The Most Overlooked Lead Gen Strategy That’s Crushing in 2025

Jennie Wright [00:00:02]:
Hey everybody. Welcome back to this episode of the Acquire podcast. I’m your host, Jenny Wright. And in this podcast we get to talk about sales and lead gen, marketing, leveling up, all different ways of scaling and a couple other things. And today is a little bit of a breakdown of what is working right now with lead gen. And on this very special episode, the 99th episode of Acquire, I want to break down the the most overlooked lead generation strategies. Because as I was looking back at all the episodes created for Acquire, the ones with the most downloads are the ones about lead generation. Not completely shocked.

Jennie Wright [00:00:40]:
It is what I talk about, but I also talk about other things. But this is the topic that most people were gravitating towards. So for this episode we’re going to talk about it and I want to look at these most overlooked lead generation strategies. They are crushing it right now in this year. They’re also going to continue to crush it because quite honestly, what is old is new again. What is new is actually really not that new. But we’re just tweaking things as we go. And so if you’ve ever, you know, had a lead magnet that wasn’t converting, if you’ve ever hosted a webinar that only got five registrants and nobody showed up, then I’d like for you to invest a little bit of time today to go through these strategies.

Jennie Wright [00:01:21]:
I think they will help you. That’s the goal. Okay, so there’s a couple different ones that are really, really working right now. I’m playing in these, these spaces with a couple different people and they’re a lot of fun and a lot of that has to do with creator collaboration. So it doesn’t matter if you are a company, like a SaaS company, by the way, this works incredibly well in this space or if you are a one person show or if you are a multi person show with a team creator. Collaborations are massive and the reason that they’re so good is because you get to bring people from adjacent niches together or people with more exposure, potentially more buying power in their audience together in order to form a little mini coalition. And you will create a product together or you will sell your individual products co mingled together in a bundle or some other format and you’ll be able to promote it to more people and get it in front of more people. Let’s break it down a little bit.

Jennie Wright [00:02:23]:
I’m going to give you an example of a SaaS company that I’m working with right now that we’re doing this on a very cool scale. Now this is a, a small to medium SaaS company. They offer a very niche product. It’s for a specific group in the marketplace that does a very specific thing. And so this product helps other creators create content. And in order to get this product in front of more people without spending a ton on advertising, without going to all the conferences, without doing all the things, they are giving their product to these really cool people, these influencers and so on, pretty much for free or with some sort of an interesting deal. And we’re asking for their feedback in return, we’re asking for testimonials in return, but we’re also going a step further and we’re having them create their own case studies. Having used the product for a certain amount of time, like how I achieved X while using product Y.

Jennie Wright [00:03:22]:
And in the past six months I think I’ve created more than six case studies. If not, yeah, probably a bit more than that. And each case study is very easy to create. We’re creating like a formatted case case study page. The creator actually does a video or creates some sort of a workbook or has some really cool information in order to share wins that they got from using this content or from using this product. And then the creator has their own unique affiliate link that they can use to promote the product. And so we’re getting in front of audiences that had we just kind of like blurt it out and said, hey, get this, you know, really cool product, we probably wouldn’t have gotten the sales that we’re getting. And so these case studies really help because we’re using the influence of that creator to get further and wider and it’s not costing us really a dime except for the software which giving away to somebody is not that big of a deal because we’re getting more in return, right? So even though the software costs X dollars per year, you’re giving it to this person pretty much for free, or if not for free, but you’re creating, you’re getting great testimonials in the back end.

Jennie Wright [00:04:32]:
Incredible opportunity. How this transposes into just digital, you know, online marketing business without being a SaaS company is if you have a product that you’re trying to sell, maybe you have a high end course. Having people use the course and then, you know, talk about the course and create case studies about the course and promote it is obviously very valuable. You could go so far as the, you know and, and most of you are going to know like the B school days with Marie Forleo where you could promote B school but you could add on your own promotional stuff like buy a B school and I’ll give you $4,000 worth of free product or whatever. That is still really a good strategy. And although people are like, oh my God, the Jenny, that’s from like 20, I don’t know, 2015. Yeah, it is, but it still works. It’s 10 years ago.

