Welcome to another episode of Six Figure Business Coaching and the Marketing VA Advantage.Today, we're excited to have Scott Gabdulin from Learo, an expert in turning prospects into business opportunities, sharing insights on the value of leads for small businesses and practical tips for effective lead generation.

Main Talking Points:

Significance of Leads for Small Businesses:

• Scott emphasizes leads' crucial role in initiating momentum and revenue.
• Explores challenges in exhausting personal networks and the need for sustained lead generation.

Lead Generation Strategies:

• Practical tips for businesses under 100K-500K, focusing on immediate revenue.
• Highlights Google Ads' effectiveness for service-oriented niches like home services.

Balancing Budgets:

• Scott advises a do-it-yourself approach for small businesses with financial constraints.
• Recommends Google Ads for immediate problem-solving and social media for higher-end niches.

Tailoring Lead Magnets:

• Discusses tailoring free lead magnets based on the nature of the product or service.
• Strategies differ for therapists and immediate-service niches like home services.

Transitioning to Marketing Investment:

• Explores the ideal point for small business owners to transition to broader marketing efforts.
• Weighs the decision between hiring more help and investing in marketing for diversified growth.

Power of Video Marketing:

• Discusses the universal appeal of video marketing for building trust and brand presence.
• Highlights video content's role in creating a personal connection with the audience.

Static Ads vs. Video Ads:

• Scott prefers static ads for quick campaign setups during lead generation.
• Acknowledges the high barrier to entry for video but stresses its importance in brand building.

Helpful Links:

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Six Figure Business Coaching 

Mastering Online Marketing for Entrepreneurs

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Welcome to the six figure business mastery podcast, where every week,

Kirsten and Jeannie dive into the essential topics to fuel your business

growth, from copywriting to course creation, mindset to video marketing.

They've got you covered tune in for expert guest interviews on all things,

marketing and business, and learn how to work on your business, not just in it.

So get ready to unlock your business potential and take it to the next level.

Hey everyone.

I'm Kirsten and this is Jeanne with Six Figure Business Coaching

and the Marketing VA Advantage.

And we're excited to have you here on our podcast today.

Jeanne, would you like to introduce our guests?

I would.

We are honored to have Scott Gabdoulin here from Lero, and he is going

to talk to us about getting leads.

So he has a proven track record of turning the trickle of prospects into a

roaring cascade of business opportunities.

I love that.

His expertise isn't just an understanding the funnel, but optimizing,

expanding, ensuring businesses not only compete, but thrives.

Today he's going to talk about the value of leads for small businesses.

So thank you so much for joining us, Scott.

Thank you for having me.

It's a great pleasure to be here.

I feel like lead generation is always.

It's a top of mind topic for businesses, because obviously if

you're not getting leads in the door, you're not making sales,

which means you're not making money.

So you've got some great tips today to talk about lead generation and how

you see small businesses doing that.

Yes.

We work with a lot of different small businesses.

As a matter of fact, I run a number of my own small traditional businesses as well

as my wife and something that we realized.

At the beginning, the early stages of most of the small businesses is that it's

really difficult to find people who are, who you can actually offer you service.

You, you run through your friends and your family fairly quickly, uh, and

that opportunity pool dries up within a few weeks, if not maybe a month

and generating leads is really a, a best way to, I think, build up that

initial momentum in terms of revenue.

before you start to grow a really holistic approach to your brand.

That's at least the philosophy that we apply.

So with our clients, a lot of times what we do, and most of them are in

home services, they are businesses under a hundred, under 200, under

500, 000, who are really looking to, to start to make money right now.

And when we generate leads for them, all they have to do is just

jump on a call, get a conversation going with a potential customer.

And then if they're good at sales, that's a very important point.

You have to be good at closing, right?

It's just being a good operator.

That's great.

But you also require a sales skill in order to close folks

when, whenever they're calling you as looking for your services.

