The Four-Part Marketing System That Creates Predictable Leads

We break down the four-part marketing system we use to build predictable lead flow without chasing trends or busy work. We explain how to spot the real bottleneck in your pipeline so you stop making emotional changes and start making data-based decisions. 
• why a signature process makes marketing tangible without rigid steps 
• the Attract stage and consistent visibility with the right audience 
• the Nurture stage and what trust building actually looks like 
• how Instagram, TikTok, and email function differently in the pipeline 
• Convert as sales plus micro conversions that happen before buying 
• outbound outreach, follow-up, and having more real conversations 
• Optimize through KPIs, tracking trends over time, and avoiding panic pivots 
• diagnosing website performance by separating conversion rate from traffic volume 

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Transcript

Welcome And The No Random Rule

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Welcome back to Think Like a CMO, the podcast for entrepreneurs who are ready to stop doing random acts of marketing and to start thinking like the chief marketing officer of your business actually needs. What's up? I'm your host, Sarah Gebel. I'm a marketing strategist and consultant helping small business owners build marketing ecosystems that actually create predictable results and predictable lead flow. Around here, we keep it real about what it really looks like to step into your role as a CMO, to start seeing the big picture, to start leading your marketing with strategy, and to stop wasting time with productive, busy work that isn't actually getting you anywhere, okay? This is all about no fluff, honest conversations, potent strategies, and practical insights that you can use right now to make your marketing work smarter. Over the course of the last 10 years, helping over 1,300 business owners with their marketing, I've developed a four-step process that has been proven to work across industries. It does not matter what type of industry you're in, what type of business you run. This four-step approach works in every single marketing strategy, and I'm gonna break it down for you right

Why A Signature Process Helps

SPEAKER_00 1:07

now. So grab your pen, grab something to take notes with. I have historically been very picky about not uh calling myself a coach, and I still stand by that. And one of my biggest things in not being a coach is in the online coaching space, right? A lot of it revolves around signature frameworks, and I kind of avoided that for a long time because I didn't want to be thought of as a coach, I didn't want to be called a coach, not because I think anything wrong is wrong with coaching, it's just different, right? Coaching and consulting are two very different things, and I am just like in my bag in the consulting arena. But I noticed something in my own marketing that it was hard to make tangible for people exactly how it worked when I helped them with their marketing. And I don't stick to frameworks in terms of like step one is this and step two is this, right? I'm also an ADHD brain and it's not at all how I consume, so it's not how I teach either. But I found that in creating signature processes and signature frameworks, it allowed for me to make what I do more tangible. And that's really where a lot of this came from, and that's why I really sat down and turned what I do every single day with business owners across industries into this four-step process, into the signature process, because it helps make it more tangible what I do, yes, but it also helps you make your own marketing more tangible and to like to start looking at your marketing, like a CMO, right, is the podcast. But to really start looking at the entire pipeline as one big picture, as opposed to just like what's gonna get me to go viral on Instagram, what's the best subject line hook for my emails? This really allows for you to zoom out 3,000 feet and see it as all one cohesive big picture. Another important thing about this signature process before we jump into it is that it's not linear. You don't always start at one and go to two and then three and then four. You bounce around to different ones based on what season you're in, and it allows for you to be flexible and you revisit each one of these stages all the time, right? Every single month, every single quarter, you're revisiting all four of these areas. So this is not a linear, um, rigid, you know, you have to do this and then you do this and then you do this. But it allows for you to give your marketing structure without the rigidity. The signature process is attract, nurture, convert, and optimize. And sometimes I'll change out optimize for retain, but for the sake of this, the most popular one that I use is attract, nurture, convert, and optimize. So this is how I look at any marketing strategy.

