Hey. Hey, everyone. Welcome back to another episode of Marketing with Empathy. Today I want to ask you a question. What do you offer your customers who aren't yet ready to buy from you? Do you have a strong transitional call to action, a strong freebie of incredible value that you can use to capture that lead and then nurture them over time so that you stay top of mind for them? When they're ready to buy, they think of you and they say yes. But not everyone's ready to say yes right away, right? So many companies miss this. Don't miss out on leads and future revenue. Welcome to Marketing with Empathy, the podcast that helps content marketers more confidently navigate the world of brand storytelling.

I'm your host, Sarah Panus, and I've spent the last 20 years creating and growing successful editorial brand storytelling strategies, teams, and operations. People are craving connections and I'm on a mission to help brands better connect with their audience by creating content people actually want to consume. Think of this show like a creative content marketing jam session mixed with Chicken Soup for the Soul. Let's hear from today's sponsors and then jump right into today's episode. As I do more story brand messaging strategy sessions with companies with business owners, I'm realizing a lot of companies don't have a good transitional call to action. What do I mean by this? Well, for those of you just joining, I am a certified StoryBrand guide. StoryBrand, for those who aren't familiar, is a seven part framework that helps you clarify your sales and marketing messages to use across all channels in a way that will help you drive more business and treat your customer as the hero. I'm going through these strategy sessions with company after company, and when we get to Call to Actions, there's a part where we're going to think about what's like the really clear direct call to action, if they're going to buy or sign up or schedule a call or something like that.

But the reality is not everyone is going to be ready to do those things at that time for various reasons. It could be time constraints, it could be budgetary constraints, it could be whatever life cycle they're in. It just doesn't fit into that moment. But hey, three weeks from now, they're ready. Or maybe even four months from now, depending on what you sell, what product or service you sell, a transitional call to action is a really good lead generating freebie of value that you offer to your potential customer to capture the lead, add value, and help attract the right people to your brand. A lead generator is a way to gather email addresses from people interested in your area of expertise. You deliver valuable content in the lead generator and then use their email to send an email nurture sequence that leads them through a sales process. Get to know you better.

Your lead generating freebie should help solve the customer's problem. So you have to really isolate and always come back to what is the customer's problem? What's going to be valuable to them, that you could help in some small way to demonstrate your authority in the space that you know what the heck you're talking about. Demonstrate your empathy that you can relate and understand the problems that they are going through and be able to pull in their information. Because even though you've hooked them with your story and if you've done all of the things right, they may not be ready to buy right at that moment for various reasons, like I mentioned. So you don't want to lose them, right? You don't want to lose them because as you know, we're all so busy. Maybe we hop on one site, we look at a product one day, we may think we like it. For me, I screenshot a lot of things on my cell phone, which ends up kind of going into this abyss on my phone. Really, half the time I don't even go back and look at them.