Trent Warner Of Strategic Brand Builders On The 5 Proven Strategies for Increasing Lead Generation

An Interview with Rachel Kline

Build a great website! Sounds basic, but I see a lot of businesses spending money on marketing campaigns that lead to a broken, out-of-date, or underdeveloped website. Again: If your website sucks, the only thing more traffic will do is make your website suck faster, to more people.

Generating quality leads is crucial for businesses in today’s competitive landscape, and finding innovative and effective ways to attract potential customers has become a top priority. In this interview series, we are talking with marketing experts, industry professionals, and thought leaders who can share insights and stories from their experience about the best strategies for effective lead generation. As a part of this series, we had the pleasure of interviewing Trent Warner.

Trent Warner is a fractional CMO and managing director of Strategic Brand Builders — a marketing strategy firm that helps sales-led and referral-dependent businesses break through the $2–5M plateau with growth-focused marketing strategies.

Thank you for doing this with us! Before we begin, our readers would like to learn a bit more about you. Can you tell us the “backstory” about what brought you to this career path?

Since I began my marketing career over a decade ago, I’ve been driven by an insatiable curiosity. I love the challenge of understanding how people think and make decisions, and using that knowledge to help businesses grow.

Working at major global marketing agencies early in my career, I was like a sponge, eager to soak up every bit of knowledge I could find. I started attending meetings that had nothing to do with my immediate responsibilities because I believed that a wider lens would help me understand how all the puzzle pieces of marketing fit together.

What I quickly learned? At traditional marketing agencies, departments are often siloed. That bothered me. I despised the lack of cohesion and wanted to change the game.

In 2015, I took a leap of faith and started my own agency on the side. Why? In short, because I wanted to be better than the major agencies I worked for. I wanted to avoid the siloes, provide research before prescribing solutions, and replace presentations with conversations.

I identified a gap in the market: professional services firms engaged in David vs. Goliath battles with outsized national competitors. Time and time again, other marketing companies had failed these businesses, providing cookie-cutter solutions that failed to consider their unique compliance issues. I made it my mission to provide tailored and intelligent marketing solutions that would actually drive results.

Two years after I launched my agency, I secured a major contract with an independent insurance brokerage in New York. At that point, I made the bold decision to commit to my agency full-time — and I haven’t looked back since.

Today, Strategic Brand Builders is a marketing strategy firm that helps businesses get from zero to one with their marketing. We start by conducting in-depth research on your business, including your unique value proposition, competitors, customers, brand personality, and archetypes. Based on our findings, we develop a custom roadmap to help you meet your business goals.

Unlike most agencies, we don’t offer a one-size-fits-all approach. We believe that every business is unique, and so is its marketing strategy. That’s why we take the time to understand your specific needs and challenges before we recommend any solutions.

That’s another thing that sets us apart from other marketing firms: we’re not afraid to recommend solutions that we don’t build ourselves. While we do offer some level of implementation, we’re the first to admit we’re not the best tool for every job. Instead, we partner with a network of trusted specialists to supplement our core capabilities. This gives you the best of both worlds: a customized, expert strategy that utilizes all the tools in your toolbox, without having to manage multiple vendors yourself.

Can you share with our readers the most interesting or amusing story that has occurred to you in your career so far? Can you share the lesson or takeaway you took from that story?

Gosh, I have so many.

I’d say one of the most interesting ones was when I led the global SEO strategy for a travel tech company (I can’t get too specific due to an NDA, but it’s a major household name). Our goal was to generate backlinks and content without having to pay influencers or guest bloggers directly. It was all about finding an authentic and organic way to boost their presence.

Our solution was to leverage local content creators — which we called “Guides” — to write about their favorite experiences in their cities. We would publish Guides’ articles on the travel company’s website, and in turn, the Guides would promote them on their own blogs and social media channels. This resulted in a win-win for both parties: the travel company gained backlinks and high-quality content, while the bloggers gained credibility and exposure to a new audience.

After a successful proof of concept with a few bloggers and cities, we helped scale the program to 100+ cities. Today, the clients’ local guides are used by hundreds of thousands of people every year, generating tens of thousands of backlinks and positive local coverage.

Are you working on any exciting new projects now? How do you think that will help people?

Yes! Okay, so I’ve always sold SEO strategies: doing research, finding keywords, crafting content, building up authority for products/services within search engines. Those foundational building blocks are crucial, but they’re not exactly sexy. Plus, it’s no secret that SEO can be a time-intensive process — which tends to test the patience of fiery business owners eager for quick results.