Whenever they're able to do that, we see their cashflow increasing quite,

quite fast, and as a result, they're able to take some of that revenue and

start reinvested back into the business.

They're trying, they can hire more people to help them in terms of contractors,

subcontractors, full time employees, as well as start to invest into the marketing

of their own brands, their own business.

So if a business really can't afford to hire an agency, because I know

a lot of them just can't do that.

What do you recommend for small businesses as far as lead generation?

Yeah.

If you're not at a place where you can invest into agency or outside help, I

would say that the best way would be to perhaps to go and learn on your own.

So do it yourself approach.

And the best leads that we find are usually on Google.

Okay.

So that's.

Maybe a secret, maybe not, but that's what works for us.

Google ads is fantastic for a vast majority of niches out there,

industries, because Google ads are very much a bottom of the funnel channel.

So when people go on Google, what they do is that they have immediate

problems as they're trying to resolve.

Imagine plumbing.

I had a basement, a pipe burst, and I had to find someone right there.

I went on Google, I found someone, someone was here within an hour.

That's an easy close for a plumber.

Just because they know that they have, someone has an emergency and

they'll pay whatever needs to be paid in order to solve the problem.

So that's what's the beauty of Google is that whenever people come

through that particular, particular channel, they're more likely to

translate into an actual transaction.

However, when you do work in specific niches that are more higher end,

I would say real estate niche.

Very much corporate accounting, insurance, mortgage, lead generation tends to

become quite expensive on Google.

So what you might want to do instead is start to invest into

speed advertising on social.

So we're talking about Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, and other

platforms, and the only thing that you have to keep in mind is that whenever

someone is on social media is they're obviously not looking for your service.

They're not there to solve a problem.

They're there to be entertained.

So you have to be very much mindful of that is because if Google

ads is the bottom of the funnel tactic or channel, then social

media is the top of the funnel.

So you have to spend some time nurturing the leads and closing the gap between

the lead being ready to buy something from you and actually just being on the

platform, entertaining, being entertained.

So that's the only thing you have to keep in mind.

The reason why there is a difference between Google and social media

is because Google is finite.

So there's only so much opportunity there.

It's not infinite.

There is only so many people searching for plumbers or electricians or tree service

or lawn care or corporate accounting.

On Facebook, there's 6 billion people.

You can reach out to them anytime you want, and that's the difference.

But across both of those kind of opportunities, it's

all about paid advertising.

In our opinion, that's the fastest way.

To reach the audience, Facebook ads start, paid advertising in general

starts running within 24 hours.

And you just got to be ready after that to get on a call and start closing the leads.

If your ads are done well, obviously.

Yeah.

So do you encourage people to run on social, run an ad to a free lead

magnet or a free webinar or something to warm them up a little bit?

Or do you go right into let's chat?

Yeah, I think that would depend on the product or service that you offer.

If someone is a therapist, there is probably a value in giving

something away for free just because you have to build trust, right?

And if someone is looking for a therapy session, it's.

Likely not something that's an emergency is going to be more of

a long term investment where it's 6, different sessions over the

course of the next 6 to 12 months.

So I think giving away free modules where they can learn a little bit

about self help meditation, perhaps, or anything else that could help with

the problems that they're facing, that would be a good solution.

However, if you are in home, house, home services, let's say lawn care and tree

services, your probably best bet would be to try and capture the information

right away in terms of what's your phone number, what's your address,

we'll give you a free quote, right?

So the biggest selling point is going to be in some kind of an estimate, some

kind of an evaluation visit and whatnot.

Maybe most of the time folks are going to be maybe conscious about their.

Front yard and they're gonna be like, Hey, can you just tell me what's going on here?

Is there pests?

Right.

I'm not sure if I should invest money into service and of any kind.

And that's what a free home evaluation or free yard evaluation

where it could be super helpful.

Yeah.

So what do you recommend for real estate agents and mortgage

people just out of curiosity?

