Lead Generation that Actually Works? (Bant.io Review)

When I was approached to ask if I wanted to take a look at a lead generation platform, honestly, my first thought was “Great, another expensive solution to lead generation, that doesn’t actually generate any leads. I’ll throw a few grand into something, and it’ll disappear, never to be seen again!”

This time, however, I was wrong...

Bant is a ‘done for you’ lead gen service that ties in a multi-tiered process from chat bots, social media marketing, banner ad retargeting, and pay-per-click campaigns. It starts from as little as $95 per month and it’s ala carte which means you can just bolt on various done-for-you campaigns, right through to their 15-30 leads & conversions guarantee which comes to $2,175 per month.

This isn’t a huge amount when it comes to a done-for-you lead gen service. I'm not lying, over the last 2 weeks my calendar has been filling up with appointments off the back of the work that Bant has done for me. 

To be able to give you a thorough review of Bant, I had to sign up for the service myself to try it out and give you a perspective from a client. So let's talk in more detail about what Bant actually does. 

The service is applicable to pretty much every business, B2B or B2C, but specifically for my review, I’m doing it from the perspective of an IT and MSP Business Owner, needing more leads.

Now I don’t sell IT Services to clients anymore, but what I do have to sell are my course and coaching. The first thing that happens with any marketing campaign, the thing that will make or break you, is defining your target audience, otherwise known as your customer avatar.

My avatar, are MSP Business Owners, in the UK, with less than 50 staff. Your avatar would be very different. It could be, Accountancy firms with less than 20 people, within a 30-mile radius of your location and with job titles of Managing Directors, Finance Directors, Owners, Founders, and so forth. 

For legal firms that could be the same, but their job titles might include the title of Partner - because that’s how law firms are typically structured here in the UK.

So once you niche down who your target audience is for your campaign, then Bant gets to work. Over the first week, Bant set up a LinkedIn campaign to proactively connect with people who fell into my target demographic. The one thing I will say here is that I hate, with a passion, those people who just spam you with sales messages on LinkedIn. So the one thing I was grateful to Bant and their service for, was that I was able to review their campaign before it went out. I could tweak the messaging that did go out so the initial connection message sounded real, and to ensure I wasn’t going to annoy anyone with sales fluff. 

Bant also got to work setting up a remarketing campaign, with banner ads of all sizes for Google remarketing. They worked on a PPC Adset for me, along with email marketing campaigns, and very impressively, they created about 9 different email campaigns for me. They also added an online chat system to my website, to pick up any leads from there.

So to simplify, Bant put the work in, to begin with, to nail the audience for who to target and to put the campaigns together ready for launch. Once they launched, that’s when surprising things started to happen.

Firstly, I got my first lead on the first day of the campaign. After they launched the campaigns, I spoke with the team as they worked to tweak things, keep improving, and try some additional campaigns with different wording or tweaked messaging. My call to action for my campaign was to book a meeting via Calendly, and for the last 3 weeks now, I’ve had my Friday mornings filled up with meetings. 

As far as I’m concerned, Bant did their job, and as I said before, I’m genuinely surprised at the results. Due to the leads coming in - I never really even bothered to look at the whole web portal that bant gives you to track everything going on.

You can see right here that at least for me and my campaign, I had a total of 27 leads in the roughly 1 1/2 weeks that this was running for.

They give you a tonne of stats around your leads. Their location, industries, gender, job titles, company sizes AND you can score the leads as they come through, to help teach Bant which leads are good and which are bad, so they can focus on getting you more high-quality leads instead.

Whilst I could go into showing you around the platform, honestly, as a client of Bants for the past month or two, who has used the platform - the best part for me was that it was done for me.

I signed up, I had my onboarding call, we identified my target clients, and then they went away to create the campaigns. I approved the campaigns, and Bant went away to deliver them. 

If I needed anything, I emailed them. If I got a lead that wasn’t a good fit, I’d just forward it to them and they would block them from the system so it didn’t contact them again.

I only really looked at the overall stats because I had, to put this review together for you. Realistically, I had leads coming into my inbox pretty much every day. About 50% of those, for me, were people from my target audience interested in buying my course. I think if we spent a little more time around niching that audience, and had the campaigns running for longer so it could learn, then that percentage would have increased. 

SETTING YOUR EXPECTATIONS

Today I shot a video for my coaching clients that goes into expectations around what to expect from marketing, lead gen, and generally how long things will take to actually start working.

So I’m going to repeat myself now, but if you are spending any kind of money on marketing - whether it’s a done-for-you service like Bant, or whether it’s you doing social media, or video marketing, or pay per click - anything you do, you should be willing to commit for a minimum of 3 months.

Why?

Because the biggest, missed opportunity with marketing, and for most businesses, is that consistency wins, every time.

The longer you stick at something, the better it will perform. There’s time to learn, tweak and adapt the campaigns, and particularly when it comes to retargeting, there is just a natural amount of time that it takes from the first visit, through to retargeting, and then finally a purchase at just the right point in time. 

Consistency wins over everything else, because in the IT Industry when we are looking to sign people up for 12-month contracts for their IT Support and other services, it takes time.

I had clients sign up with my IT business a YEAR after their initial interest because they weren’t ready to buy then. They were tied into contracts or didn’t have the budget, and so a year later, they came to be ready to buy.

That is why this multi-level approach by Bant works well in my eyes. It gives you a little bit of everything and whilst perhaps the pay per click didn’t work as well for me as say Social, for you it could be the total opposite experience.

So for those of you who do keep asking me, Pete - I have £2k to spend a month on marketing. What should I do with it? This wouldn’t actually be a bad option to try out and see how well it works for you.

Next, you should watch THIS video about one of the best marketing trends that you are missing out on, and it’s the exact reason why Bant approached me about making this post, so go check that out next.

Sign up for Bant: https://geni.us/bant