I have been so blessed over the past 4.5 years while I have grown my business to be able to mostly have business come from word-of-mouth and client referrals. I have been super lucky in that way, and I am forever grateful for your continued support.
As our overarching business, Aura Palms, expanded into a personal virtual assistant agency at The Village Assist, we started to do some real work into lead generation. These are things we have done for PR clients of ours, but its the first time we have done cold pitching of leads for our own businesses. So I wanted to share with you some of our top favorite lead generation tools we have used with other clients are currently using to build Aura Palms Marketing and The Village Assist.
First off is the OG (sort of) which is ManyChat. We have different automations set up to grab leads to include auto-DM with a comment to lead magnets, auto-DM with a follow, and auto-DM with specific words in a message. Comment ManyChat now to see this working in real time.
Hand in hand with ManyChat is email marketing. We use Mailerlite and as a fractional CMO and owner of my own marketing firm it is absolutely my favorite email marketing platform. It’s so intuitive and easy to use, with regular people language instead of that weird marketing language that confuses everyone. When someone signs up one of our lead magnets, they will go onto an email list in Mailerlite which we use to target them through email marketing. Comment lead magnet and you’ll go through the ManyChat automation in real time to see what it’s like.
Third is Apollo.io. This handy Google Chrome extension and software helps us to find the actual email addresses of potential leads. Not a general “business” email but the actual email of a person. We use it for finding leads on LinkedIn as well as searching their database for leads. We use this mostly for PR, media outreach, and corporate clients.
Lastly, we have this lead gen tracker, which you can grab at the link here, to help keep everything organized and so the team knows where we are in the outreach process. This is a huge lift because it helps us to know who we have reached out to, where they are in the process, and I even have a spot where we can put why we lost a client so we have data to analyze and refine our process. This is also something we give clients access to so they can see where we are in the lead generation and outreach process, what deliverables will be provided, and due dates for content.
Lead generation is a process, and I did this reel to talk about how I’m getting over the ick of cold pitching and making it more personal and less AI templated because no one wants an impersonal email from an AI bot- especially when you’re trying to do business with them.
And as always, here are some social trends you can use this week:
Trending socials
You may disagree with me but…
BRoll reel with the overlay text of “You may disagree with me but I think every ________ should __________.”
Add in your target demographic and the solution your provide into the blanks. Add a trending audio and bam, super simple reel for this week.
Waiting
Broll with the overlay text of “Me waiting for _______ to find my page so that ________.”
In the first blank put your target demographic, and in the second blank but what they will find on your page of if they follow you.
Unexpected Signs
This is a static graphic of a blank street sign with either your current offer, pain point, or relatable quote.
We would love to chat with you if you need help with PR, lead generation, or reaching out to leads. Contact us to schedule a free discovery call today!
Hope to see you with the Aura Palms team soon!
Best,
Lauren, Founder
