You’ve almost certainly landed on a squeeze page at some point if you use your computer or mobile device to research information or learn.
What’s a squeeze page? One of those web pages that offers you a free download – or sometimes a video – in return for your name and email address. Usually the download has a compelling title like:
- 27 marketing mistakes business owners make
- Your top ten strategies for getting great staff
- Your business health and safety checklist
There’s nothing wrong with this – in fact, it’s something I recommend my clients offer to build their marketing lists – but it does have to deliver value.
In marketing terms it’s known as an ‘ethical bribe’. You deliver valuable information and the recipient gives you their contact information in order to access it.
Generally a squeeze page is the first stop in a marketing funnel. You offer something free to establish a relationship.
Leveraging your marketing funnel
The next step is to communicate with the people who have ‘signed up’ something at low cost – a book, a low cost webinar, a small product (it depends whether you sell products or services – or both), a short course. People who buy are now moving down your funnel.
Now you can offer them something at a higher cost and, although fewer people will buy at each stage, some will and a handful will eventually become premium clients who buy your high cost services/products.
While you may need to get a few hundred people downloading your free ethical bribe to sell one low cost item and probably a few thousand to convert one into a premium client, it’s still worth doing. This is lead generation almost on autopilot.
The key to open the door to converting people from free to customers is to deliver really good value in that initial document. Now video is so popular many people recommend that the free item is now a video rather than a pdf download, but you need to know your audience to decide what will work best. The challenge with videos is that they take time to ‘consume’ and, if someone is busy they may not want to or have time to watch right now, whereas the download process for a written document only takes a few seconds.
Setting it up
- If you’re struggling to come up with material that will interest potential clients – think about the questions that your existing clients often ask you. The information you give them – usually free of charge – because you’re knowledgeable about it and they need to know – is a great place to start.
- Give it a compelling title – what problem does it solve for the reader? What pitfalls will it help them avoid?
- Don’t ramble – a short, punchy one pager is better than a vague, rambling two pager. The value is in the content, not the length.
Put it on your website linked to a data capture system, promote it on Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn – and then you’ve opened your funnel for business!
