Make sure that you don't leak leads on your website, that, you know, you're paying a lot of money to get that traffic to your website.
You cannot wait 3 days to get back to people. You need to get back to them within 3 minutes.
I've actually seen startups with a great idea that nobody wants. So you've got to know that somebody wants what you have and then, then go find them, go get it.
Hey everybody, and welcome to Marketing Guides for Small Businesses podcast. Today we're tackling one of the most overhyped topics in marketing, fast lead generation. Because the truth is most businesses do not have a lead problem first. They have a focus problem, a trust problem, or a follow-up problem. Buyers are researching across AI, across Google, across reviews, videos, social, and AI-powered discovery because they are— they want to find a solution to their problem, right? So the businesses that win are the ones that show up clearly, prove their trust quickly, and respond fast when interest appears. So today I'm joined by Ken Tucker and Paul Barthel from Changescape Web and Jeff Steck from Tylerica Marketing Systems. And we're gonna break down this topic to market your startup the right way for fast lead generation without burning money or tactics that look busy and do not build your pipeline. So we're gonna roundtable this, guys. So it's a death match. I'm just kidding. So let's start with the first question. What does fast lead generation the right way actually look like in 2026? So I'll start with Jeff because he's on my left on my screen. So Jeff, why don't you start us off?
So I think, you know, one of the key things is that if you are focusing on startups, the saying good, fast, cheap, comes to mind. And if you want it to be fast and you want it to be good, you're going to have to spend some money on it. So startups plan on allocating an appropriate budget. If you have the budget to spend and you want to do things quickly, then you're going to build a lead generation system. Again, we're always talking about systems, multiple things working together. It's probably going to be some form of ads, some form of paid outreach, but you want to be very careful to spend your budget in the right places and focus in, you know, have a great strategy, know your audience, know your message, messaging, and then, you know, spend the money where you need to to get your messaging in front of the audience.
Man, you packed a lot into that short clip there, Jeff. It was awesome. Fantastic. What about, what about you, Ken?
Well, um, yeah, what Jeff said at the beginning I think is really important. You know, sadly, uh, still to this day when a startup happens, most people tell them they got to get an accountant, they got to get a lawyer, they got to do this, they got to get a bank, yada yada yada. They forget to tell you that you need to have a marketing function and actual, a real marketing budget. So please don't forget that. What I'll add to Jeff is if you're gonna spend money on ads, which is probably the fastest way if nobody knows you, right? If you're a startup, make sure that you don't leak leads on your website that, you know, you're paying a lot of money to get that traffic to your website and get people to raise their hand and express that they're interested in. So, Look at things like, you know, using a retargeting pixel where you can run ads for a fraction of the price to people who do come to your website. You're going to have to drive people initially to your website, but retargeting ads are really great. And then just make sure that, you know, you make it obvious. Have a phone number. I'm amazed at the number of websites that don't have a phone number at the top. You make people look for your phone number and just make sure that You know, when people do fill out forms or express interest, you follow up. We'll get more into that, I'm sure, later.
Yeah, yeah. No, and that's fantastic stuff, Ken. Um, yeah, what about you, Paul?
Well, kind of going off what Ken and Jeff said is that, look, advertising is expensive. Ever since COVID it has become exponentially more expensive because everybody realized that they had to do something. And going off what Ken said, let's say you get leads. Do you have a follow-up process? You cannot wait 3 days to get back to people. You need to get back to them within 3 minutes. I mean, because talked about this in the past and it's happened to me. If I contact a business because I need something done, even if it's not an emergency, I'm not going to wait for 2 or 3 days for you to get back to me. I'm going to move on to your competitor. And whoever responds the quickest, even if it's just an automated email saying, hey, we're sorry we missed your call. Someone will get back to you within X amount of time and specify that time, then that's fine. But you can't just send them to a voicemail and then 3 days later call them. That will not work.
Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. And one, one of the things I wanted to raise, it's not really an exact answer to this question, but I, I've, I certainly come across this and I think you guys probably have as well, where, where, uh, startups— so let's say, you know, within the first 2 years of starting your business, right? They mortgage the future to pay for today sometimes. And you have to do that to some degree. Like you guys talked about paid ads. Jeff, you talked about strategy, like knowing who your audience is, right? The one thing I do find is that people often will just get a website up, the very minimum, and then they wonder why they're not getting leads in the future, right? And, you know, Ken, you talked about having no phone number on there. They might not even have a very good form. You make people work really hard. To first of all find you because you're not showing up in search. And, and so I want to encourage people to, to think long-term, think strategy, because if, if you build it right, you know, within 3 to 6 months, maybe faster depending on who your competitors are, especially in some industries where, where some of the competition probably haven't invested very smartly in marketing, especially related to organic search and AI search, like you could, you could actually own that area pretty quickly. So don't mortgage the future for today, like think long-term and build appropriately while getting those leads in fast. So question number 2, and this time I'll start with Ken. I want to mix it up. So if a startup has a limited budget, which channels should it prioritize first? And you already mentioned a couple, but let's dig into this a little bit more.
Yeah. Yeah. So the first thing you have to do is you have to do some marketing research and develop a marketing strategy. to identify who your ideal client profile is, where they spend time online, what they do, what behaviors they have, what are their, you know, their passions, their pains, all of that kind of stuff. If you don't do that, you're basically, you know, pissing away money. So you gotta do that. I think, you know, it also depends dramatically on the type of business you have. So if you're a brick-and-mortar business where people come to your place of business, in most cases, most people come from a 3 to 5 mile radius. So if that's the case, your Google profile in combination with your website— you have to have both. Your website is credibility, your profile is findability, maybe initially until you can build up that SEO and AEO mojo that you talked about, Ian. Get your Google Business Profile set up and get, get a website that looks professional, even if you can't build it out all the way that you need to. You got to have a professional presence online, and a website is really a prerequisite for credibility in many customers' eyes. If they look for you and they can't find your website, they don't think you're a real business. So I would say Google profile and website. For most local businesses, whether you're brick and mortar or whether you're a service area or a B2B business, probably very, very important. Having said that, the, you know, the challenge is going to be, you know, you're going to have to wait for people to find you or you're going to have to pay to drive traffic to get there. And again, those channels, I'll defer to Paul and Jeff to talk about, you know, maybe those other channels that make sense to do that.
Awesome. Let's move on to you, Paul.
Yeah, reviews. I mean, you have to have clients before you can get reviews, but it's have a process in place to get reviews. And credibility. We talk about credibility and trust all the time, and I can't believe that to this day we still see this. Using a free Gmail address or Microsoft Mail in your business does not really instill confidence in people. Yeah.
Well, and actually it hurts email deliverability too, right? If you're sending email—
Oh yeah. If you were using any kind of CRM, you cannot use— you have to use a domain-based email address because they're all using something on the backend, you know, whether it's Mailgun or whatever it is, they're all using something on the backend. And those platforms simply, If you try to use a free email account, Gmail, Microsoft Mail, Yahoo, AOL, God forbid, it won't even make it to people's spam folder because the CRM will block it. It will never send it.
Yeah, you know, one of the things I do see a lot is startups will often bootstrap their website. Either they'll go, you know, and I understand it, right? You have to make the money spread as far as you can. You have to consider your business as your website is, is the only property you own. It's, it's effectively as important as a brick-and-mortar appearance of a brick-and-mortar store, regardless of the industry you're in. And so invest wisely in that from a technical standpoint, from an SEO and AI standpoint, from a conversion standpoint. You got it. You got to be focusing on that, Jeff. Over to you.