Attract And Consistent Visibility

SPEAKER_00 3:57

Attract is where are you getting visible? How are you getting in front of more of the right people? Nurture is the content that warms people up, right? You hear all the time you need to build no-like trust, but very few people actually break it down in how you can do that and how you can do it quicker. Because the longer it takes for you to build no-like trust, the longer your sales cycle is gonna be. Convert usually is the is the sales process, right? But there is a lot that happens in the marketing to set you up for success in the convert phase, but there's also not just the conversion of the sale, there's a lot of different points of conversion in your marketing. So, for example, getting someone to follow you on social media is a conversion, right? Getting someone from your social media to your website is a conversion. Getting someone from your email to click on the button to go to a landing page is a conversion. There are a lot of different conversions that happen before they buy. So, yes, we look at revenue and and and money conversion, but we also look at all of these micro conversions beforehand. I say all the time that marketing and sales are very different. You cannot measure the success of your marketing the way that you would measure the success of your sales, which typically is revenue, right? Marketing is all about the visibility, the audience growth, the brand awareness, right? The opt-ins, the the lead generation. So that's the convert. And then optimize, and we talk a lot about this on this podcast, is thinking like a CMO means that you track the performance of your marketing on a consistent regular basis. You know exactly which metrics to track, right? Which ones are the most important based on your key performance indicators or your KPIs. And then you make data-based decisions on what to lean into and what to change. I'm gonna read you a little bit from a guide I have for my clients in this four-step process, right? Attract, nurture, convert, and optimize. We have a guide that they can follow of like what are the focus areas of each one. I'm gonna read it to you because this is gonna be really helpful to narrow down exactly where in this process you have the biggest gap or the biggest opportunity to focus first, right? So attract is obvious. Attract is getting in front of the right people consistently. Are you consistently getting yourself out there, building brand awareness, getting in front of new people, and not just getting in front of masses, but getting in front of the right people? So some focus areas here are the messaging you use for cold audience who have no idea who you are, right? The focus area is market research. It's search engine optimization. How are people discovering you? What are your visibility strategies, right? A lot of times in visibility, this could be networking, partnerships, referrals, um, social media platforms that are specifically designed for visibility or paid advertising that is specifically for cold audiences or new audiences. What are you doing to get in front of more of the right people? Are you speaking? Are you getting on podcasts? The most important thing in this phase is that you do not only focus on visibility and attraction when you need it. This is gonna set you up for failure. This is very reactive marketing. It is very normal, right, for entrepreneurs because it's hard to balance all four of these things when you're also doing client work. I fully acknowledge that. But you cannot just focus on visibility when you need to close a sale because this is the top of the pipeline. You have to be constantly feeding the top of the pipeline and giving people a chance and enough time to make their own autonomous decision to work through the pipeline, to make their way down, to be closer to a buying decision without feeling pressured or controlled. We know that marketing psychology says if someone feels controlled or judged or rushed or pushed that they are going to defy and they're gonna push back and they're gonna get defensive.

Nurture Content That Builds Trust

SPEAKER_00 8:09

Okay, number two is nurture. The focus areas under nurture. This is all about how we're building trust, right? So, what is the specific messaging that we use for people who know who we are but need more information to build the trust? The messaging is very different. What type of content on what platforms are you using specifically for nurturing? So I'll give you a great example. On Instagram specifically, okay, Instagram itself is not a huge visibility platform. Right now, it's more of a nurture platform for most small business owners. But on Instagram, like your regular feed, could be a little bit of visibility. It's mostly gonna be nurture content for a lot of us. The stories is like 100% nurtured content. Very few new people are going to see your stories. That's where you're gonna have warmer and hotter people that are ready to be nurtured and nurtured and nurtured and nurtured, right? Then on Instagram trial reels, that's all cold audience. So that's not nurtured content, that's all cold audience content. Another example is if you're on TikTok, that is visibility content. But if you're creating content for your email list, that is all nurture content, it is all trust building content. Email marketing is a huge area of focus in the nurture phase because there's really no way for new people to see your email marketing. They have to have discovered you from somewhere else and had some other way of getting on the email list in order to receive that content. Um, and you should not be adding people to your email list that don't know who you are or didn't opt in, right? That's illegal. Don't do that. So email marketing is a big area of focus in the nurture content. The other thing that's a big area of focus is follow-up systems, having follow-up systems and also having relationship building uh systems with referral partners, collaboration partners. We don't always want to be seeking new collaboration partners and referral partners, right? We also want to nurture the relationships that we have so that we keep that consistent, mutually beneficial relationship going. I've seen this big trend on social media specifically lately about you know, clients don't buy from nurtured content. It's such a load of shit. Please don't buy what those people are selling, okay? Buyers need to be nurtured. No matter how you cut the cake, it's still cake. They need to be nurtured, okay? Is that a saying? I don't know, but it is now, okay? People need to be nurtured, and it all depends on their buyer behavior of what is actually going to nurture them. There's been this common misconception in what nurture content is. You don't always have to educate someone in nurture content, and you don't always need to teach them how to do it themselves. That's usually where the disconnect is, right? But nurturing them just means I am giving you more information that allows for you to feel like you can trust me more than you did before. And it is just downright insane to me to think that you don't need that. It's almost like borderline entitled to think that you don't need to nurture before someone buys from you. It's just how you nurture depends on who your audience is and what their buyer behavior is. We don't want to nurture the people who have no intention on buying naturally, right? But if you have a 3K offer, a 5K offer, a 10K offer, you want people to spend thousands of dollars with you, you cannot just assume that you don't have to nurture them to get them to spend money with you. Now, if you have like a $27 offer, a $5 offer or a $100 offer, do you need to do as much nurturing? Maybe not. Right? We shouldn't need as many touch points to sell something at $20 that we need to sell at $20,000. But every business needs nurture content, especially service providers. Service providers, please, for the love of all those holy, do not let anyone tell you that nurture content is not relevant anymore. Okay, I

