How to generate 7000 leads in 14 days
I came across a great example of digital marketing yesterday: A fellow digital marketing professional had managed to generate approximately 7000 leads in just 14 days, and the share count was gaining momentum!!!
Allow me to share the methodology that he used to help his post go viral…
1. It all starts with a lucrative post, offering targeted, useful information. This was the post that appeared in my news feed on LinkedIn…You’ll notice that one of my LinkedIn contacts had commented on the post.
Essentially, the original post came from a chap who was “Giving away” his digital marketing plan. I like the language being used there. He didn’t say “Free digital marketing plan” like everyone else does, he said, “Giving Away MY digital marketing plan”. To me, the reluctant undertones somehow make the download feel more valuable than another FREE download, and the number of comments underneath provided enough social proof for me to take a look in more detail.
2. Within the post I found a sneak peek of what the downloadable content was offering, along with some instructions on how to actually download the content. Here are the instructions he gave:
On the face of it, this seems fair enough – Essentially, this guy is willing to give me his digital marketing plan in return for my email address, and that’s all, right?! Hmm not quite. Step number 2 contains a little white lie, and I’ll explain why in a minute. But for now, let’s follow his instructions by heading over to his landing page and entering my email address…
3. So here it is, we’ve arrived at the landing page, and I’m being asked for 3 snipperts of information. My name, my email address, and confirmation that I had commented on his LinkedIn post (I personally decided to skip the step of commenting on his blog post, but I still wrote “yes” into the final form field here (trading lie for a lie).
4. Following the submission of that form I was pushed through to the following thank you page:
It all seems friendly and innocent, except for that “powered by drip” link at the bottom, which strengthens my suspicions of the lie I was talking about in the previous step…. The “Drip” link takes you through to the website of a marketing automation provider.
5. Regardless, I received the following message to my inbox (this came through at 4:33pm).
Then I waited whilst he “double checked” his comments section on Linkedin, but I still didn’t comment “yes” on his linkedin post. Then, as if by clockwork, this email came through exactly 30 minutes later:
…but wait a minute, I didn’t comment on his post! And look at that, the address at the bottom of this email says he’s mailing from Perth, Australia. Perth are 8 hours ahead of us, making it approximately 1am there. WOW!!! This man is both really generous and a very hard worker (what a great guy!!!!)…ok enough of the sarcasm.
Clearly a machine is at work here. He didn’t check his comments at all… he simply set a 30-minute delay command on the drip-feed email service he is using, and the whole process is automated…Which is a good job considering 7000 people want his downloadable “give-away”, it would be far too much work to send this information manually.
So why is this post going viral?
Well, let’s reverse engineer the instructions he gave in his LinkedIn post and translate them into what they really mean…
Instruction Translation
1. Comment on my post. That way, a good number of your Linkedin contacts will see it in their news feed too.
2. Go to this landing page and give me your email address. I’m not going to check that you’ve commented, I just wanted to scare you into thinking that I wasn’t going to send you the content you’ve asked for. This will ensure that you inadvertently share the content with your friends.
3. I want you to endorse my content by physically clicking the share button (notice how the total number of shares is only about 6.5% of the total number of comments, but this is irrelevant since you’ve already shard the content with your contacts by commenting on it).
When I started writing this post (about 2 hours ago), the number of comments stood at 6733. It’s now at 6900 - the post is snowballing, and it’s almost entirely down to this clever methodology.
Whilst this isn’t the first time this particular method has ever been used, I wouldn’t say it’s something you see every day (yet), so hats off to this marketing professional - That’s some pretty awesome digital marketing!
As a side note, I have no idea whether or not the marketing plan is any good or not, but I’ll be sure to head over to his post and contribute my “yes” once I’m happy to endorse the content to all of my contacts.