Yeah, just a couple of quick things. I want to hit this notion of demand capture versus demand creation. And the layman's version of that is, you know, fish where the fish are. Demand capture is, you know, if you've got demand for your product or service, and that's the first thing you got to understand as a startup. And I've actually seen startups with a great idea that nobody wants. So you've got to know that somebody wants what you have and then go find them, go get it. And then you can worry about, you know, creating audiences for people who don't know what you do and don't know they have that need yet. But the people that do have that need, get them first, capture the demand, and then go out and create more. So fish where the fish are, uh, super important. And, you know, the notion of having, uh, the right levels— again, this is the strategy becomes super important because you can't put all your eggs in, in the, you know, demand capture lead generation basket and then not, once you get those people's attention, follow through and give them what they want to help their decision-making process to do business with you. So it always is going to go back to the website and your, your personal profile and your credibility and your trust factors. And if a startup doesn't have some of those, you, you know, need to go out and cultivate some. And depending on the business, um, that may even be the first thing you do before you start any advertising is go find a, you know, a first. If you're a high-ticket item, a consulting firm or something like that. Go out and find that first client and make a great deal with them to be the test case, be the, the case study, to be the social proof that then you're going to build on. Um, so again, I think a lot of the channels depend on the business too. I think Ken kind of hit on some for services, but you really got to understand your, your target market and where they get their information and how you're gonna, you know, reel them in. Ken?
Yep.
Yeah, yeah.
Real quick, I wanted to, you know, Paul said something I think is very important. He was talking about email addresses, you know, a business-based domain email address. But, you know, an email list is critical. So start building your email list day one because email marketing is still an incredibly cost-effective way to build out a channel. And so that's got to be a high priority.
Yeah. Yeah, for sure. Absolutely. Email marketing. Most people don't know this, but email marketing has one of the highest return on investments of any marketing strategy. And we're not talking about cold email marketing. There's a radical difference between cold email marketing and warm email marketing. So we're talking warm email marketing. The other things I wanted to add to that was networking and strategic partnerships, right? Small businesses, startups, you can create real momentum. This isn't a digital strategy necessarily, although it can dovetail really nicely. With digital strategies. But look for people that either refer to your type of business, or you can refer to another business. Look for networking groups, you know, Chamber of Commerce, Board of Trades, look for BNIs. Just get out there, start working on your, you know, what your pitch is. You know, pay attention to how it resonates with different people, because that can actually guide your online activities as well. And the last channel I just wanted to cover was A lot of small startups, you know, sometimes this is, this is relevant, other times it's not. And that's social media advertising. A lot of startups just jump right into social media advertising because it's something they know they've been advertised to, they spend time on social media. And I think that's a real danger for them because I don't think it's always the best place to be. And they don't view it strategically. So if you're a startup business, don't just jump to the conclusion that you should be advertising on TikTok or Meta, you know, you really do need to look at who your ideal customers are, where they spend time, and where your budget can get the most bang for the buck for sure.
Just a quick add-on to that, Ian, and when you do start, you know, doing online advertising, don't take the easy way out. Google, Meta will make it real easy for you to spend money with them and not get great results. And the easiest thing to do on Meta is just boost a post, right? That almost everyone says don't do it, it just wastes money. The easiest thing to do on Google is to let their AI do your entire ad campaign. Don't do it. That's just— Google's going to find a way to take your money. They may intend well, but you gotta, you know, do it right. You gotta, you know, use your budget wisely.
Somebody else had something to say?
Well, I was following up on what you said about advertising on social media. Ask yourself, how often have you clicked on an ad on Facebook?
Yep. All right, next question: what kind of offer and landing page actually generates leads quickly? And we'll start with Paul.
A clear call to action is still important. And I think it was Ken that mentioned having a phone number in the header of your website and a link in the header to the contact form. And as far as landing pages, I'd say landing pages, I think we need to redefine landing pages because Jeff was just talking about Google Ads and they are forcing— I was going to say implementing, but forcing people to use A and I— A. AI more and more. And now what they'll do— and at this point you can still not do it, you can still send people directly to a landing page— but what they're starting to do, and Google being Google, it's probably only a matter of time until you don't have a choice, is they will scan your— they'll take the search query, scan your website, and send the person to what they think is the most relevant page on your website. And right now at this point, you still have a choice. I think it's a matter of time until you don't. So I'm not saying landing pages aren't important anymore. I think they're less important than they used to be because of all the changes. And we have a future podcast coming up that's going to talk about a lot of these things. But I think there's a lot of things that they were really important a year ago and maybe not so much now. Yeah.
