What is a lead magnet?
Let’s start by nailing down the lead magnet definition:
A lead magnet is an incentive offered to a potential customer in exchange for their email address. This incentive can be in the form of a valuable resource or service.
They are used to generate sales and to build up an email list for marketing purposes. Funnels are also used to efficiently turn cold traffic into customers.
A lead magnet is a piece of content that is offered for free in order to generate leads. Social media marketing typically uses a variety of content to attract and engage audiences, such as free eBooks, templates, and other gated content. These pieces are often offered alongside blog articles to provide additional value to readers. If someone clicks on your website and provides you with their email address, this creates an opportunity for you to have more personal email conversations with them.
Why lead magnets work
Robert Cialdini, author of Influence, talks about two consumer behaviors that compel people to engage with your brand and respond to your offers.
The first is consistency.
People who download your lead magnet are more likely to support you in the future.
Once they said yes, they wanted to keep saying yes. This is positive news as it will now be simpler to convince them to take up your paid offer.
In reciprocation, people feel obligated to repay what another person has given them. This rule is often used in sales and marketing, as companies will give away a free sample or lead magnet in the hopes that consumers will feel obligated to make a purchase.
The rule of reciprocity is the social norm that dictates that people feel obligated to repay what another person has given them.
When you give away valuable information for free, prospects are more likely to buy from you when you make an offer. The only way they can repay you is by doing this.
Quality matters
If you want good results, you should offer high quality lead magnets, regardless of consumer behaviours.
The most effective lead magnets provide your potential customers with a sample of your products or services. So you want them to impress. You’ll know you’re hitting the mark when prospects reach out in email or social media with messages like this:
“This is amazing! This person is looking forward to seeing what the author will give in their paid products, since they’ve given so much away for free.
Your lead magnets (freebies) must be high quality so that people will want to buy your paid products or services. Just smaller in scope.
Selling in advance
Your lead magnet is the first interaction a potential customer has with your business. This is their first impression of your company, so it’s important to make sure it’s a good one! No money is exchanged, but it’s still a transaction. Your visitor is required to input their email address if they want to download your lead magnet.
Your lead magnet should be relevant to the future offers you plan to make. The product must address a specific issue that the customer is having.
Hopefully, after consuming your lead magnet, they’ll want more. This means that people will be willing to spend money on solutions that are more comprehensive and complete.
How to create a lead magnet
A lead magnet is a piece of content that is offered for free in exchange for the user’s contact information. Usually, a lead magnet is part of an email marketing campaign or a promotional campaign. So start there.
Ask yourself:
- What is the goal of this campaign?
- What action do I want to drive?
- What type of lead magnet is most likely to get results?
Then assess your resources.
Do you have enough time to create new content?
- Create a guide or report.
- Write a blog post that can serve as your lead magnet.
- Create a quiz with a follow-up report
Would you like to reduce the amount of time spent creating new content by recycling old content?
- Look for an existing blog post that you can use in your campaign.
- Create a content upgrade.
- Share a book chapter or PDF.
- Splinter a portion of your main offer.
Do you have the money and materials necessary to create an event?
- Host a webinar or masterclass.
- Consider a one-day virtual event.
There’s no right way to create a lead magnet. To succeed in monetizing your blog, you need to create content that your audience will find valuable and be interested in your paid products or services.
Some great examples of lead magnets that compel action:
To summarize, lead magnets should:
- Be specific – Be absolutely clear what people are going to get, and, to take it a step further, what problem the lead magnet helps solve.
- Provide results – Tell them how you’re going to solve the problem and what result they will see.
- Provide instant gratification – When prospects consume the content, they should be able to use the information immediately to solve the problem.
- Build authority – The quality of what your offering and the information included should be valuable to your audience and, therefore, improve your brand’s standing as a strong resource and thought leader.
- Provide value – By addressing issues and helping solve problems. As Barry stated, it should be something people would be willing to pay for. More on that later.
