Bake The Cookies

Want to know the easiest way to get lots of leads?

Here's the recipe for getting tons of leads fast without lots of effort and even if you have no budget or a tiny team.

P.S. If you're looking, here are a few things to help you:

- Hang out with 20 marketing directors for 2 days in Orlando, FL at the Momentum conference. You'll walk away with a simple strategy that works, the skills, plan, and confidence to make it happen. ​Click here for details.​

- Download the Marketing Director Roadmap to get the one-page blueprint to succeeding as a marketing director.

Transcript

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This is the Marketing Director Daily, and I'm Tim Parkin. Let's talk about getting leads because I just had the Marketing Director Roundtable yesterday. We do it every month. It's an awesome event where we bring together a bunch of marketing leaders for free. On Zoom, we spend an hour hanging out, and I teach and share some of the stuff that's working that I'm teaching in the advisory board, which is my private coaching group. So it's a really cool way to see behind the scenes and for me to get to share with everybody the stuff that's actually working right now. And yesterday on the round table, we talked about getting leads, how to get lots of leads for very little budget, with very little time, and without a lot of effort, even if you have a small team. So you don't want to miss the next round table. So go to the website for this podcast, marketingdirectordaily.com, and click the button for the round table to sign up for free for next month so you can join us there. It'll be awesome. It'll be even better. But today I want to talk about one of the concepts that I shared yesterday about how to get more leads. Because if you're like most marketing directors, you need leads. We all need leads. And there's a really easy way to get leads, and that is to give people value. You've heard this before. So how do you do that? And I think we need a new analogy. We need a new way to frame it. And I think there's some nuances here. You can't just say value, give people value, give people what they want, and they'll raise their hand and they'll become a lead. That is probably true, but not very helpful when it comes to actually doing it. I think the best analogy is something that everybody likes, that no one can refuse, and that is cookies. I love cookies. My favorite type of cookie is a chocolate chip cookie or double chocolate. That's a chocolate cookie with chocolate chips in it. Anyways, I love chocolate. So I'd love to know what your favorite type of cookie is. But just by asking you that question, you probably are thinking about cookies. You've probably had a cookie that you've liked in your life. Most people like cookies. I've never met someone that doesn't like cookies, and if I did, I'd probably run away from them because they can't be trusted. People love cookies. This is why Girl Scout season, this is why when the Girl Scouts have cookies for sale, I have to buy multiple boxes because those thin mints are amazing. But I digress. Let's talk about cookies. If you were to come over to your friend's house and sit on the couch, you walk in the door, you sit on the couch, you look to your friend, and you say, Friend, make me some cookies. Can you imagine doing that? Of course not. That would be extremely rude and presumptuous to think that one, they'd have cookies in the house, and two, that they would make them for you. You wouldn't ever do that. At the same time, if you came over to your friend's house and sat on the couch and your friend said, Hey, I've got some cookies in the fridge, do you want me to pull them out and turn in the oven, bake you some cookies? You'd probably say no, because that sounds like a lot of work for them. They weren't prepared to do it, they hadn't already started it, and you don't want to make your friend do work, you just want to hang out. But if you came over to your friend's house, sat on the couch, and they came over with a tray of freshly baked cookies hot out of the oven, and they handed it to you and said, Hey, would you like a cookie? You're probably going to take a cookie. Because it'd be rude not to take the cookie, and because they've already gone through all the work to prepare the cookie and to put it together, and because it looks delicious. That's how I want you to think about getting leads. That your prospect, your ideal customer, is sitting on the couch, and it's our job to bake the cookies, to decide what are the things they would really want, they would love to have a bite of, that are delicious and tasty to them. And let's pre-bake them, let's get them ready for them so that when they show up, we can just give them the cookies and say, Hey, do you want a cookie? When you do this, you'll get a lot more people who bite, who take a cookie, who raise their hand, who become a lead. And I think a lot of people have something in marketing, it's called a lead magnet that they offer people to get a response, to get an engagement, to get a hand raise. But I think there's four different categories that your thing probably falls into, that your offer falls into. So the first is a cookie. Cookies are awesome because they're small, they're bite-sized, it's easy to say yes to, it's sweet, it's tasty, it's something people want, and it gives them a sugar rush. Very important. So is your offer, is your lead magnet, a cookie? If you have something that people really want, that's bite-sized, that's easy to say yes to, that gets them to raise their hand, then you have a nice, perfect cookie. On the other hand, if you have a boring white paper that no one wants, that's not a cookie. So let's talk about the other three categories here. First is a cookie, second is a pizza. Pizza seems cool. Pizza is cheesy and gooey and hot and yummy, but no one can eat a pizza by themselves. And not everybody likes pizza. And if you do like pizza, you probably like a very particular type of pizza. Whereas cookies or chocolate chip cookies, most people like. So pizza, not the best offer, not the best lead magnet, because it's a lot to take in. This is kind of like those white papers that some of you have, where here's my 27-page white paper with 11-point font, 10-point font. And do you want to read this thing? No, nobody wants to read that. So is your offer a pizza? Some of you have an offer that is a pizza. The third category here is an apple, or maybe it's a rotten apple. This is the lead magnet you've had forever, and it's rotten to the core now. It's old, it's ancient, nobody wants this thing. Or maybe you've been reusing it forever. And so people have taken some bites out of it, and now it's just the core of the apple, and no one else is biting because everyone's already gotten the thing that you've been offering. And last but not least, the fourth category here is nothing. If you don't have something to offer people, if you don't have cookies on your tray to offer people, then you got nothing. You got zero, nada. And that's not good because how do you get leads if you have nothing to offer people? This is a value exchange. You give people something of value that they want, and they will give you their attention, their uh information, their permission in return. So what's your offer? That's my question for you today. Do you have a cookie? Do you have pizza? Do you have an apple that maybe is rotten to the core? Or do you have nothing? I would propose to you that you need to have a cookie, that everybody loves cookies, and that if you have a cookie to offer people, you will get a lot of people saying yes. And I'll give you an example of this to make it tangible for you. My offer to people is a roadmap. I built a roadmap over the years, and this is a step-by-step blueprint of exactly where to focus and what to do, in what order, as a marketing director, to have success, to crush your goals, and to level up in your role and advance your career. And the roadmap is a one-page document, so it's very easy to consume and it's very attractive because it outlines exactly what you need to do. And it's what we use in my coaching group, the advisory board. So you know that it's legit and that it's the roadmap many other people like you are following, and you know it can help you. And it's not overwhelming, it's not complicated, it's very simple, it's just one page. That's my cookie. And a lot of people say yes. And so when you design and craft the right cookie, people want it. People say yes to it. You don't have to push your cookie on people, you just have to say, hey, I've got a cookie, do you want it? And people say yes. And if you don't have a cookie, that's not the case. So if you want more people to say yes, if you want more people to raise their hand, if you want more leads, you need to have a cookie. You don't need a pizza or an apple or nothing, you need a cookie. So, what is your offer? Do you have a cookie? And if not, go make one. Start the oven, get out the dough, and start baking.