And one of the things you said there, Paul, that is super relevant, again, related to your website, is if Google's scanning your website as an advertiser, right? And it's trying to determine where to send the traffic, uh, you need to have really good information and really good calls to action. Everything that you guys talked about before needs to be there in order to connect the dots for Google. If your site is very light on content, if it's very light on information, you're not giving Google the signals that it needs even to do that directional pointing very well.
True.
That's one of the big reasons I don't like, uh, PMax ads, Performance Max.
Yeah.
Is I want the control, right? I want to send somebody to a landing page that has one, you know, purpose only, to convert that person who demonstrated the interest that got them there to take the next action. And when you're letting Google go to wherever it wants to go, well, does that mean that every page on your site has to be a landing page? Every page on your site has to have a call to action, and every page has to be free of distractions and the things that can hijack people elsewhere? That just doesn't make sense. So, I think having that control when you are taking traffic to your website for a purpose, whether it's coming from an ad, a Facebook ad, a Google ad, whether it's a postcard you handed out at an event that has, you know, scan here to get this offer, a QR code, or they take it home and they type in the URL, that landing page has got to be very specific and very sole-purpose designed with that one intent, get people to take the next step.
Well, at this point, you can exclude certain pages within your campaign. What I'm saying is that a year from now, you may not have a choice because Google is strongly pushing in that direction. I mean, look at the— they took Q&As away from Google Business Profile.
If any other—
they're going to do something, they're going to do whatever they want to do.
Google loves Google. Jeff, any other thoughts before I move on to Ken?
I'll wait and see if Ken hits this one. I want to give him a chance to talk, but I do have one more if he doesn't.
Go, go, Ken.
You're on the spot now.
All right.
Well, first of all, make sure that it's an offer that people really want. It's amazing to me that how many times a business will put an offer out there that they want to give to people, but it's not really what people want. Just a classic case in point is a restaurant might come up with a really clever, you know, let's just say a pizza parlor, and they come up with a really clever pizza that sounds really interesting.
Yeah.
Nobody may really want that. What they want are the standard tried and true things that they know. If you want to get butts in the seats in your facility or your calendar filled up, it's got to be an offer that somebody wants. And so it kind of goes back to what Jeff was talking about, you know, with the demand capture versus creation. Look, if you have to spend time and energy and money educating people on why they should take your offer, It's a bad offer. You need to make it simple, crystal clear. It's got to be something that somebody already wants. And then, you know, I'm a big fan of putting— of having some kind of a try, you know, where people don't have to make, you know, a hardcore buying decision to buy a big-ticket item before they even get a chance to experience your business. So tries can be done in a variety of ways. It can be a free estimate.
Yeah.
It can be downloading, you know, a calculator to— or actually filling out a calculator on your website to see if your product or solution could save them money. But you should have something there. And then social proof. So I think video is fantastic. I think video should be on every landing page. And with today's tool sets that are out there, there's no reason why video wouldn't be on every landing page. And it sounded to me, Paul, like what you're saying is probably future-proofing your website. You might need to think about having every page on your website become a landing page.
Yeah, and you really should. I mean, that's— again, we're gonna talk about this later, I think, but it's comprehensive content, and content outside of your website is more important than ever. And like I said, we have a Podcast coming up where we're going to talk about that. We have talked about it in the past. Yeah.
Yeah. The last comment about landing pages is keep your forms short. If you have an overabundance of leads someday and you want to get more granular in your qualification of leads, then you can add more questions, but keep your forms short.
Anything—
I mean, the last statistic I saw was that anything over 7, you start to get get pretty high rates of abandonment. So keep it short. The minimum that you need in order to follow up or help people through their decision-making is really important. So I see that we're actually getting—
That's a great point, Ian. If I can just—
Well, thank you.
Look, I think it's much more important for a startup to have a conversation with even a poorly qualified lead because that's going to help you capture a lot of valuable information and dial in everything in the future. So don't disqualify people automatically just by asking for way too much information on your form. I think that's a really important point.
Yeah, yeah.
Keep keeping your contact form simple.
Yeah.