So, I figured out how to add more value. I call it an Organic Sprint. The approach is all about combining an online and offline marketing strategy to offer clients a more holistic approach to lead generation.

Here’s how it works: as we continue with our established SEO efforts, we simultaneously develop a strategy to connect with referral sources. This approach is a great way to fuel the sales pipeline in the short term, all while continuing to drive long-term results through SEO.

We recently deployed this approach for an insurance brokerage trying to get more building owner/landlord leads. We identified potential referral sources such as realtors and financial advisors. We built email scripts and systems that started with cold outreach and led to creating content together and future collaborations.

The result? Our approach not only generated a ton of exposure for the client almost immediately, but also built strong partnerships that will generate referrals for years to come. Simultaneously, behind the scenes, we were steadily establishing a solid SEO foundation, creating even more value to be harvested down the road.

For the benefit of our readers, can you tell us a bit about your experience with Lead Generation? Can you share an anecdote or two that illustrates your experience in this area?

Overall, I think the key to success in lead generation is about focusing on what really matters: driving long-term success for the business. People usually look at marketing as getting people to order something, or fill out a form — and that is part of it. But there is also decreasing the timeline for sales, increasing lifetime value (LTV) of leads, increasing brand trust, increasing brand awareness, etc.

We recently took over the marketing for a client that was getting leads through their PPC campaigns, but weren’t closing a lot of business.

After taking a look under the hood, we uncovered that a lot of these leads were coming from one campaign in particular.

This campaign targeted keywords like “cheap” and “free” — but being the cheapest option was not one of the client’s differentiators.

In other words, they were wasting money showing up for keywords their ideal customer would never search for.

So many marketers try to inflate their stats by paying attention to unqualified leads that ultimately have no impact on the business’s bottom line. One highly-qualified, ideal lead that converts into a loyal, long-term customer is worth far more than all the clicks in the world.

How do you determine which channels to invest in for lead generation, and which ones have been most successful for you?

It all depends on what you’re selling, who you’re selling to, and how your audience consumes content and makes decisions.

Generally speaking, I like to think about channel selection in terms of your business faces when it comes to acquiring new customers. By identifying the key challenge your business needs to overcome for lead generation, you can select marketing channels that directly address those challenges.

For example, if you run a pizza place or a plumbing service, the main hurdle you face is visibility. Unless customers already have a preferred pizza joint or plumber, chances are they will turn to the internet to find the best option available. The B2C market often has a lower number of touchpoints to lead to a sale. If you show up ahead of the competition and have solid reviews, odds are you’ve just won yourself a new customer. That’s why it’s so essential for your business to prioritize local SEO and reputation management. For businesses like this, I also look to Google Ads for commercially relevant search terms. If you bid on the right keywords, you can usually find people ready to buy.

On the other hand, if you own a more complex B2B service, such as a marketing agency, establishing trust becomes the primary challenge. Research shows that the average B2B buyer needs around 12 marketing touchpoints before making a purchase. Because these purchases are often major decisions that require a high level of trust, it’s important to show who you are, what you do, how you do it, and why your business ultimately exists to fulfill their needs. Typically, this is done with a combination of SEO, content marketing, email, and reputation management.

For disruptive businesses, people may not actively search for your product or service — after all, they probably don’t even know it exists. In this case, the biggest challenge lies in creating awareness. You need to be proactive in showing up and uniquely positioning yourself as a better alternative to the status quo. By actively demonstrating the value and benefits of your offering through targeted advertising, engaging content, and strategic partnerships, you can generate interest and curiosity among potential customers who may not have even realized they needed your solution.

How do you balance lead quantity with lead quality? What metrics do you use to measure the quality of your leads, and how do you ensure sales and marketing are aligned?

You need leads before you can assess their quality.

Everything starts with research. We try to really understand our clients and who their ideal customer is. We then explore what the industry is doing — what our clients want to emulate about their competition, and what they want to avoid. Once we know that, we dig into their target audience. This goes beyond demographics and gets to the core of their desires, pain points, and hesitations. That all creates alignment before we start building.

In terms of assessing lead quality, the key is to break the silos between marketing and sales. The easiest and most efficient way to do this is to have a well-maintained and integrated CRM. Most businesses fall short of doing this. Without a well-integrated CRM, you can really only assess cost per lead — it’s nearly impossible to assess the quality of leads.

