How to Get New Leads (Quickly) When You're Just Starting Out
Today, the big question we’re answering is:
“What’s the quickest and cheapest way to build an audience and generate new leads when you’re just starting out?”
Our quick answer is:
The best way to quickly grow your audience when you launch a new brand is by strategically borrowing someone else’s audience and leveraging that new exposure in a smart way.
What do we even mean “borrow someone’s audience” ? Well, the truth is, even when you’ve built a beautiful brand and website, you need a steady flow of new traffic to your site; or else, the great design in itself won’t be able to serve its purpose. It’s like building a beautiful storefront with amazing products, but having it located in a dark side-street with no foot traffic, so nobody knows it’s there!
It’s important to remember that there are people out there who genuinely want what you have to offer. You can solve these people’s problems by providing your product or service, and they will be thrilled to buy from you! But if they don’t know you exist, they will probably just end up buying the next best thing from your competitors.
So going back to our main point: borrowing someone else’s audience can be done in a few different ways, and it can be extremely effective! I mean, (not to say that all of these are very admirable examples, but) for example:
Danielle Peskowitz Bregoli, known professionally as Bhad Bhabie or "the catch me outside girl," borrowed Dr. Phil's audience in 2016, and now (at the time of writing this post) reportedly has a net worth of $6 million!
Dr. Phil himself only became famous after borrowing Oprah’s audience in the late 90s, and now (at the time of writing this post) his net worth is $460 million!
Kim Kardashian didn’t let any negative media get to her, and instead was able to leverage Ray J’s audience to catapult her career in the spotlight.
In 2013, GoPro was not a well-known brand like it is now; and the way they grew so quickly was by leveraging their user’s audiences by allowing them upload footage with the GoPro logo to YouTube and thereby organically promoting their product.
The LA clothing brand Dimepiece were in business for around 7 years but didn’t see exponential growth until they accidentally borrowed Cara Delevingne’s audience when she wore the brand’s "Ain't No Wifey" tee backstage and it circulated over the internet. After there was some buzz about their clothing, they leveraged Helen Ruth aka “Baddie Wrinkle’s” instagram audience of 3.8M+ followers by having her post some photos wearing their new line and the campaign had huge success. Now celebrities like Rihanna, Miley Cyrus, Missy Elliot, and even Michelle Obama have been seen wearing the brand.
The subscription-based beauty brand Birchbox reached massive success after teaming up with the lifestyle blogger Emily Schuman and “borrowing her audience” by coordinating five sponsored Instagram posts which received over 18,000 likes, and reached over 550,000 potential customers.
And the list of different examples goes on and on, but you can do this with your brand too!
What are the best ways to get new traffic to your site?
Listed here are the top 4 strategies you can implement to get new traffic to your website. You can start with one, and eventually, apply all 4 traffic-generating strategies for best results.
Social Media Posting & Engagement
Digital Ads
Leveraging Guest Opportunities
Off-Page SEO Guest Post Backlinks
Consistent Social Media Posting & Engagement
Pros:
When done correctly, this is the best solution for long-term growth. It can be “free” if you decide to manage it in-house.
You can use our Social Media Worksheet to help guide you or you can book a Social Media Strategy Workshop if you’d like us to help train your team.
We also offer Social Media Strategy and Social Media Management Services if you’d like a more hands-off approach.
Cons:
It usually takes some time to warm up cold leads, so it can take a while before you see some noticeable ROI.
In order to manage your social media accounts effectively, you are required to know best practices for social media, have an understanding of who your niche target audience is and which platforms they spend time in, how to leverage proper hashtags for your niche, how to schedule posts in advance, how to create valuable and engaging content, how to run giveaway campaigns and form influencer partnerships, and more; which can be a lot to take on if you’re already busy managing other important aspects of your company.
Paid Digital Ads
Pros:
You can get really specific with your target audience and even send each segment of your niche a specific ad with targeted messaging for optimal results.
If your offer is truly amazing, you might convert leads who have never even heard of you before into buying customers with a single campaign.
Once the algorithm understands who your paying target is, you can have a very high return, which in turn pays for your ads. So yes, ideally you will have a campaign that pays for itself like we’ve managed to do for our clients —Yay! Free ads!
Cons:
It takes some upfront investment to allow your social media platform to complete its “learning phase” and really start working to its full potential. You can expect around two to three months of low-ROI before seeing optimal results.
It can get quite expensive if you do it wrong, or if you don’t have an ads expert managing, monitoring, and continually optimizing your campaigns.
This strategy might not be right for a brand that hasn’t had any sales yet, or if you’ve only had friends and family sales (and especially if you’ve relied thus-far on fake sales and fake followers!). The algorithm for digital ads tends to work by analyzing data from sales that were previously made and leads that were previously generated in order to know who to target as a priority. This means that if you don’t have much data there yet, you might want to focus on getting some organic sales first.
Leveraging Guest Opportunities
Pros:
Its another win-win scenario! You grow your own content by giving other experts in the field a platform to promote their expertise and brand. This will help keep your own audience engaged with a steady flow of new content, it will boost your credibility by borrowing the trust from your expert guests, plus it’s less work for you since the guests will be providing the majority of the content!
It’s super flexible and can work in all kinds of media formats: blogs, podcasts, videos, etc.
Once you’ve invited guests to promote on your website, the likelihood of them offering you the same opportunity on their website or a media outlet run by someone they know, is much more elevated.
Cons:
Convincing the first few top level guests might take a little time. Grow your guest appearances by being selective with who you allow to be a guest and network your way into getting some big names from thought leaders in your field. Once you have a few recognizable guests on your website, the rest will come much more easily.
Off-Page SEO Guest Post Backlinks
Pros:
Its free for both you and the media publication you choose to partner with! Just offer to write an article for their publication that includes links to relevant content you want to promote from your website. The key is to be aligned with their other content and provide relevant, original information to add value to their brand and audience.
It’s a great way to get your content promoted in a place that has already developed an audience.
Your guest post can provide relevant value to the readers which will in turn gain trust for your expertise and eventually warm up into converting to paying customers.
Cons:
Unless you’ve already built up a really large network of blogs and other online publications to post in or be featured on, it can become a numbers game where you really need to aim to reach out as a cold-email to a very large amount of publications before getting a few to agree to publish your work. This can be VERY time consuming, so consider hiring that part out or delegating it accordingly.
Borrowing an Existing Audience
So, the question is, where to start, right? We suggest you go in this order:
BASE Level: First, make sure to have a solid strategy, brand identity, and website design with good SEO strategies applied. You should also have at least 9 posts on social media to give your audience an introductory base of what to expect from your brand.
Quick Exposure: Then, grow your audience organically by getting free leads though strategically borrowing an existing audience.
SOCIAL MEDIA: Next, move on to nurturing those new leads though consistent social media posting and engagement.
Digital Ads: Finally, once you have a few consistent sales under your belt, move on to paid digital ads to multiply your sales and re-target your warm audience.
This post was written by Ceci Jayo, Co-Founder of HIYO DESIGN and Daniel Ramirez, an art & design journalist for HIYO DESIGN