Oh, that one is tough.

We try to stay away from that niche just because it's very

competitive and saturated.

We see better return elsewhere.

But if I was my wife and I both actually consider getting a real

estate license ourselves, just because we love real estate as investors.

But if I was to do that, I think what I would do is I actually

would utilize quite a bit of.

YouTube content, video content, what does tend to happen is that when you

work with real estate agents, a lot of it comes down to trust and basically

making sure that someone is experienced enough for me to get the best deal I can.

So what I would recommend is some kind of video on a page where it

showcases maybe one or two minutes, what do you do as well as what kind

of deals you got for your clients.

Afterwards, an opportunity for someone to book a free evaluation of the

house or, or maybe to have a free call to explore amazing opportunities

that you have as an investor, right?

So that would be my recommendation, but again, we're not particularly,

we don't have extensive expertise in that particular niche, but that's

what I would do is if I was, if I was doing it for clients or for myself.

We love video marketing.

So we're right there with you on that one.

Absolutely.

When do you want to move from investing in leads to investing in marketing?

If you are the point.

As a small business owner where you don't have to be 24 seven running around

the city and performing the job and fulfilling the services, I think that's

a good time to start to evaluate whether you have the extra revenue that you

could direct towards bigger marketing efforts, or there is obviously going to

be always a question of do you hire more?

More help is the employees to do the jobs that you actually offer your clients,

or do you invest it into marketing?

The thing that quite often comes up with businesses that work with

us is pretty logical questions.

Scott, I have, we've gone from zero to.

220, 000 in the last year and a half, right?

We have someone who's done that.

And he's basically saying, what if one day you just disappear, right?

When something happens to you, all those leads just dry up, right?

Because he doesn't have a website really.

He doesn't invest into the website.

And it's a logical question to ask a certain point where you've got.

Three, four folks working for you and all of your kind of businesses

coming essentially through leads through a particular business.

So that's where we honestly tell them is that, yeah, you should

start investing into marketing.

You should build a website.

You should start to look into improving your Google business profile.

Right.

Collecting as many, you should be doing that either way from the beginning,

collecting business reviews, five star reviews from every customer that's happy.

And, and just starting to do more of.

SEO, SEM, as well as starting to invest a little bit into social and video.

So again, it's just, it's a, at a point where you have ink revenue to, to start

to diversify, if that's a good point to start to look beyond the leads and start

to look into more of do the services or go invest into your own education

and learn how to do it yourself.

I.

I've been teaching digital marketing for five years as well in local colleges

in Toronto and educational startups.

And I actually had a student who sat in my class for two weeks.

He came back, uh, after two weeks and he said, I did what you told

me to do on my page in terms of SEO, change the title and whatnot.

And I'm now ranking on the first page of Google.

And I had to hire an assistant to take, to help me with the calls.

So it's, it really does.

Uh, help to actually start to invest into your own business.

But you also gotta be mindful of what stages of business you're in and

do you want to invest into your own education where you do it yourself

because you have the time or do you want to be more in the business

still and you audit it to an agency?

Yeah it's interesting because we've been working with clients

in marketing for a long time.

And one of the things that we find to be true is that business owners

that fall in love with marketing, they tend to really do a great job.

Their brand's really strong, and I think that it is that desire to learn and we've

got a guy who owns a moving company.

And, of course, in the beginning, I'm sure he's schlepping everything up and

down the steps, but now he's got many trucks and lots of people working for

him, and he is just fantastic on video.

He has a great presence on social media, and he really enjoys doing that.

Same thing with, we have another client who's a lawyer and again, just fantastic

on video, because again, it's all about education and, but again, falling in

love with marketing, getting to the point where you really enjoy learning about SEO.

You enjoy learning about video marketing.

You enjoy learning about ads.

Not that you'll always do it all yourself, right?

But that you really understand it enough to make the decision of should I

outsource it or should I hire an agency?