Jennie Wright [00:05:21]:
But what is old is new again with slight tweaks, right? So look at creator collaborations in those aspects. So you promote somebody else’s product but add something onto it. So co marketing. The other thing that works really, really well is mini summits. So getting together with four or five or 10 other people and creating their own little mini summit, it’s a smaller lead gen strategy, but it does work and it’s very niched in. You can get a really good list build from that. Additionally, I love guest bundle launches. So working with other people, collaborating with two or three other marketers to get together, you know, and pull your resources, one of them is going to build the website, one of you is going to market, one of you is going to do all the copy, right? And you’re going to get together 50 to 150 really cool people to be part of your bundle.

Jennie Wright [00:06:12]:
Now, bundles have been really big, bundles have been a little bit slow. Bundles seem to be coming back again. And so this resurgence of slightly different bundles is important and it’s really cool. If you want to charge your contributors to be on your bundle, that’s a different ball of wax. And you can, although for the most part the free ones are where it’s at. You’re not going to see a ton of people paying the 125 or the $250 to get their, you know, 250 leads that convert to nothing in that case. And I’m not going to say convert to nothing because they don’t always convert to nothing. But, you know, participating with other people for free is my recommendation in that space.

Speaker B [00:06:54]:
Right.

Jennie Wright [00:06:55]:
When you look at some of the data that we’re seeing come through at this, you know, Q4 of 2020, almost Q4 of 2024, 2025, they’re going to see that a lot of people are saying that their top ROI, over 70% of surveyed brands in this one survey that just came out is saying that their top ROI came from creator partnerships, not from ads, not from, you know, putting out mainstream media, not from promoting it necessarily themselves, but the creative partnerships they were able to have in order to get the product in front of more people, a wider audience that they may or may not have had an opportunity to get in front of. So when you’re looking at potentially your lead gen strategies going into the fall for 2025 and also your lead generation strategies for 2026, the recommendation I’m going to always say is fall Summit, Spring Summit. If you prefer to sort of break that down and have other people work with you, do it with other people, co create it, right? What is also working really well as a lead gen strategy right now are chapter books. So you could easily take your podcast, you could easily take your summit, grab 5, 10, or even 15 of the other guests on that and create a chapter book. Even, even three years ago, getting a chapter book done was more challenging because you had to get all of those videos or all of those interviews transcribed and transcription cost a lot of money. I remember distinctly using products that cost a ton to get my transcriptions and then it got a little bit cheaper and then AI came on board and then AI transcriptions were cheaper, then the, you know, the personal or the person transcriptions, and now it’s AI and now it’s like almost free. You can use otter, you can use Fathom, you can use whatever you want and you can get free transcriptions from that. Now you just have to do some editing.

Jennie Wright [00:08:55]:
And I highly recommend, of course you can use AI to write your book, but I’m going to tell you right now that I just saw a draft of a book that somebody used AI to write and I found errors, like factual mistakes, people’s names not written correctly, made up events that didn’t ever happen. And so you really do need to go through it and make sure that it’s accurate. I don’t care how hard you train your AI, it’s going to make some sort of boo boo some point. So. But chapter books off of the Summit, highly recommend. That creates an additional opportunity for lead gen because within that book, you as the main author, or the three of you, or the ten of you or whatnot as the main authors, you could create some sort of a lead magnet or lead generation avenue from that in order to get more leads. Or each one of you could, you could have your CTA at the end of each chapter for each person and have that be one of your CTAs. Also, it still does matter if you have put the time and effort into publishing a book.

Jennie Wright [00:09:59]:
It doesn’t, it doesn’t have the gravitas of traditional publishing, but it still has weight because you’ve still put in that effort to create, to write, to edit to get a cover done. I mean, it’s not something that you’re going to do on a Friday night and have it up on Monday morning. It does take a little bit more time, but it does have weight still in our space.

Speaker B [00:10:21]:
Right.