When the CRM is properly integrated with sales and marketing, you unlock a 360-degree view of your entire customer journey. You can identify which leads are actually converting into customers, and how long they remain customers. This will allow you to understand cost per acquisition and lifetime value of leads. It’s the only true way to assess the quality of leads, at least at scale.

What are the biggest challenges you see companies facing when it comes to lead generation, and how do you suggest they overcome them?

I think one of the biggest issues I see is hoping that random acts of marketing will generate leads. Many businesses lack clearly defined goals and a strategy to reach them. That’s why having a well-thought-out strategy in place is crucial. It’s like having a hypothesis that you can test — you need to have a plan to see what works and what doesn’t.

The second issue I see is unrealistic expectations. We frequently work with sales-led and referral-dependent businesses that have never executed effective marketing strategies that drive revenue.There seems to be an expectation that simply “doing things” will automatically generate business. “We’ll do blogging.” Okay, great. Which keywords will your blog posts target? What is the search volume on those keywords? Once someone reads your blog, what is the logical next step in the customer journey? If they don’t convert immediately, what’s your plan to get them back to the website?

Marketing isn’t magic. Blogging for the sake of blogging won’t do anything for your business. I’m reminded of David Ogilvy’s famous quote, “If it doesn’t sell, it isn’t creative.” In other words, you can create all the unique, thoughtful content in the world — but if it’s not actually driving revenue for your business, what’s the point?

The third challenge I see is the lack of a strong foundation for marketing. You can’t layer marketing onto a broken website and hope to magically generate leads. Here’s the truth: If your website sucks, the only thing more traffic will do is make your website suck faster, to more people. Think about it this way: Marketing is all about testing hypotheses. As you’re testing various strategies to figure out what works and what doesn’t, your website shouldn’t be a factor to contend with. Instead, the website should be the control group.

Fourth biggest challenge is getting sales onboard. Sales teams can sometimes struggle to integrate into the marketing process or keep the CRM updated. But here’s the thing, the sales team has the best information for marketing. So it’s critical to get them to collaborate with your marketing team, either in-house or external, to achieve optimal results.

What role do marketing automation and CRM systems play in your lead generation strategy, and how do you use technology or AI to streamline the process?

That’s a lot in one question!

Virtually every business getting consistent leads online is leveraging marketing automation and a CRM. That said, exactly how businesses deploy those technologies is unique to the organization and should empower functions of the organization.

What you don’t want to do is deploy every feature just because you have access to it. Adoption can grow over time. I see a lot of businesses that end up getting ignored because of excessive marketing automation. Marketing automation isn’t a substitute for great customer experience and real communication.

As far as the role that marketing automation and CRM systems play in lead gen, here are ways I use it:

1. Lead nurturing
2. Enhance customer experience
3. Reduce wasted spend
4. Build customer data
5. Sales Enablement
6. Reporting and analytics

I’m a huge user of AI. As far as integrating it into the marketing automation and CRM process, I don’t have much of a use case. I deploy AI for a variety of tasks that speed up my day to day. I think generative AI is wildly interesting for doing research, crafting landing pages and email drafts. But I still think we’re a bit away from deploying it in a meaningful way with CRMs. I did a demo of a tool recently that helped with outbound sales. You could use a CRM designated for cold outreach, and this AI tool would give you a report on assumptions of their psychological biases around being sold. It was pretty interesting.

Can you share an example of a successful lead generation campaign you’ve led? What made it so effective?

Sure! One of my clients is a Manhattan-based property and casualty insurance brokerage. Before I took over the account, they’d been running a Google ads campaign around co-op and condo insurance in the Greater New York City area. They weren’t spending a lot of money — about $1,500 a month. But they also weren’t getting many leads — in fact, the campaign was only bringing in an average of one lead per month.

Their previous marketing vendor had kept asking to increase the monthly budget, arguing that they needed more money to get conversions. But the client was already spending an average of $1,500 per conversion. Clearly, something wasn’t working.

When I took over the account, I started with research. I wanted to know why it wasn’t working. What part of this strategy was leading to the lack of conversions?

We did a full audit of the campaign. We looked at the targeting, bidding, landing page, messaging… all of it.

