Get More Small Business Leads With Our Proven System
A Guide to the Bizhack Lead Building System for Getting Small Business Leads
Many entrepreneurs face the challenge of not having enough time, money, and expertise to generate enough small business leads through online marketing to achieve their goals.
As a small business owner, you may feel like it’s hard to know how to get started with online marketing and lead generation. After all, getting started in online marketing can be overwhelming! There’s so much information and advice out there—some very helpful, and some that are the opposite of helpful (if we’re being honest).
We understand, and that’s why we created the Lead Building System™, a straightforward solution to lead generation for small businesses through online marketing. With the Lead Building System™, BizHack offers business owners a partner they can trust, a proven system, and implementation support.
TL;DR: 3 Things to Know About Generating Small Business Leads
Using digital tactics to market your small business can be overwhelming at first! At BizHackLive, we want to set you up for success with lead generation for small businesses. So, here are the three things you must know before you begin.
- The foundation of small business digital marketing success is an impactful, authentic business story.
- Start marketing your small business online with a Facebook Ad.
- Know the key metrics that drive your company and track those numbers diligently.
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Building Small Business Leads with BizHack
Figuring out how to market a small business online and get leads can be a struggle. Who should you hire? How should you measure success? Where the heck do you even start?
In the face of all these questions, you may want to hire an expert to take on your small business marketing strategy and execution. But, some marketing agencies might be too expensive or ineffective (or both!). So, you might turn to everyone’s favorite teacher—Google. But, every search result brings an overwhelming set of options without a clear path.
There’s a more straightforward way to get the results you want.
BizHack’s Lead Building System™ is a proven approach to raising awareness and generating small business leads online for any business with a limited budget, time and expertise. Our founder and CEO, Dan Grech, developed and refined this system over the past seven years while working with more than 700 small businesses across different industries worldwide. In 2019, BizHack trained more than 110 small businesses. On average, these businesses saw a 29:1 return on investment for every dollar invested in online advertising based on our proprietary system.
For each of these small businesses, implementing our proven system began with a clear understanding of three elements:
- The 6 Pillars
- The Foundation
- The 9 Steps
Element #1: The Foundation of Lead Generation for Any Small Business
The foundation of the Lead Building System™ is your business story. It’s how you market your small business through storytelling by sharing your “why.” Fortune 500 companies such as Microsoft, Nike, IBM, and many others have hired chief storytellers to craft the story of the organization and share it with the world. If you are a small business owner, YOU are your company’s chief storyteller. To market your small business online and generate leads, you must have a strong understanding of why you do what you do. This is the essence of your company, and you must keep that story consistent across all marketing channels.
“The more in touch you are with why you do what you do, the more powerfully you are going to be able to market your company,” Grech said during a #BizHackLive webinar where he introduced the Lead Building System™ for the first time in its entirety.
Your Business Story Is…
- Your deeply personal motivation for starting your business.
- Your origin story.
- How you communicate your purpose and passion
- The answer to the question, “If your business were to disappear, how would the world be worse?”
- Vital to your success! Every organization, from a Fortune 500 to a startup, has a business story.
- A competitive advantage. If you don’t define your Business Story, your competitors will do it for you.
The “Story of Me” Is Not Enough. Tell the “Story of Us”
The best way to use online marketing and get small business leads is by sharing your story. People are hard-wired to respond to a moving story, ultimately motivating your target audience to take action. Where should you start? First, look inward and develop the “Story of Me”—your core purpose, why you do what you do.
Simon Sinek, the British-American author and inspirational speaker, said. “People don’t buy what you do, they buy why you do it.”
An Example: The “Story of Me”
Grech was personally motivated to start BizHack by watching his mother, an art teacher in Philadelphia’s inner city. Students would flock to Mrs. Grech and ask for advice. She became an informal guidance counselor, and helped many of these young adults pursue a brighter future and attend college. Eventually, she turned this passion for helping students realize their dreams into her full-time career and became the school’s guidance counselor. As a teenager, Dan Grech would visit his mother, meet these students and see the love, passion, and meaning his mother derived from working with them.
Thirty years later, he created a company that teaches digital marketing to small businesses while holding true to a core mission to help the underdogs thrive. He loves helping other people transform their lives—just like his mom did. This is Grech’s “Story of Me.”
Your “why” may come from a similar early experience. Sometimes this is a positive lesson that you model your own choices after. Sometimes it’s a negative lesson that motivates you to create a different scenario than your parents could provide for you.
How The “Story of Us” Is Different
While your “Story of Me” will be the unchanging foundation of your drive and motivation, your target audience will connect more with the “Story of Us,” which will change according to their needs and wants. This means, emphasizing some elements of your story and leaving out others when you communicate it to different audiences.
The “Story of Us” connects the story of your personal motivation to the themes that resonate with your current audience. When online marketing a small business, it is important to resonate with the right audience in a virtual world of more than 3.4 billion users.