Jennie Wright [00:10:22]:
People are still. People who are authors are recognized as authors. And it’s something you can say for real on your LinkedIn bio or when you go and speak from stage.

Speaker B [00:10:31]:
Right.

Jennie Wright [00:10:31]:
So those can be incredibly helpful when you do that. One thing that I love for lead gen that is still incredibly useful and I really think that people overlook these strategies are doing challenges, three day challenges, five day challenges. I haven’t seen a lot of them coming up lately, but I still think they’re completely overlooked because the people that do do challenges on a regular basis or a consistent basis with their business see this influx of leads from doing it and conversion. So what I recommend is the following spring or fall summit. We’re going into fall shortly, so fall summit followed by a three, maybe four day challenge, five days maybe to a sales event, right? So if you do a three day challenge, day four is your sales day. If you do a five day challenge, day six is your sales day or even day five is your sales day. And so what you’re doing is you’re list building. So you’re doing that lead gen with your summit and then you’re leading into what can be a conversion event with a challenge.

Jennie Wright [00:11:35]:
So you’re getting those new leads on the summit. When you’re doing your three or four day challenge, you’re then showing people who you are and what you do, you’re converting them from a cold or slightly warm lead to a much warmer lead. And then you’re making an offer that makes sense based on the content that they were getting in the summit. And so when you do your challenge, you’re just continuing that learning journey, but it’s coming from you and the program, product or service that you’re offering at the end of it makes complete sense to whatever the summit was about and whatever the challenge is about. If you want that added income, you could definitely have a VIP on your summit and make it really reasonable. Prices on summit VIPs have dropped considerably. And so we used to see 97, 127, you know, 297, and those have dropped. At the moment they’ll probably go right back up again.

Jennie Wright [00:12:26]:
But at the moment we’re seeing 27, 37 and $47 sort of price tags for these VIPs. And so keep that in mind if you’re planning a summit that you’re not going to make a ton off the back end, off the VIP only you do need to have a good offer so you can recoup whatever cost is put into actually creating that event. So I recommend taking a look at that as well. Probably again, spring fall is the best time for these and challenges you can do pretty much anytime. When it comes to list gen like lead gen in general, most people overlook the fact that their timing is what really matters. If you are doing lead gen between American Thanksgiving and New Year’s Day, good luck to you. Unless you have a product or program that specifically would be useful to people that need it either during that time or want the price break that you could give them on a Black Friday or Cyber Monday. But remember, that is a very populous space.

Jennie Wright [00:13:27]:
It is. There’s no blue ocean for Black Friday or Cyber Monday. You are in a heavily populated spot and in order to get your program, product or service seen or your lead gen even to get seen during that time is going to take a lot more effort, potentially a lot more money if you’re doing ads, and a lot more of your time. So choose wisely. But a lot of people overlook the timing of these things and don’t put them out at the right time. I have clients that ask me when they should do summits, when they should do challenges, webinars, any of it. And I, I, I, I basically say that between American Thanksgiving and the middle of January is the no go zone. Focus on other things, focus on creating story, focus on connection, focus on audience building in different ways.

Jennie Wright [00:14:15]:
One of the things that I actually do like during that sort of like holiday time is a holiday bundle and there are quite a few that come out and they’re very popular. So that would be one thing that I would invest my time and energy on, but I would personally not invest my time and energy or recommend that you do so on things that are going to be too crowded for people to see what you’re doing. Especially if you are just launching that product for the first time, it’s going to feel really, really tough. You’re not going to get enough people to see it. And if they don’t see it, you’re going to feel like you failed or potentially you’re going to feel like you failed because you didn’t think you launched very well. And so launching during that time, challenging. Really don’t recommend it. Definitely stick to the times outside of that.

Jennie Wright [00:15:00]:
It’s going to be a lot better. There’s a movement right now in the industry. And there’s statistics to back this up that companies are now saying that about 94. Well, it’s about 90% of the companies that were surveyed in this. Another survey that I saw recently is that creator content outperforms ads in roi. So let’s talk about that for a second and why that would matter. Just like. And this is not news to me personally, it is again, what is old is new again.

