sales process. If you schedule a discovery call with me, you'll get a. An email welcome email. You'll get a reminder email. The call. You're going to get an email from me after the call. It's all automated. The more you can automate your marketing and sales systems, guys, you'll kill it because you're going to get so much done, more done in less time and you don't feel like you're recreating the wheel every time.

So that's a whole nother topic for another webinar is automating your marketing and sales. We should talk about that. But in two weeks, we're going into the content phase. Guys, this is where you hit the home runs, so hopefully you can be back in two weeks. You got any questions, guys, shoot me an email. You got the link to my calendar if you want to know more about the Academy. Otherwise, finish strong this week, and I'll see you in two weeks. Thanks, Andy. Awesome. Thanks, Andy. Thank you.