The Lead Generation Cheat Code Business Owners Need

If you're a business that generates leads and you're finding it harder than ever to get them, then strap in because I'm about to share the cheat code that is killing the traditional lead magnet. You see, this is for business owners who want to increase the number of leads coming into their business, that want to reduce their cost per lead so they get more bang for their buck, and ultimately who want to increase the number of sales, revenue, and importantly, profit that they can generate so they can have more impact and drastically increase their take-home income. That is what we are all about here on this channel. I'm going to be your host as I explore why lead magnets in the traditional sense are nowhere near as effective as they once were. I'm going to explain what we are doing instead and unveil the magical cheat codes to you, and then I'm going to show you how you can start to build and implement your very own cheat code into your business. My name is Elliott. I'm the Chief Marketing Officer and one of the co-owners here at Entrepreneur's Circle, a business that lives to help businesses. And just as some proof, here's a snapshot of our ad account in the first 25 days of June. And we spent around £100,000 on adverts and we generate loads and loads of leads. You know, they're the lifeblood of our business. We generate leads for our low-ticket community business. We generate leads for our software as a service business, and we generate leads for our high-ticket coaching business. I also built, scaled, and exited an agency over the last 6 years where we did this as a done-for-you service for many, many clients spanning many different industries. So I have built myself with my own two hands a whole bunch of lead magnets, and I have seen what has worked and what hasn't. And importantly, We're at the forefront of this important evolution, and getting you ahead of the curve is what's important in this video today. So quickly, let's just define what a lead magnet is. Well, in the traditional sense, a lead magnet is something that we would give away for free in exchange for somebody's details. Those details that acts as a signal of interest that somebody is interested in our stuff. And the details is the fair exchange that enables us to communicate with them, and thus they go from being eyeballs or attention to a cold, hard lead that we can now engage with and try and warm up and nurture. And so historically, you know, we'd give away all sorts of free guides, free quotes, PDF downloads, you name it. And the reason we do lead magnets, which is important to understand, is the ABC market principle. And so this is the idea that any given market, we can break all of the customers into one of four segments. At the very top of the market, you have 3% of people that are your active buyers. These folks know they want to buy this thing and they've got the credit card out ready to go. We love those people. But again, there's only 3% of them, which means if you're purely marketing to the people that are ready to buy your thing, you're only going to be able to get so many. Beneath that, we have a much bigger chunk, which is 17%. And these are the buyers considering. What does that mean? It means they're kind of in the market for your type of thing, whether that's shutters, whether that's trainers, whether that's marketing services. They're not quite at the point where they've got the credit card out and ready, but they are actively looking, they're actively considering this purchase. And so again, they're a little bit earlier in the journey, they're going to take a little bit longer to convert. But so we have to appeal to those guys with slightly different marketing messages than the 3%, which is all about buy now. Beneath that, we have a big chunk. This is a 60%, and this is our cold audience. So these are people that could be a fit for our thing, but they are not actively in the market. Many of them don't even know your thing exists, and they're certainly not thinking about it right now. So for these guys, we have to do a lot of additional education to warm them up, make them aware, and move them into these upper echelons. Now, most people, when they do their marketing, they focus really on the top, the active buyers. And as a result, they find it very difficult to grow. The big breakthroughs that we have had and that we created for a lot of our clients in the agency days were building lead magnets that appealed to the 17%, but also this huge chunk, the 60%, because a lead magnet, some free, valuable, interesting thing would appeal to people earlier in their journey and we would get on their radar, give them something of value, educate them, and begin to have a conversation. Now, I know you're probably wondering, what about this chunk at the bottom, Elliott? Well, these guys, the bottom 20%, they ain't ever going to buy. So screw those guys. And historically, this always worked, but we have gotta recognize that the world that we live in is evolving, as depicted by this beautiful drawing I created. Now, there's two big forces that we've gotta understand, because when you are a marketer, a business owner, and we are creating paid ads, organic content, or reaching out to people to try and get their business, we must understand how they are living and behaving. Because if we do not, our efforts to do actions and create things that are going to persuade and influence their behaviour is going to be very limited. So I always like to keep my finger on the pulse of what is happening in society, and I highly recommend that you do too. But for me, there's two big forces that are having a major impact that are forcing a necessary evolution in the world of lead magnets. The first one is short-form video. The rise of TikTok and the development of short-form video across many, many platforms. Now, short-form video, when you think about it, is the most highly curated rapid-fire content designed to stimulate the biggest chunks of dopamine in our brains as humanly possible. All these little clips are— take expansive bits of content, pinpoint the most thrilling, excitable moments,, and then we are just fed a never-ending stream of them. One minute it's a great insight, the next minute it's an animal attack or a car crash or some crazy thing. It's crazy, okay, what appears on the feed. And so that is frying people's brains. You've all heard of brain rot, which I truly believe is a pretty