How to use your invite-only Benchmark Group to increase leads

By hosting a benchmark group for your market, you can increase awareness, trust, and qualified leads. Prospects will join your group to benchmark their performance and find improvement opportunities. If they need help improving, your agency will be uniquely positioned as a thought leader and can prove (with data) that you have experience improving key metrics they’re interested in.

You can drive more qualified leads using these 3 steps:

Create unique content from your group
Capture leads from your group, and
Convert leads from your group.

Step 1: Create unique content from your group

The best way to raise awareness for your group (and company) is by sharing valuable content, natively and contextually, wherever your audience is paying attention. Unique and valuable content attracts more attention, shares, and links. And it’s harder for AI or your competitors to copy. One way to create valuable content like this is to leverage unique insights that only you can offer, directly from your benchmark group.

Summarize benchmark data

Sometimes the simplest approach is the best. Each month, gather benchmark data from your group and summarize it in a social post, through carousel images, in your newsletter, or on a blog post.

View an example here.

Talk about how to improve key metrics

Pick a metric where the average company performs low, and share advice on how they can improve performance. This could be through a podcast interview (on your, or another company’s show), social posts, articles, or a newsletter.

View an example here.

Answer questions with data

Search social platforms like LinkedIn, Reddit or X (formerly Twitter) for queries like, “What’s a good {metric name}” or “average {metric name}”. Share the answer with data from your group.

Share an observation and your unique point of view

Review your benchmark data, looking for something that surprises you about it. It could be that a certain metric performs so low or high, and you didn’t expect it to. Or it could be your hypothesis as to why median performance is what it is. Summarize your point of view and share it on your channels.

View an example here.

Host a “guess the average” post

Ask followers to “guess what the average {metric} is for {your market}”. After time has passed and guesses have rolled in, share the answer.

View an example here.

Step 2: Capture leads using your group

The more members in your group, the more prospects you can build relationships with. You can invite prospects to join your group by sharing your signup link, or entering their email in your group.

Here are a few ways you can use your invitation link to drive more signups:

Link to your group on your website

If your website visitors aren’t quite ready to take the next step with you, give them somewhere to go. By inviting them to your benchmark group, they’ll be able to see how they stack up (and most importantly, where they underperform) compared to peers, increasing the desire to get help to improve performance.

You can build a dedicated landing page showcasing your group, link to it in your navigation, or provide a simple call to action.

Invite members in your nurture campaigns or newsletter

Send a one-time email inviting your customers or prospects to join your group, and see how they stack up to peers. Or, incorporate it into your newsletter or signature line if you want a more consistent call to action. You can also add it as a step in your email nurture sequence.

Share a link in your marketing content

When you create marketing content based on your benchmark data (see Step 1), provide a link and invite people to view the source.

Invite members via email

Go into your group, and enter the email address you want to invite.

Step 3: Convert leads from your group

We want your benchmark group to position you as a thought leader and expert in your target market. But most importantly, we want it to help you increase qualified leads.

Use it in your outbound strategy

Send your prospects something valuable they can use now, instead of a cold sales pitch. For most cold messages, prospects ignore it, or aren’t in-market when you reach out. By inviting them to your benchmark group, you’re providing valuable insights, and building a meaningful connection with them.

Here’s an example of a message a marketing agency for law firms might send:

“Hey Sarah! I host a free “benchmark group” for law firms. It lets you compare your firm to 50+ other firms to see how your marketing performance compares to theirs and find opportunities to improve. No sales pitch, it’s totally free to join. I host it for clients and non-clients and just wanted to extend the invite!”

Provide a free benchmark consultation

Let prospects know they can join your benchmark group to see how they’re performing, then offer a consultation where you’ll help them understand the benchmark data and identify areas they can improve.

Prove your expertise with data

Update your case studies to show the results you helped clients get, and how you helped them outperform the rest of the companies in their market. Or share data on how the average client who works with you outperforms the median.