Jennie Wright [00:15:34]:
Because one of the reasons that I loved summits and gravitated towards summits way back in 2012 and 2013 was because for every person I could get to register for a summit, I was paying less than 2 at the time. $2 or less per lead than any other way I could promote.

Speaker B [00:15:53]:
Right.

Jennie Wright [00:15:54]:
So ads at the time were costing anywhere between 8 to $15 a lead. Now that’s like, that can be a lot higher depending on what you’re doing. It could also be a lot less, but it can be a lot higher. And the leads themselves coming through. Organic means organic as being, you know, those creators, promotion, just word of mouth, that sort of thing. You’re going to get a better lead than you would if you’re just using meta ads. Meta ads can be very unspecific because it’s based all on what people are saying in their profiles. And so your program, product or service is going to get shown to a ton of people who have indicated on their profile and through their browser history or browser mannerisms that they would be interested in what you have to share.

Jennie Wright [00:16:43]:
But not always is that accurate. And because there’s that, that slight inaccuracy or there’s the opportunity for inaccuracy, you’re causing potential, a big potential gap between who you should be speaking to and who’s actually seeing your stuff.

Speaker B [00:16:59]:
Right.

Jennie Wright [00:16:59]:
And so that is where these mistakes can be made. That’s where lead gen can go awry. And you’re looking at your stats going, but Jenny, I, I paid X amount for ads, had all these impressions, but nobody’s converting. Yeah, shocker, nobody’s converting because they most likely were not your ideal client. If you had no list before you did paid ads, that’s another big no no, because now you’re making meta work or whatever platform work super hard to try and engage an audience that you don’t currently have that you’re trying to build. And so those are cold leads and they’re most likely not even leads that would have signed up for your lead magnet had they come across your website or anything that you post online. Highly recommend that you do not do that. Okay, so when we’re looking at collaboration, that’s where that warm lead comes in.

Jennie Wright [00:17:50]:
That’s where that organic reach is incredible still. And even though we get throttled on a lot of platforms for our organic attempts, they still can be incredibly lucrative if you’ve dialed in your audience, if you’ve done enough audience building and connection versus paid ads. Now, if you have the budget for paid ads, have at it. But your paid ads budget has to be big enough and has to cover a wide enough potential audience in order for it to be lucrative. And the program, product or service off the back end needs to be at least somewhat self liquidating so that you’re not spending too much. Does that all make sense? I may not explain it perfectly, but that’s how I understand it. If you’re going to go down that collaboration route that we’ve been talking about on this episode to really get those really dialed in leads in this very much overlooked strategy, then three or four things here that I want to communicate so that you have the best possible outcome. One is identifying your competitive, like your comparable creators, people that you can connect with and do this with.

Jennie Wright [00:18:57]:
I will tell you right now that I’ve done it a few times, I’ve done it well a few times, but I’ve also done it incredibly poorly a few times. I’ve chosen or identified the wrong people to connect with, the wrong people to work with. So here’s what I’ve learned. You need to look for major audience overlap. Now you can be in niche or niche, niche adjacent. But you can’t be further out of field. It doesn’t work that way. You need to have brand alignment.

Jennie Wright [00:19:26]:
It needs to like, you need to be speaking the same slang, the same language in that way so that it makes sense. And you need to make sure that there’s an equitable and equal value exchange. Whatever it is that you are doing as part of this collaboration, the other person has to do an equal and equitable amount so that you don’t get, you know, you don’t, you don’t feel like you’re doing too much and they’re doing too little. And I would also recommend that you choose micro creators over huge influencers. Micro creators, people who do have an audience who are getting, I mean, who do have quite a bit of engagement are going to be a better bet, a better fit. But then people who have massive, massive audiences, it just, it just seems to work that way. The other thing that I’m going to recommend, and this is from my own personal experience, is the structure of your collaboration, what is that going to look like? And I’m not just talking the the, but nuts and bolts and how you’re going to do it. But what are you going to create? Are you going to create a joint lead magnet or collaborate on bringing two different lead magnets together? Are you going to create a bundle launch or are you going to have a mini summit? Are you going to create a series of webinars, a challenge together? And then on the other nuts and bolts side, how are you going to structure this so that it works to your mutual benefit?