intense thing that I'm slightly worried about for my future children, but hey, that's a topic for another day. People's attention spans are diminishing, and that is a key driving force behind it. Not only that, we saw the uprising of ChatGPT and AI and Claude and all this magical stuff, which has been out for several years now, is getting better and better, but is training us as humans to be able to ask a simple question and then get fed a beautiful synthesized response almost immediately. So we are just instantly gratified at every turn right now. Which is exactly why standard lead magnets, done the way we've always done them, simply are no longer valid. Because if we are advertising some kind of free download, a free info pack, a free PDF that someone has to sit there and consume, this no longer cuts the mustard for most people. And this is only going to exacerbate. And it's why it's important you get ahead of this now rather than later. So instead, of doing the old boring stuff. We are going to build cheat codes. What is a cheat code? Well, let me take you back several years to Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas. Not the first game to have cheat codes, but a very legendary game that I sank many hours into as a small boy. And so for those who are uninitiated, Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, you play as a guy in San Andreas and you can go around and do whatever you want really. It's a pretty cool, crazy game. And in San Andreas, you have, you know, various stats around your stamina, your strength, you, you know, earn money to buy weapons to cause carnage. And when you cause carnage, you also will get the police and the army coming after you. There were such things as cheat codes in this game, hidden secret patterns that you could press on your PlayStation controller and it would automatically, instantaneously spawn magical things in the game for you. They were cheat codes. So if I press circle, right arrow, circle, right arrow, left arrow, square, triangle, up in a sequence on my controller, boom, no police would come and get me. And the same could be said, and I had many a fun time spawning in a tank, driving around, getting max police on, making myself invincible, spawning weapons, and just going full god mode because of these cheat codes. And so in the world of business, We are now able to create cheat codes. You see, a cheat code is simply our ability to deliver a specific solution to a very specific problem instantly with next to no effort. That is what a cheat code is, and that is the future of lead magnets, my friends. You see, gone are the days where we have to produce a boring PDF, and here are the days where we have AI tools at our disposal, such as Claude, Manus, Replet, you name it. Things that we can speak an idea and create a complete tool or solution that's able to actually produce something of value to our customers in next to no time for next to no effort. And this is what you need to get ahead of, in my humble opinion. So 3 types of cheat code that we are experimenting with at the moment. The first type of cheat code is a diagnostic. This is a tool where people are able to enter a series of specific answers to questions or bits of information, and we are able to take that information and turn it into some kind of profound, insightful result. And so the value of this is it gives them an insight, whether it's a roadmap, whether it's a specific problem and solution. The main value is people are giving you stuff and we are diagnosing what the core issue is and giving them a clear path to resolve it. Because for a lot of people, especially if you're stuck in business, having clarity over the problem that you should be solving is a tremendously valuable thing. The second type of cheat code is an asset creator. So this is something where, unlike a diagnostic where we give them an insight, it is actually going to produce a valuable thing. So they interact with this cheat code and boom, it actually creates an asset that they can go on to use. And the third type of cheat code is an AI clone. So this is where we're able to package up our brain, our knowledge, our intellectual property, and create a specific AI that somebody can chat with, call, even video call with, and get their personalized advice. And so this is all about giving them personal attention and access to an individual that has interesting experience, intellectual property, and they can get personalized advice and recommendations. So these are the 3 core ones that we're experimenting with. So a few examples to bring this to life for you. So one that we've been running very successfully recently is this. It's a diagnostic tool. Now it's aimed at service-based business owners, and the premise is, what is your fastest route to an extra £50,000 per year? And this simple diagnostic, it requires you to fill out a few questions. It takes literally less than 4 minutes, and the output is going to be a clear path that identifies the small number of steps you need to take in your business to generate an extra £50,000 in take-home income, which in and of itself is quite a compelling promise. And as a result, it attracts a lot of people. We get a lot of great information about them and their business, and they get a really useful result at the end of it. Now, this diagnostic is actually a lead magnet for our software company because the most— the quickest route in most cases is normally to do with fixing your follow-up, reactivating a lot of the old leads and customers that might be sat in your database. And so we highlight that, and then it segues nicely into our proposed solution for it, which is getting our help and getting on board with the software and so on and so forth. So it's a compelling promise, a really useful valuable diagnostic for the prospect, but it also nicely segues into what we are trying to do and enables us to drive customers for the software. Another example. So this is a custom GPT. So this is an example of an asset creator. This custom GPT, we call it the Cold Lead Defibrillator. And so this is a really simple little custom GPT. Again, it's designed for service-based business owners, trade business owners. And what it does is it writes you a very short follow-up email trained on our proprietary frameworks that is designed to defibrillate and reactivate these old ghosted leads, people that haven't, haven't responded in a while. And so this is incredibly valuable because if you