Here’s what we found:

1. The location targeting wasn’t optimized for the campaign. It should have only been running in New York, and it was showing ads to people who had been in New York in the past few months, and in the old Google Ads settings you could target people “interested in” the location. This was a disaster! We limited it to be directly in New York at the time of search.
2. Broad keywords were targeting things that shouldn’t have been targeted. And, because the negative keyword list wasn’t well maintained, the bad keywords were eating up all the budget. We created more exact match and phrase match keywords, created an exhaustive negative keyword list, and really limited the broad match keywords.
3. The landing page needed to be better. It received a low quality score from Google so we improved the design, moved the form higher up on the page so it started above the fold, included more keywords that we were targeting throughout the content.

The results:

• 4,900% increase in monthly leads — from 1 per month to ~50 leads per month.
• 97% decrease in cost per lead — from $1,500 per lead to $35 per lead.
• 20% landing page conversion rate — industry average is between 2–10%.

Here is the main question of our interview. What are your 5 proven strategies for increasing lead generation?

1. Build a great website! Sounds basic, but I see a lot of businesses spending money on marketing campaigns that lead to a broken, out-of-date, or underdeveloped website. Again: If your website sucks, the only thing more traffic will do is make your website suck faster, to more people.

Think of your website as a 24/7 salesperson. If you want your website to be your best salesperson, you can’t just throw up a Squarespace website and call it a day. Your website needs a clear, compelling message — what you do, who you are, and what value you offer to customers. Without this clarity, no amount of increased traffic can help.

It’s equally important to build your site with best practices, speed, accessibility, analytics, and user experience in mind. Remember, developing an effective website is more like building a race car than a house. You can’t just set it and forget it — it requires frequent updates, analysis, and adjustments based on data.

2. Fuel your landing pages with supporting content. When crafting landing pages, consider implementing the “hub and spoke” methodology. In other words, build a landing page and create 5–20 articles associated with the root keyword on that page. Connect these pieces of content together, forming a robust network of long-tail content that supports your landing page.

This approach has consistently shown outstanding results — in my experience, it’s one of the most effective SEO strategies out there. We’ve used it to help independent insurance brokerages outrank large national carriers for highly competitive keywords. Even businesses who’ve worked with us for less than a year are already ranking on the first page of Google for their main, commercially relevant keywords.

3. Create smaller offers if you have a high-value product. We made this mistake ourselves for a little while. We had the false expectation that people would see our content or ads and then just convert on our main offer. This rarely works out. You need to coax potential customers into the fold by providing smaller offers that entice them to take that first step. It’s like offering a “sneak peek” of the value they’ll receive. This approach can significantly increase your lead generation.

4. Always provide a logical next step. I see a lot of businesses create content with no clear next step to guide their audience through the customer journey. Getting people to read a blog post or watch a video won’t convert them into paying customers on its own. When it comes to lead generation, it’s crucial to guide your audience toward a desired action — the next stage in the buyers’ journey. After they’ve shown interest by engaging with your content, provide them with a clear and compelling next step or offer.

5. Complement PPC campaigns with retargeting and nurture campaigns. We never launch a PPC (pay-per-click) campaign without pairing it with retargeting and a nurture campaign. This is especially crucial in the B2B space. Why? Again, research shows that B2B buyers typically need around 12 touchpoints before committing to a demo or contacting your business. Armed with this knowledge, we understand that a PPC campaign cannot be a one-and-done effort. By integrating retargeting and a nurture campaign, you’ll increase your chances of converting leads through multiple interactions.

What trends do you see emerging in this space that businesses should be paying attention to?

AI is hot right now. Like I said before, I am a huge user of AI. There are a ton of ways to be more effective with marketing by using it, but generative AI for content marketing is especially interesting. I think it gives great writers more time to do more research and write better work.

That said, I’m confident I won’t be replaced by AI for some time.

Podcasts are also interesting right now, but I don’t think businesses should make a podcast that is just stream of consciousness. I like the idea of doing seasons focused on different disciplines.

We are nearly done. You are a person of enormous influence. If you could inspire a movement that would bring the most amount of good to the greatest amount of people, what would that be? You never know what your idea can trigger. :-)

Interesting question. This isn’t a wildly new idea, by any means, but I’d love people to be more inspired to build — especially locally. Build a business, hire locally, spend locally. Grow your own community. Find ways to help others. Everyone has different talents. Make time to explore what you love to do, what you’re truly good at. Find people to help. Then solve bigger problems.

How can our readers further follow your work online?

You can visit my website strategicbrandbuilders.com, follow me on LinkedIn, or sign up for my newsletter (you can find that on my LinkedIn page).

Thank you for the interview. We wish you only continued success!