🧑‍💻 Mastering lead gen & consumer trust

Proven strategies for growing your audience and keeping them engaged in 2024 and beyond

Photo by Phil Desforges on Unsplash

If your customers aren’t giving you feedback, how do you know what needs to improve?

This week, we’re digging into strategies designed to establish a solid foundation for your startup—and keep people coming back time and again.

Today’s agenda:

🧑‍💻 The state of today’s consumer

🏆 Top lead gen strategies in 2024

🗞️ How to get people to read your newsletter

💼 Briefly: Reaching Gen Z, PC’s comeback, and inflation targets

⏱️ Up & coming: Experiential marketing rises again

🤫 Why consumers are staying silent

Consumers aren’t sharing their experiences and they don’t trust how businesses are using AI, according to a massive new consumer trends report from Qualtrics

The report gathered insights from nearly 24,000 consumers in 23 countries.

🔑 MarTech’s Kim Davis shared a few key takeaways he extracted from the report:

• Consumers aren’t sharing good or bad experiences on social media: And if they tell anyone about it, it’s family or friends. Isabelle Zdatny, head of thought leadership at Qualtrics’ XM Institute, told MarTech that she believes this reflects a “general erosion of trust” from consumers, and that they don’t see the value in providing feedback.

• Only 26% of consumers trust businesses to use AI responsibly: Consumers are not nearly as excited as companies are about having to connect with AI agents rather than human ones.

What startups and entrepreneurs can take away from the report

Your customers need to be able to trust you in order to become loyal to your business.

👉 Strive to make it clear to your customers that their feedback is valuable, and that it’s being used to make their experiences better. If they’re thinking, “What’s the point of offering feedback if I’m never coming back,” you need to figure out where, when, and how this is happening so you can interfere.

👉 Be transparent about how you use AI, and how it offers value to them.

🏗️ Start with a solid foundation

When a startup is building out their lead generation strategy, there are several channels they can use—and it’s easy to end up starting with the wrong mechanisms.

▶️ Watch my video on the Top 5 Winning Lead Generation Strategies to build a strong lead gen foundation, specifically tailored to tech startups and other entrepreneurial ventures.

In my video, I use this visual to help us dive into all components of the Lead Generation Flywheel.

💪 Topics I cover:

• Leveraging your existing local network/community

• Implementing a CRM system as soon as possible

• Investing wisely in PPC and SEO

• Content and social media marketing

• Collaboration to expand your reach

💡 Subscribe to my YouTube channel for more!

✍️ Get those signups

Newsletters are a smart marketing tool for startup founders and entrepreneurs because they provide a direct line of communication to your audience—free from the restrictions and algorithms of social media.

🎉 They also are:

• Cost-effective

• Scalable

• Trust/authority builders

• Data-rich

🧰 One of the hardest parts about starting a newsletter is building a solid list of subscribers.

Strategies for newsletter success

⭐ Award-winning digital marketer Kim Rittberg has the following tips for getting people to sign up:

• Offer a lead magnet: Create a free resource (a guide, quiz, checklist, etc.) that directly addresses your audience’s pain points and aligns with what they need

• Provide value to build trust: Consistently offer helpful, relevant content to encourage people to subscribe and stay on your list

• Try a welcome sequence: Create a short series of engaging emails to welcome new subscribers and keep them coming back for more (AI can help you brainstorm/structure this)

• Start small, build as you go: You don’t need the perfect funnel to get started—just begin writing and connecting, and you can refine as you go

💡 Schedule a Discovery Session to see how we can accelerate your go-to-market and lead-generation strategy.

Briefly

👋 Trying to reach Gen Z on social media? Read this guide to understand more about this unique generation and how you can turn them into loyal customers

🤖 Generative vs. predictive AI: Check out this infographic to see their differences, benefits, limitations, and more (it’s free to sign up for MarketingProfs)

🗣️ If you want to tell more dynamic, engaging brand stories, take a look at these 6 ideas of audio/video storytelling from brands that were recognized at the the 2024 Content Marketing Awards or Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity

💻 PC vs. Apple: New report predicts a strong holiday season comeback for the PC industry

📉 Recent inflation data suggests the Fed has reached its 2% goal, which may mean more rate cuts in the future

📒 Interested in a Field Notes subscription? Watch me unbox my latest quarterly drop and see how I’m using the different notebooks

Up & Coming

Remember experiential marketing? The industry was starting to explode before the pandemic hit, then took a sharp dive as lockdowns ensued.

Now it’s making a comeback—a predicted $128.35 billion comeback.

Should you invest in this type of marketing? Read more insights here.