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.

You want to hook people before they're gone and they forget about you. Offer a strong freebie that they perceive to be worth enough to give you their email address. This is really key because most people don't want more emails, but they will sign up for emails that are incredibly valuable for them. Some research shows that your freebie needs to have a perceived value worth at least $11 in the minds of your potential customer or they won't give you their email. So you want to be thinking about, is this thing worth at least $11 if I was going to sell it? So that this person will see an incredible amount of value in how it could help solve a smidge of the problems that they're going through. Your freebie needs to help solve that customer's problem in some small way that's going to be most interesting to them and prove to them that like I said, you're the authority, you're the expert and helps them keep you top of mind so that when they choose, when they're ready to buy, they're going to think of you first. So I want to give you guys some examples of different kinds of lead generating ideas just to get the juices flowing here and to look at your own process to say, okay, do we as a company have a good enough freebie? Offer transitional call to action for those people who aren't yet ready to buy, but we can pull them into our email list and be able to nurture them over time? Quizzes quizzes are a fantastic lead generator. I'm actually learning right now and going through a course with a previous guest we had on the show, Helen Munshi, going through and developing my own Quiz funnel.

And so I will be talking about that in future months here on the show after I have some results under my belt and we'll see how the whole process goes and I'll have Helen come back on and we can dissect that further. But quizzes are incredibly interactive, really interesting. If you frame them up right, can be a great opportunity. There can be PDFs, like a download this nice catchy title. Now checklist a free sample or a discount coupon, videos, podcast, episode, like something exclusive or doesn't even have to be exclusive. It could just be something you're promoting in that place that they may not have seen if they don't subscribe already to your podcast, ebook, a playbook of some kind, a guide, a handbook x mistakes to avoid like my freebie, I have eight mistakes to avoid when creating your content marketing strategy. It walks through in depth things I've learned over the last 20 years to help people streamline their plans and processes. There's also X number of essentials list like main things to have or not have, things like that that gets people to be wondering what am I missing out on, what don't I know about that I should know about, what are resources that I should be looking into, things like that.

So those are some initial ideas that work really well as lead generators. And if you need any help clarifying your marketing and sales messages and thinking of good lead generation ideas that tie back into your customer and the problem that they have and how you help in all of that, go ahead and book a free discovery call with me. I do free 30 minutes zoom calls to discuss your content needs and see if my story brand messaging strategy session might be a good fit, or if you just need me to help brainstorm and think through or create some lead generators for you that you can use as transitional call to actions. You can schedule that free discovery call on my website@kindredspeak.com, that's kindredspeak.com. So don't leave your leads and revenue on the table guys. You need to have a really great one of these and get it live, push it out there and then rotate throughout them throughout the year as you start to see fatigue. So that way you can be honing in on these different folks. The other piece and the other beautiful thing with transitional call to actions that a freebie can do is it can help you actually segment your leads list too, because you can segment based on the topic of the freebie and the people that are coming in.

So like, let's say you're a realtor and you have a freebie that's geared toward first time home buyers and you have a second freebie that's geared toward empty nesters who are looking to downsize two very different freebies, right? So you know the leads that are coming in through that first time home buyers, that they are first time home buyers and you can market to them appropriately as such versus the empty nesters. And what your content plan can look like to those leads. So it's kind of a way to easily segment your leads list with those qualifying topics and questions that will come out of it. I hope this is helpful and sparked some ideas for you wanted to plant that seed, especially as we're getting to the end of the year and you may be starting into the next content plans and ideas. But this is definitely something to get up on your site to be sharing and talking about across your channels to be capturing those leads. So until next week, God bless. If you're hearing this, I know you work in the world of content marketing, but here's the deal you want to be a content marketing leader, but marketers don't have enough time to do content marketing. Well, I'd love to help you check storytelling projects off your marketing to do list using my 20 years of frameworks and methods so you get your time back while confidently engaging new and existing customers.

For example, I'm a certified Story brand guide and would love to help clarify your messaging strategy for your overall brand as well as your editorial Storytelling content plans. Let me help you plan, implement and scale your content plans. There's a variety of ways we can work together, including day rates, online training courses, all the way through to longer term retainer projects. Schedule a discovery call with me to discuss your business needs by going to my website@kindredspeak.com. That's kindredspeak.com.