For example BizHack’s business story, or Story of Us, goes something like this in Dan Grech’s words:
“We are a company dedicated to helping small businesses thrive so you can have the life and business that you dreamed of. We do this through the three C’s: coaching, community, content. We use a combination of storytelling, strategy, and software to achieve your greatest dreams.”
Small Business Lead Building Element #2: Online Advertising for Small Businesses Using the 6 Pillars
Once you have a solid foundation of your business story, it’s time to move onto integrating the 6 Pillars of the Lead Building System™ into your small business digital marketing efforts.
A common misconception we see among small business owners is that they rely solely on social media posts and activity to spread the word about what they do and generate leads. Often, it’s because this tactic is free and easy enough to implement. However, relying heavily or solely on social media posts for online marketing can be problematic for a few reasons. Most importantly, when you rely on a social media network—such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram or LinkedIn—to connect with your audience, you are giving up ownership of that relationship with your potential leads. Every time a platform changes its algorithm you have to roll with the punches.
But, if you can get a customer’s email or phone number, you can communicate with them on your terms! No more relying on the good graces of these internet behemoths. You can email or text them when you have a relevant offer. To build a reliable system for finding small business leads, you need a potential customer’s email address or phone number. That’s because emails and texts are more efficient and effective ways of communicate with your leads. Fun fact: SMS open rates are 98%—the highest of any marketing channel!
So, how do you start building this list of emails and phone numbers of qualified prospects and leads? With the Lead Building System™, it all starts with a paid advertisement on Facebook to connect with qualified leads for your prospect list. That’s right we use the social media platforms themselves to access our audience, and then find a way to connect with them without the platform.
Small Business Digital Success with a Simple Facebook Ad
At BizHack we believe that a Facebook ad is the ideal starting point for online marketing effort to generate small business leads. Here’s why:
- Facebook ads will produce almost immediate results and give immediate feedback if what you are doing is working.
- Facebook ads are cheaper than almost any other kind of ad.
- Facebook is ubiquitous. About 80% of people in the United States on the internet have a Facebook or Instagram account. (Fun fact: Instagram is owned by Facebook!)
Can’t I Just Boost a Facebook Post?
There are three types of posts on Facebook: organic, boost and advertisement.
- Organic posts are free posts. These are your status updates on Facebook. Unfortunately, Facebook limits the reach of free business page posts, so, not many people see them.
- Boosted posts put a paid budget behind an organic post to boost it to reach more people.
- Facebook Advertisements are built in a completely different part of Facebook and offer more targeting and customization. That’s why we believe this is the best place to kickstart your online marketing for a small business.
The 6 Pillars of the Lead Building System include:
Before you start building your first Facebook advertisement, you need to understand the 6 Pillars of every advertisement created as part of the Lead Building System™:
- Campaign Objective: Define the key metrics that drive your company.
- Target Audience: Identify segments of your audience that are most likely to buy.
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- Irresistible Offer: Give something of value—an incentive—in exchange for their phone number or email.
- Thumb-Stopping Video: Create a compelling video—the first three seconds are critical! The easiest video maker for social media marketing lumen5.com and canva.com to easily create professional images and videos.
- Compelling Message: Meet at the intersection of what your buyer wants and what you want with a timely, relevant and authentic message.
- A Call-to-Action (CTA): Close the deal with a clear next step that gets the audience to do what you want them to do.
Measuring Your Online Marketing Success: Analytics and Metrics
Once you understand that the overall objective of your ad campaign is to collect small business leads, all of your analytics should be in support of that.
There is so much data out there, Facebook alone has four different places where you can get a massive amount of data. The simple thing that you need to know is that whenever you choose a goal in a Facebook ad campaign, it automatically creates a Key Performance Indicator (KPI). Since lead generation is what many small businesses are looking to do, we recommend running ads to get more leads.
“As a leader of a company, you should know what key metric drives your company and track that number maniacally,” Grech said.
Element #3 the 9 Steps: Run an Ad, Run Another Ad
In the BizHack 7-Week Program, our cohorts learn hands-on how to market a small business by following the 9 Steps of the Lead Building System™.
- Create customer personas & Build Audiences
- Make a Thumb-Stopping Video
- Launch 1st Ad for Video Views
- Map Out the Customer Journey
- Determine a Free Irresistible Offer
- Analyze & Optimize the 1st Ad
- Build a Lead Form or Landing Page
- Launch 2nd Ad for Lead Gen or Traffic
- Analyze & Optimize 2nd Ad
During the program, our expert coaches give business owners implementation support and coaching to run through The 9 Steps.
Although figuring out how to use online marketing to generate small business leads can feel overwhelming, it doesn’t have to be! By finding a system that works for your business, you can see growth through digital marketing efforts.