Speaker B [00:20:55]:
Right?

Jennie Wright [00:20:56]:
And you have to have those tough conversations. You have to be able to say, look, I’m going to do this and I’m going to create this whatever with you, but If I’m doing 80% of the work and you’re doing 20 and then just sitting back and enjoying it, this isn’t going to work for me. And what are you going to do if that happens? How are you going to dissolve this new collaboration and how are you going to handle the tough parts? Because those do come up. And then I want you to plan for your revenue use and create clear lead gen goals and say, I want this many leads per week and I want this conversion rate. And it’s not that you’re going to necessarily hit those numbers. You could, you could actually even surpass. But having those clear goals in mind is going to help you sort of benchmark what needs to be done to get there, but also give you something to work towards. You know, if you do a collaboration with somebody and you’re like, oh yeah, I’m really happy if I get two or three leads that is not going to be beneficial to the other person.

Jennie Wright [00:21:56]:
I, I promise you, they’re not going to be wanting two or three leads. You need to have an equitable amount there and think about it. So plan for that revenue. And then finally, I want you to look at how you’re going to track your outcomes and optimize for the future if you’re going to continue. So what are your key metrics? What is your conversion rate? What is your audience growth look like? How many email signups do you need to actually feel like you’ve done a good job at this? How are you going to create feedback loops with the person or the people that you’re working with and the teams that you might integrate in order to do this, to look at and iterate what your next collaboration would be or not?

Speaker B [00:22:36]:
Right.

Jennie Wright [00:22:37]:
So make sure there’s, I Mean, I know I sound pretty formal on this, almost like corporate, but KPIs are a thing for a reason and companies use them to hit goals because it works. And just because we’re in digital marketing doesn’t mean we get to throw a lot of that away and just kind of fly by the seat of our pants, because we all know that doesn’t work. And if it does for you, awesome. Have at it. All of that to say that overlooked strategies because everybody wants that new shiny, bright thing as opposed to using something that works over time, like I will. I would much rather have a 10 year old bike that I know is going to like work for me for the next 10 years because it’s a well made bike than the flashy, you know, scooter that somebody’s offering me for $25 or whatever they charge. And then I’m going to like, you know, it’s going to break down when I’m trying to ride it somewhere. Like, go for something that works, tried and true, that’ll actually benefit you in the long run and help you close off this year with a lead generation strategy that that’s actually going to work for you and stop looking at things and trying to make new things when the old things are new again and continue to work.

Jennie Wright [00:23:45]:
You just have to tweak them for where you are right now, what’s working in the marketplace. That’s about it. All right, as we wrap this up, the next episode is the 100th episode of Acquire. And I think that’s pretty darn cool. Starting this podcast a year ago actually is, is phenomenal. It’s been a great year. It’s changed a lot. Acquire has changed quite a bit.

Jennie Wright [00:24:10]:
The premise hasn’t changed though. Wanting to help people grow their lists, grow their leads, grow their businesses, have fun while doing it and being honest and having these kind of like frank conversations. That was always the way that I wanted it. That’s always the way that, you know, when this, when this kind of idea formulated between my partner and I and they were like, yeah, this is going to be, this could be really, really cool. You know, I still love the logo for it. I still love the concept for this. And the next 100 episodes should be pretty cool. Going to be looking at more stories and founders and what made their businesses tick.

Jennie Wright [00:24:47]:
What, what have they done? Well, what could they have done better? How can we all learn from these lessons? But I think also just being open and having frank conversations about what business is actually like is important. So if you’ve tuned in thus far. Please make sure you enjoy the rest of these episodes that are to come. And hit subscribe. Leave a message, share your thoughts. I’d love to hear what you think about this and what you’d like to hear for the next 100. So thanks for being here, appreciate it, and we’ll talk to y’ all soon. Take care.