Unlocking Time-Saving Strategies: Generate More Leads Without Burning Out

I wanted to explore strategies and tactics for busy coaches, consultants and small businesses to generate a pipeline of leads and overcome the common challenges they face in that early stage of their customer journey.

Without a system of lead generation, your business will fluctuate with peaks and troughs of income. There’s the inevitability of being too busy during times when you have lots of client work on and no time to get your marketing efforts out there, to the project reaching its natural conclusion and then thinking “where is my next piece of work coming from?”

So how can we guard against the rollercoaster of income and find a way to stabilise our income streams and develop a system of growth?

Firstly we consider who our business serves and where that business or individual “hangs out”. 

If there’s a place online, that’s great as it makes them easier to reach, but sometimes we may need to consider that your ideal audience will need to be reached in person. 

I recently had a marketing consultation with a lady who primarily works with very small building companies; typically husband and wife teams; so there was potential for instagram (perhaps) but actually those builders are at builders merchants almost daily. 

Perhaps asking the builders merchant if they can offer tea and bacon baps there one morning to chat with them as they come in could be a conversation starter? Perhaps produce leaflets with QR codes on them, or have posters in their spaces - it may be that an advert in a local magazine is the right way to reach them? Online is not always the answer for those initial conversations.

Often, if we can drive our audiences to a place online where we can regularly keep them updated, build relationships with them by sharing our insight into the challenges they face AND make them offers, we can have more success. Finding them in the first place is crucial.

Social Media has been a vital tool for raising brand awareness for so many years we may have forgotten that prior to the advent we used to advertise!

Although social media can be very time-consuming, if we want to reach people, we either have to use our time or our money (advertising); or a combination of the two; to reach new audiences. Most early stage businesses tend to have more time than money, so organic (ie. not paid advertising) social media content creation is the answer - but don’t think you can’t place ads at some point in the future - that will give you the chance to reach people outside of your immediate network of “contacts and their contacts” - so it’s not to be sniffed at!

So how can we be more efficient with our marketing strategies so that we don’t feel glued to social media?

Consider the content you’ve already produced - if it’s worked well, could you reword it to use again? Could you chunk it into smaller pieces of content to use. Perhaps you’ve talked on a podcast and not shared that? Could you take snippets from that podcast to use as smaller pieces of content.

Have you delivered a presentation that you could take elements from  - perhaps get a transcript of a video piece that could then become a written piece.

And when you create new content, have in mind all the different ways you can make that piece of content work for you - it’s never one and done! 

Re-use, re-purpose and schedule that content out ahead of time so that when you’re super busy, you have a lively social media feed working away for you.

It can be so easy to forget that we already have a bank of GOOD content that we could reuse in different ways, share from a different angle…..

What content have you got hidden away on your computer that you could reuse?