Podcast

The agencies that I've coached in the past normally tell me something like this. Either they don't have any leads or they don't know where to find leads, or they don't have the time for leads. And frankly, these are all excuses.

Hello and welcome to this episode of Retain FM. I am you host, Pete. Today we're gonna tackle a large issue fairly head on, and I call it a large issue because this is one of the issues that when I've been working with coaching clients is something that has come up most regularly. And the issue is this, why finding leads should be easy for digital agencies.

You see, the agencies that I've coached in the past normally tell me something like this. Either they don't have any leads or they don't know where to find leads, or they don't have the time for leads. And frankly, these are all excuses. You see what I've actually found? With the digital agencies I've coached is that they actually have easy access to leads.

They just don't really know what to do when they've got one, so they pass on it, or don't even call it a lead. So what we're gonna do in today's episode is I'm gonna talk you through something called the One ninth Rule, and this is a method for generating leads for your business. And then in the next episode of the podcast, we're then gonna talk about what to do with a lead once you have obtained one.

So full disclosure, the one ninth rule isn't my idea. This is a concept that, uh, I have picked up and modified from, uh, our, our good old Australian friend, Troy Dean. Uh, I've met Troy. I, uh, have engaged with some of his coaching. Not all of it. Uh, I've spoken to him, I've been on his podcast. Um, he's a, he's generally a really nice bloke, uh, as most Australian blokes tend to be.

And this was a concept that he pitched, he, he put to us in some training that I attended once. And, um, I've modified it a little bit to work specifically for the digital agencies that I've coached. So the one night thrill right before we get started, We first need to understand your customer particularly.

How you interact with that customer, how you serve that customer. So is your ideal customer somebody that's industry specific? I e Do you work in the wedding industry or for lawyers? Or dentists? Are they business type specific? I e You want to deal with something like e-commerce customers. It doesn't really matter what industry they're in, but it's the type of business that they run.

Or are they location specific? You want to be, you want to serve all the businesses in your local town, for example. So you need to understand your customer. And once you have that picture of your customer in your mind, I then want you to create a grid with nine squares in it and fill it with the top nine reasons of how your service or service is directly help that customer.

So these could be things like, You help them reliably sell products online, or you help them rank in the search engines for their, for their, uh, chosen keywords, or you take the pain out of unreliable web posting because they are, you know, they rely on, um, uptime. Guarantees it. It can be anything. Maybe you help integrate their website or project management system and CRMs through seamless integrations.

There's whole load of things, but they need to be specific to your customer. You, you know, as I say, either by industry, by business type, or by location. Once you've filled out your grid of nine, You're then going to choose one of those blocks to become your marketing tool, and this block needs to be something that is specific to that client.

It needs to be something that they could do on their own. It might be convoluted, it might be complicated. In fact, if it is convoluted and complicated, that kind of helps with the marketing of this because you can explain it and then say, but hey, you don't need to go through all of that. We can help you out with it.

But yeah, it needs to be something they can achieve on their own that will make a real world difference to their business today. So, um, it also needs to be something that you can create a marketing hook for that's maybe. A secondary consideration here, but it, it does help if there's, there's some way that you can obviously market this and it obviously needs to compliment your other services because this is gonna be the introduction tool to the rest of your, your suite of services.

So if you can identify, assess your nine blocks, it, it doesn't matter which one it is, whether it's top, left, bottom right, something in the middle, it, it abs it doesn't really matter. The fact is you're gonna choose one thing. That can directly help your customer today. And then you're gonna cr create a resource explaining how they achieve what they want to achieve.

Um, I, I've seen this run in the past for people, uh, web agencies helping people with their, uh, camera setups for YouTube videos, for example. So it's a little bit on the fringes of what they do. But you know what? If you can help a client create video content, they're gonna need a good website for that video content.

That website is gonna need to have all the social integration so that when it gets shared, all the thumbnails and stuff are cre correct. So as you can see, you can take that one idea of. The best YouTube setup for your home office, for example, and, uh, turn that into a resource which then leads into what you actually do.

That resource, again, can be anything however you feel comfortable and however the client would feel comfortable receiving that information is the best thing to do. If you're doing a checklist or something, a PDF works great. Cause of course they can have it on the screen next to them and just, just go through it.

Uh, but that could be a video or a podcast or I'd maybe refrain from a blog post unless it was some kind of private URL that you were, um, that you were sharing because. You want to obtain the leads information for this, so it, it doesn't want to be something that's readily available on your website that people could just Google and get for nothing.

But on the same note, it needs to be in a format that, as I say, you're, you're comfortable with. So you've identified your target customer, you've created your nine blocks. You've chosen one of those. That's where the ninth rule comes in. You've chosen one of those to be your marketing tool that can directly help the customer today, and you've created that resource to help the customer.

Then once you're at that point, you go 110% into that one. Block. You create your content about it, you engage on social media about it. You search for people looking for it on different platforms, on Reddit, on LinkedIn, on wherever you can think about it. You maybe run ads to it, and if you do run ads to it, you know, like Facebook ads will now allow you to have an embedded form.

So actually somebody couldn't convert without leading, leaving the ad. Now it's up to you whether you wanna spend the budget on ads. I'm not saying you should or you shouldn't. I'm just saying that's an option. Um, You make it your topic of choice. When you are on guest podcasts, you maybe speak about it when you're on a stage.

So ultimately you become the number one person known in your niche for that thing. Now, in your niche is a really important point because it's not actually that difficult to become known for a certain thing, and if you've got a guide about. The best home office, YouTube setup, and then you go and share it with a whole load of other web designers, for example.

That's great. You can get a whole load of email addresses, dead quit. But if you are not creating web design or design agency websites, they're kind of pointless. So, This is where you are, you are focused on becoming that known person in that niche. So if that's your town, you need to maybe speak on local, local radio about it, get in touch with the local newspaper about it, find any local bloggers that you can get, um, that you can speak to.

Is there other local podcasts that, that you can speak to? Do places that, uh, you know, do you have a chamber of, um, commerce where you could maybe attend some of their networking events, maybe even lead a networking event about it. All of this needs to be contextual about where your customers are. So, you know, uh, by all means, if you want to go and ha get some friends to check it out to make sure it makes sense, and make sure the automations work and make sure that the PDF's written correctly by fine, go and do that, but they're not leads.

They are going back to those excuses at the top of essentially making yourself feel good about something. That's not the purpose of this. The purpose of this is to get you leads, and if you do that, Over a period of time, you will consistently start to receive leads for your business. You know what the really deaf thing about this whole episode is?

Is that everything I've just said is actually advice that we would all give to our customers. Yet as digital agencies, we're absolutely rubbish at taking our own advice because we get too busy, because we don't make time for it, because we make excuses to make ourselves feel better about not having time for it.

All of that kind of stuff. So that is the framework. That is the one ninth rule for generating leads. Commit to that process. Commit to s, to focusing in on that one ninth for your target customer and. Then next week we're gonna talk about what to do when you have a lead, uh, to, to open their eyes to show them the other eight ninths that you haven't mentioned to them yet, and how you can then start to convert those leads into sales and ultimately improve your business.

Hope you found this episode, uh, really interesting. If you have any feedback or you wanna share anything about this or you have any questions, feel free to join us in our Facebook group at peter.com/group, and I will see you in the next episode.