Convert With Micro Conversions

SPEAKER_00 12:16

digress. Let's move right into number three, which is convert. Conversion, we talked about this in the beginning, right? So, yes, we look at the sales conversion, of course, but all those micro conversions that come before it, figure out where are you showing up in your marketing, right? What is considered a conversion at every single step of the marketing that you currently have? How are you turning conversations and attention into actual leads? So the focus area for this particular stage or this particular part of the signature process it could be pitching, right? So are you pitching uh in DMs, in person? Are you pitching for speaking opportunities, for collaboration opportunities? Are you pitching for media features? You can this also kind of ties into outreach strategies. Not so much, I don't believe in cold pitching, right? But I do believe in cold outreach, right? Inbound lead generation is great. Inbound lead generation means that you are putting out marketing content and people are seeing it and they're coming to you and saying, Yes, I need this. But out go uh outbound lead gen means that you're going to them and saying, Hey, my name is Sarah Alpha Marketing. I would love to connect. Are you, you know, are you looking for marketing support? Or I have this freebie, you might really like it. Is it okay if I send you the link? Doing outbound read uh lead gen is also important and falls into this conversion, um, into this conversion phase. Sales conversations, how many conversations are you having with actual leads who are at any stage of ready to buy? Right? How many people are actually getting on your calendar for a sales call? How many people are in your email inbox or DMing you on social media asking you how to work with you? It's really important that we consistently understand that in order to feed these bigger conversions, we have to get the smaller conversions, but what does that look like? Right? It's not updating the website for the tenth time, it's not creating a new product, it's not updating an email automation, it is getting out, and in this stage, a big, big piece of this stage, a big area of focus is having the conversations with people and actually following up. Email marketing could also be used here. Uh, we could look at email automations and how we follow up with people post, you know, opt-in or post-sales call or whatever. Could be argued that we do that. But I will never ever ever tell you to focus and building an automation before you have organic proof of concept. Doing it organically and manually, yes, is time consuming, but when you're looking to figure out what works and when you're revisiting the messaging and the offer and all of these things, and you want to boost conversion and you want to boost conversion quickly, then organic and manual is the way to