are a service-based business owner with a pipeline filled with people that are ghosting you, this can give you a literal email to send in 2 seconds that will be effective. So highly valuable and very easy to use. We hosted an event in the last couple of weeks called the Implementer, and at the Implementer I sit at a table, it's a marketing strategy table, and people can come over and we will spend 10 to 20 minutes talking about the marketing strategy in their business. And one conversation was all about cheat codes because this lady had a business. She'd been a web designer for many, many years, and she was going to sell this £297 website kit, which is for small coaches, creators, small businesses that need a simple one-page website and they want it to look nice and human. And so in order to do this, she was going to create this kind of website quiz. It would ask their prospects around what they were looking to get out their website, and it would give them some valuable kind of information. And then she'd try and sell this £297 website kit. I said, That's probably not the best idea, to be honest. I don't think that will be that compelling or that fun. And so what I think would be much better is you make a cheat code, a cheat code where instead of doing a website quiz and then trying to sell them this thing where they have to build a website, why don't you make the lead magnet a website generator? Because she could take her frameworks and her templates and her styling that she has developed and actually create a simple little tool where somebody puts in the information about their business, all the details they need for their website, and then boom, it just generates the design of the one-page website so they can actually see it. And then instead of selling a $297 build your own website, which not many people want to build their own website, you can just sell the deployment of that website. Because actually, once you've seen this beautiful design, if you like it, and there's an option to say, hey, do you want to buy this website? We can set it live for you now. For £500, £1,000? Most people will probably say yes. And because of technology and Replit and all this kind of stuff, that becomes possible today. And so that is a great example of taking what would have been a traditional quiz and turning it into an incredibly powerful cheat code that I hope will absolutely transform her business. Then we get on to the AI clones. So there's a company called Delphi, which we've explored, and these guys make it very straightforward for you to create your own AI clone. And on their website you can see a host of all of the semi-famous big names across a variety of different industries that have got their own Delphi clone that you can go and interact with. And so you can go, you can chat with them, you can call them and get their specific view because yes, generalized AI is fantastic. But if I have a specific health question and there is a world-leading health expert on that particular topic, then actually the value of me interacting with that AI clone is so much higher and they make it really easy to turn this into a lead generation tool where people can interact for a set number of messages and then if they want to continue, boom, they have to put in their email or you just gate it and you say put in your email to get access to this for a short period of time. So again, if you are an expert-led business, have a lot of proprietary information, this can be a truly fantastic lead magnet that is worth exploring as well. So As a few examples, one of my favourite examples is in interior design, classic service-based business where you are able to create an interior design like generator. So instead of going through the standard process of advertising a brochure and then trying to communicate with people to get them to book a consultation, create a tool that actually people can upload pictures of their rooms and it will show a bunch of design variations in your style with your suppliers. Previously, that would take a long time and a lot of money to build. Right now you can do that in a weekend. The world we live in is crazy. And so it's your ability to harness the power of what's available at your fingertips right now to build the best cheat codes. Now, what makes a good cheat code? The first thing that makes a cheat code highly effective is its specificity. It must solve one very small, very painful, specific problem. Not a whole bunch of stuff. One problem that ideally leads them into the next problem they're going to encounter, which is where we can open the door to conversations around our paid services and help that we can deliver. So go really deep on one little niggly thing that's like a splinter, you know, tiny little things stuck in you, really flipping annoying. You're not going to leave a splinter in there for ages, are you? You're going to yank that sucker out. So it has to be a problem that people want dealing with. Straight away. The second thing good cheat codes do is provide an instant result. Speed is key here for all the reasons we spoke about with the short-form brain rot and the AI instant gratification. This thing needs to work now, not tomorrow, not next week, but now. Which is why you must harness these tools that I've shared in order to deliver something where the value is immediate. And finally, it must be low effort. People will not be opposed to answering several questions and uploading some decent information in exchange for something of pure value. But you don't want it to be too long, okay? Too arduous. Because again, we're dealing with mostly cold people here. And so we win by making it as easy and frictionless as possible for them. Now, all of this comes together, but I want you to remember this: the size and the speed of the win that your cheat code is able to deliver is going to set the tone. It's going to determine exactly how warm these leads are when they come into your business, and they're going to determine how much they trust you. So we want to go big with this and deliver something that delivers very strong value very quickly for very low effort, and then follow up properly. And we will be laughing all the way to the bank. Ladies and gentlemen, I hope you enjoyed this video. I know I sure did. I appreciate you tuning in. Don't forget to drop a like, a comment, and subscribe. New videos coming at you every single week. I'll see you later. I'm off to go play GTA San Andreas. Bye-bye.