And I want to point this out because it seems like this is happening more and more. Someone filling out a contact form on your website requesting information is not giving you permission to put them on your email list and start emailing them.
Unless you have a consent.
Unless you have the consent. Yeah, I was just—
Right. And that consent box cannot be required.
And if you're on the cutting edge of marketing, those consent verbiages are getting quite long now because now we have to include text and AI and all sorts of things. But the very last question, because we're running out of time today, And whoever wants to jump in on this, please do. But I really wanted to just talk about the speed to lead, how important that is. So, if one of you wants to just take that and run with it, do so.
It's more important than it ever has been. I mean, it just is. I was talking about that earlier. People are not— we live in this instantaneous, always connected world, and people are not going to wait Even for a day. If you can't, if you're a small business and you can't answer the phone, at the very least send them an email or a text saying, hey, sorry we missed your call, someone will get back to you, and the faster the better. But if you just send them to a voicemail, they're gone. They're going to hang up and call your competitor.
Yeah, you know, and the, the last thing I should kind of throw in there is make sure you track everything, right? If you're, if you're doing any kind of marketing, Make sure you're tracking the metrics that matter most, connect the dots as much as you possibly can so that you know where your marketing spend is going so that you can figure out the return on investment. Any other last thoughts, guys, before we close out?
Yeah. Speed to lead is a competitive advantage. I mean, massive competitive advantage. And the great thing is, you know, we had Jay Baer on our podcast, you know, a year and a half or 2 years ago, and it's more important now than it ever has been. Speed to lead actually allows you to charge more and still win the business. And so, you know, too many times startups fail largely because it's a race to the bottom. They're always trying to find a way, how can I discount my way to being able to make sure I capture this customer regardless of if it's a smart or a wise thing to do? If you want to get out of that trap, speed to lead is your best friend.
Yeah. And just Let me add one thing and then over to you, Jeff. I was just going to say a lot of businesses, especially startups, as you're— you will eventually grow if you start to, you know, do all these things we're talking about. And then you're going to start to feel overwhelmed at some point, like you can't answer the phone, but you have to answer the phone regardless of how busy you are or find someone that can answer the phone for you, or in the very least use AI, right? Because if you don't answer that phone, you're crushing your future sales right there and you don't want to do that. Over to you, Jeff.
Yeah, I was just going to say the, the automation tools, marketing automation tools can help. And yes, the AIs can help with that. And, you know, there's a growing concern, uh, backlash against AI, even that it's, you know, putting people out of work, it's taking jobs. And in certain areas it, it kind of is, or at least it's transforming them. But, you know, if you don't have anybody answering your phone at 7 o'clock at night after hours when somebody wants to call, the AI is not putting that person the job. You didn't have them anyway. All it's doing is it's giving you, as Ken said, more of a competitive advantage. Um, so the tools are there. Don't be afraid of them. Embrace them. Use them. Use them appropriately.
Yeah. And Jeff, what you— going on what you said, is that if you don't have someone to answer the phone, there's no one to put out of a job. So, um, but yeah, if you're not answering the phone except yourself.
Yeah.
So AI allows you It's even better than a missed call, text back, or email because it allows you to have that initial conversation and collect their information.
Yeah, absolutely. Well guys, this has been awesome. We're keeping it on time today. I didn't talk to you guys about this ahead of time. So if you want to extend this as well, this is an offer that I'm extending to startups. I have a real heart for startups because it's painful. We've all been there. And so I'm extending a 15% first month discount to startups if they reach out. So if you guys want to extend that as well, fantastic. But just reach out if you're a startup and you're listening to us or watching us today. We're here to help. We would love to help you really launch your business to new heights. And we have the skills, the abilities, the tools, and the strategies, and we can help you do that. So if there's one takeaway from today's conversation, it's this: fast lead generation is not about chasing every new channel. It's about building a focused lead engine around the right audience, the right offer, the right proof, the right follow-up speed, and the right metrics. So search still matters. All of reviews matter, videos matter, AI matters, speed to lead matters. And if you can get those basics working together, you will usually outperform a competitor with a bigger budget and a messier system. So thank you all for joining us today. Keep calm and market on.