Optimize With Metrics Not Moods

SPEAKER_00 15:02

go. Number four is so huge and so important, yet it's probably the most missed, especially in small business owners and solopreneurs. Optimize is all about how you can make smarter decisions and refine what you're doing. How can you stop recreating the wheel every single month? How can you stop constantly chasing and reacting and doing all these things and actually start making database decisions? We're talking about like marketing systems, and marketing ecosystems is a huge thing you'll hear me say all the time. Attract, nurture, convert, optimize is the signature framework for building the marketing ecosystem, right? And in order to have a marketing ecosystem that runs like a well-oiled machine, you have to track your numbers consistently and constantly. You have to know exactly what your metrics are that matter to you. And we'll do another podcast episode on that because it's it's really important that we dive into that. But it's looking at here's what numbers actually matter, actually tracking those numbers and making data-based decisions. So I'll give you a great example. If we're tracking the open and click rates of your emails, right, you're sending weekly newsletters to your list, we're tracking open and click rates, which arguably click rates are more important, but open rates we still track. In the first 30 days, you have a 25% open rate and a 1% click rate. You can't tell me that's good or bad because you have nothing to compare it to, right? So we implement strategies to improve the email marketing for 30 days, then we track what's the open rate, what's the click rate. If in 30 days the open rate is 28% and the click rate is 2%, the open rate hasn't really gone up that much. But we've doubled the click rate, right? And we also compare it to what the average is. An average of 20 to 40% open rate is great, but that's not the same for a click-through rate. An average click-through rate right now, I believe, is like three to five percent. Five percent would be like super great. So if you go from one to two, that is a big jump. But you want to keep track of it over time because when you get to 90 days, 120 days, now you can see is it this linear progress, or is it real volatile? Or did we have one month that was really good but it was an outlier and none of the other months match up? So now instead of saying, well, my open rate is only 25%, when you get to 35% open rate, you can say, wow, we increased our open rate by 10%. Now you have something to actually compare it to, not just your emotional brain telling you it's just not enough. And that's a big thing I see in entrepreneurs is we see these numbers. I'll give you a great example. A client of mine um was telling me about her website traffic and her website conversion. So we had the total traffic and the total conversion, and she's like, Sarah, I'm only converting at 2%. And in her mind, 2% was so terrible because two out of 100 seems low, right? And she's like ready to burn it to the ground. She was so upset, she was so discouraged. She was trying to make these major changes to the structure of her marketing in order to convert more on the website. And then we get to talking, and I say 2% is actually really great. We want to be somewhere like 3%, 4%, 5% conversion rate from a website like this with mostly cold traffic, right? If it was warm traffic, I would want it to be higher. But cold traffic to a product-based website, 2% is great. Yeah, we can get it up a little bit, but it's not that bad. So here's what the industry averages for this type of site. It's really not that bad. She's like, but Sarah, I'm not making any sales. And it's like, okay, well, let's look at it's actually not the conversion rate. We don't need to completely overhaul the website. What we need to do is we need to look at the total traffic, right? The total traffic is not high enough. So how do we build the traffic to the website? We need to get it visible to more people. We need to remind people it's there. We need to have better front-end marketing that better directs them to the website, right? So we need to build that aspect of it. But at the end of the day, making major structural changes to the marketing and offering a bunch of discounts to in hopes convert higher is not the answer. And this is where we start to make emotional decisions. This is a great example of emotional decision, right? Instead, in order to get the total sales for the day up, we can increase the trap the conversion rate a little bit with little tweaks on the website, but we first need to focus on getting more traffic. We need to look at the total traffic and get that to a healthy number before we can say that it's not it's the website that's not working. Right now, the front-end marketing is not even getting them to click onto the website. That is the problem. So you need to focus on creating better content. See now where when we track these numbers, when we actually look at the numbers, we can identify the exact thing that needs to be focused on. If you have low traffic but a great conversion, and you think your conversion is trash wise, I had 1500 people on the website today, but at 2% conversion, that's only about one sale, right? Or you look at the fact that that 1,500 clicks onto the website were somewhere in another country where you don't even ship your products. Now we know that we have to dig and get curious and really investigate where is this traffic from the website coming from? Because right now it's coming from the wrong place. It's getting us in front of the wrong audience. And it's also just simply not high enough.

Find The Gap And Set Cadence

SPEAKER_00 20:48

Now that you've listened to me flap my gums, okay, about the signature process that I approach every single marketing strategy through. I want you to really think about where do you have the biggest opportunities? Which phase of this have you been ignoring or neglecting over the last 30, 60, or 90 days? That's gonna tell you where you can focus first because what you don't want to neglect any of these totally. Over a 30-day process or a 30-day um yikes, Sarah, words are hard. Over a 30-day period, you should be hitting all four of these. You should be doing all four of these things every single month. And there's a way that you can come up with a cadence of figuring out exactly what you should be doing daily, weekly, and monthly in your marketing. And starting here will help you to break down that cadence and that rhythm. And see now where we're creating a system. And when you have a system, you can create predictable and reliable lead flow. And when you have predictable and reliable fleet lead flow, you will have predictable and reliable cash flow.

unknown 22:00

Yeah.