What do you do when you want to attract leads who are perfect for you or your business? Leads who could become your customers? And not just any customers, but the kind of customers you really want to have?

You know, of course, that everything starts with traffic. It’s why there’s so much money spent on search engine optimization, Google ad campaigns, social media marketing and advertising, heck, even business card printing.

Get people to go to your website and learn all about you, and you’ll get your perfect leads, flowing like a river right into your business and converting to customers with ease.

Right? Right? Hello? Anyone there?

You’re right – it doesn’t really happen like that. Not even close.

The driving force to attract leads and feed them to the sales process is one that drives nearly every marketer. When we recently asked a large group of marketers at all experience levels about their top marketing challenge, “getting more of my perfect-fit leads” emerged right at the top of the list. Many of these marketers ARE driving traffic to their websites, but those website visitors aren’t coming out of the shadows, aren’t declaring themselves as leads, are not offering up their contact details – not even on a “subscribe to our blog” button.

Why don’t visitors become leads?

I bet you’re busy. Are you busier today than a year ago? Two years ago? Three years ago? When you have a problem you need to solve, or a question you need answered, or an opportunity to address, do you go to the internet and sign up to be a blog subscriber on any of the websites you find? Or do you look for solutions, answers, or information that’s specific to your need of the moment? I’ll wager you fall into the latter camp – find the answers, right? Get something moved forward or finished and move on to the next thing.

When you sign up to get something, don’t you want to know it’s going to add value in some way? Or are you okay with getting one more email, about who knows what, taking up space and vying for attention in your already overcrowded inbox?

Generic “subscribe” calls to action are performing poorly – and it’s not going to get any better. Drive traffic by the thousands and you might get some subscribers – but you still won’t know if they’re your perfect potential customers. You’ll only know that they subscribed. (Shockingly, many marketers still don’t even know WHO their blog subscribers are, so that’s a different kind of breakdown right there.)

Motivate action to attract leads

To get your perfect leads, the ones you really want to turn into customers, create offers that will motivate them to come out of the shadows and offer up their information. Your site visitors found you somehow, and they’re hungry for knowledge that you can presumably provide. They just aren’t willing to get on the phone with you, or come into your store, or make an appointment just yet. They want to get to know you, and to understand the value that you can bring to their pain, predicament, challenge, or curiosity.

If you can provide that motivation, you’ll attract leads that are most likely to turn into customers. Providing that value into your visitor’s life, at the moment it’s needed, builds your know-like-trust factor and moves them along the path toward becoming your customer.

It’s not about numbers. Subscriber counts and the size of your list are irrelevant if the people on your list are NOT your perfect potential customers.

Two things are needed…

To attract leads who are perfect for your business, you have to have two things in place, and… pro tip here, you must be absolutely committed to both of them.

1. You must know WHO your perfect potential customer is. I’m not talking about some broad definition either. In a recent webinar, we asked people to share their perfect potential customer definitions with us, and a few volunteered to be examples to the rest of the audience. One person said that her perfect potential customer profile is “real estate agents.” Well, that’s a good start, but nowhere near specific enough. Would you talk the same way to agents who sell million-dollar-plus luxury suburban homes as you would to people selling city homes for rehab? Do agents who focus on commercial listings want the same info as agents who focus on residential? See what I mean? You’ve got to be specific – and particular – about your perfect potential customer – and commit to it.
2. You must also have a system for understanding what content will be most valuable and relevant to your niche – and providing that content at the right time and in the right context. If your current marketing platform doesn’t provide you with those insights, it’s time for a new system, to be quite frank. The email service providers and autoresponder systems of the world can’t do that for you; you need a marketing automation system (like Genoo) that gives you the data and insights you need.

Set up your website to attract leads

We’ve talked before about what’s wrong with most websites, and we STILL find that 90% of the sites we evaluate are just depending on the “subscribe” button to get people out of the shadows and into the lead list – which leads to increasing disappointment. Those sites are not built to attract leads; they’re built for broadcasting brochure content to everyone.

That needle has moved.

What do your perfect potential customers NEED? What do they WANT? How can you help them move a little bit down the path of answering a question, solving a problem, or addressing a challenge? What can you OFFER them – on your website – that will motivate them to take action, to offer up their info in exchange for your valuable insights?

When you know EXACTLY who your perfect potential customers are, you can craft content that they’ll want, offer it to them, and motivate them to take it. Your next step from there is to continue to engage them in the way that will make sense to THEM based on the information they will have shared with you.

Attract leads – YOUR PERFECT LEADS – with offers that speak directly to them, that motivate them to action, that will bring them out of the shadows. Then turn them into your perfect potential customers by building your know-like-trust factor and helping them make a decision to become your customer.

Your perfect customer.