What should I do to go to that next level in my business?

And that's a great point.

Video is a bit of a unicorn is that no matter what size of the business

someone is in is a business owner is doing videos they just enjoy doing.

They love doing it at any size, a million under a million, 5 million, 10 million.

They can still be in it and see our why from it.

However, if someone is small business under a million dollars a year.

And they're doing SEO.

It makes sense.

But once you cross that point of a million dollars, do you really

want to be sitting on a website and tinkering with a headline?

Like it's not worth your time anymore because you could

be recording a video, right?

So that's the type of service that you start to outsource to somebody else.

But video, yeah, it is a truly unicorn just because you get to see yourself.

Other people get to build trust with you, be as a video and build your brand.

I see a lot of business owners just staying with the

video for really a long time.

Like Alex Ramosi and Cody Sanchez, they're just examples of how you go into

hundreds of millions of dollars and you're still generating videos of yourself.

So yes.

So fascinating.

Yeah, we've, we follow both of them and they do a great job.

And it is so amazing because if you watch someone's content, you watch enough of it.

You do feel like you really know them.

So another question for you with ads, do you prefer static ads or do you

prefer video ads with your clients?

Or does it just depend on the industry?

So.

Video is great.

It just has a high, high barrier to entry, right?

So if you were to run ads, definitely video would probably work great.

For us, the biggest selling point in terms of lead generation is that we can.

Stand up a campaign within 24 hours.

So for us to go and create a video and edit it and all that

stuff, that would take too long.

So, especially if it's Google ads, we're just, there's no

real reason to do video there.

There's no opportunity there.

So we don't invest into that as much.

And for the vast majority of the clients, we mostly focus on text and images.

However, Video would be fantastic as part of the brand kind of

building, doing their own marketing.

I would say video is a mandatory thing just because then you can really customize

the look, the feel of it, align it with what your brand is supposed to be.

Whereas for us, we don't.

When, whenever we do lead generation, we don't touch your

website, everything is very generic.

The whole point is just to solve a problem, right?

So when they call up, call to you, that's really where the, the, the

kind of transition happens where you offer your unique value proposition.

But before that, everything is fairly generic.

Uh, we focus primarily on conversion rates.

If it converts, works.

And, and past that point for us is just not as important.

But yes, video works fantastic.

As long as I think it comes from the brand itself, which, which

leads, we don't do as much of it.

Yeah.

This has been absolutely fantastic.

You're a wealth of knowledge, Scott.

We appreciate you coming on and talking to us and educating our audience.

Yeah.

So, uh, if people wanna get in touch with you to talk about you running ads for them

and helping them with lead generation, how would you like them to reach out to you?

Yeah, you can find me on my website, scott gab dolin.com.

You can also find me on LinkedIn or Twitter under the same name, or you can

check out our lead generation website, lead Gen agency website, liro.io.

So it's L-E-A-R-O, LiRo leads hero.

Beautiful twist to it, but yes, that's where you can find me and

you can get in touch with me.

I will be happy to work with you or evaluate your situation

and see how we can help.

Excellent.

And Gabdulin is spelled just like it sounds.

G A B D U L I N.

Scott Gabdulin.

Awesome Scott.

Thank you so much for being here.

We'll have to have you back another time because I know you've got so

many great topics that we can talk with you about that will truly

help everyone who's listening.

So thank you so much.

Thank you.

It's definitely a pleasure.

I'm happy to share as much as I can and hopefully your audience will find

whatever we talked about helpful and, uh, looking forward to hearing the feedback.

Brilliant.

Thank you, Scott.

We'll sign off now.

Thanks for listening to the six figure business mastery podcast.

If you enjoyed listening to this episode and you are ready to leverage video

marketing on all online platforms, or maybe even start your own video

podcast, then you need to check out the done for you and done with you

program at the marketing VA advantage.

com and take your business to the next level.