How to find your leads 🎯

Do you want 100 contacts where one is a solid lead, or would you rather have 10 where three are solid?

I’ll take the second option every time. I’d rather have three home runs than have 99 contacts who aren’t interested in my product.

Let’s talk about how to find these people.

Mike

You’ve probably heard me talk about the dartboard theory if you follow me on social media.

Think of your lead generation campaign like it’s on a dartboard, and your ideal customer is dead center in the middle. Darts are your leads.

While seeing a board full of darts might feel good, you only want ones in the middle. The closer a lead is to the ideal customer you’re targeting, the more likely the lead is to buy.

If you run your campaign incorrectly, you could end up with quantity all over the board, which might feel pretty good as you watch people pour into your database.

But you want quality, with darts that hit the bullseye, even if it means fewer total leads. Fill the center, not the board.

Next, let’s talk about an example and how to find the right darts.

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What I’m about to say might sound familiar if you've ever run Google Ads.

At some point, especially if you’re spending enough money, you’ll hear from a Google account manager who will want to meet with you to help improve your campaign.

Most of the time, these account managers have talked to me about optimizing my ads by adding additional keywords.

On a phone call, they’ll review the suggested keywords their AI has created for your account. They’ll recommend you add more of these to your campaign so that your ads get seen by more people.

But here’s the problem:

If you aren’t careful, you’ll add more keywords and get seen by more people, but these people will be further out on the dartboard and less likely to be in your target market.

You want your business to be found for particular things so that you increase the likelihood that the person clicking on your ad is someone who will like what you’re selling.

If you repair dishwashers, you want to be found for terms related to that and not for other types of home repair, for example.

If you add too many keywords, you could find yourself attracting people interested in something similar to what you offer but not your specific thing. This is how you end up with many darts on the board instead of a bunch near the center.

Now, let’s wrap this up by discussing how this concept applies to all sorts of content, not just Google Ads.

Let’s take the concept described above with Google Ads and apply it with a No Budget Marketing mindset around your content.

Just as you want to ensure your keywords stay tight to attract people at the center of the dartboard, you want your content laser-focused on the audience you want to bring in.

Let’s go back to the previously mentioned situation with dishwasher repair.

To get people close to the center of the dartboard to land on your content, you should focus on things like the specific region you service. Use town names rather than shooting for something at a state level.

Expanding your content to focus more on your state than specific towns will be tempting because you’ll start generating more traffic. But 100 web visitors two hours away from you aren’t as helpful as five people in a town you serve.

You could also focus on specific models and manufacturers rather than dishwashers in general because everyone isn’t going to just search for “dishwasher repair in Baltimore.” Some people will search for “Bosch dishwasher repair in Baltimore.” They might also search for a specific error message or the issue they’re facing, like “dishwasher won’t drain.”

No matter what you’re selling, you can take this same approach with all the terms associated with your business. Keep drilling down so you’ll start to own organic search results for all the phrases that are essential to your business.

Think small and then go big on that, rather than going too big and attracting a bunch of leads that aren’t the people you genuinely want to target.

Check out the X post from Neil Patel below and notice where he says, “We are seeing a new trend, where keywords that are seven or more words in length are starting to make up a big chunk of the conversions and revenue. They typically don’t drive the most traffic, but revenue tends to be much higher.”

That’s the dartboard theory in action. Longer keywords might be entered by people being more specific when they search. There’s less traffic there than with broader searches, but the person is more likely to be your customer; hence, revenue can be higher for the longer search terms.

Thanks for reading! See you next week.