We focus a lot of time on the results and value pieces of the equation to drive more clicks and conversions.
You Have to Know Your Buyer’s Journey
You need a detailed understanding of your prospects’ buyer’s journey to provide the best value.
Content and lead magnets should be tailored to each stage of your buyer’s journey.
Content Near Lead Magnet Calls to Action Is Key
This could be a blog article or an eBook. Embedded content, such as an eBook, is a type of lead magnet. They might be call-to-action buttons on your website. They might be calls-to-action on your blog. The links in an email message could be part of a longer conversation that a salesperson is having with a lead to try to turn them into an opportunity. The key is to make sure that the right content is associated with the right offer.
Winning Clicks and Influencing Customers
lead magnets exist to serve two primary purposes: to gain attention by enticing potential customers to click and download them, and then to actually provide value once they have been downloaded in order to funnel leads further down the sales process and keep them coming back for more. This means that the content offered as a lead magnet should be different depending on where the potential customer is in their journey.
Let’s look at some examples of what lead magnets might look like during each stage of the buyer’s journey:
Retail product
- Awareness stage (top of the funnel) – Remember, at this stage, people are looking for answers and seeking education and insight. You should be educating them and positioning your brand as both a useful resource for content and as a thought leader. A retail product might provide a checklist – for example, a generator manufacturer might offer a listing of key features that generators should have for use with RVs, at worksites, and during power outages. This eBook is likely broadly promoted on websites, blogs, and through social media and search advertising.
- Consideration stage (middle of the funnel) – At this stage prospects understand their problems and opportunities, and they’re researching solutions that will help them best solve those problems or realize those opportunities. You need to both showcase your products and services, and differentiate them – and make yourself stand above the competition. You also want to guide those prospects that are the best fit for your business further down your funnel. At this stage, the generator manufacturer might produce a whitepaper detailing the capabilities, and features of its generators showcasing how they’re designed to be used in specific scenarios. This type of lead magnet may be included alongside content or might be sent in an email message to leads that have already opted into a previous offer.
- Decision stage (bottom of the funnel) – At this stage prospects are looking for the reason to buy, they need something, internal or external, that will compel that action. For this element, the generator manufacturer might offer a coupon, free add-ons, free setup, or some other offer to nudge prospective buyers into action. Again, this offer likely comes in an email to leads that are already considered to be at the middle or bottom of the funnel.
Software App
- Awareness stage – A software vendor that sells proposal creation software might produce an eBook which explains how the standard back and forth of writing proposals without using such a tool wastes time and may result in unnecessary churn for every proposal created, and delivery of rushed or unrefined proposals that may lose business.
- Consideration stage – The proposal software vendor may run webinars regularly that allow prospects to see the software in action, and that show how common issues in proposal creation and collaboration are addressed by the software. It’s important to note the interactive nature of this activity. While the webinar is likely to be mostly a canned presentation and demonstration, the webinar format gives the software vendor a great opportunity to have salespeople interact in real time with prospective buyers, and follow up with those buyers after the fact to answer questions, provide clarifications and continue productive contact.
- Decision stage – To nudge leads into becoming buyers, the proposal software vendor may offer a free trial of their software, or, as some software vendors frequently do, offering a ‘forever free’ version of software with minimal functionality to warm users up to using a paid version.
Professional service
- Awareness stage – An IT consultancy that provides security hardware, software, and consulting for intrusion protection and prevention may also use an eBook in the awareness stage. In the technology sector, one of our favorite types of eBooks is a ‘Notes from the Field’ eBook. This kind of eBook would showcase a variety of real examples of the types of threats that exist, the impact of network attacks, and the steps needed to secure networks from future issues.
- Consideration stage – The IT security consultancy might publish an Expert Guide on Detecting Network Intrusion. The guide showcases the company’s knowledge and expertise and conveys the complexity of the services they provide. At this stage, leads are often doing intense research and looking for in-depth knowledge, which is what this lead magnet provides.
- Awareness stage – The IT security consultancy might offer a free evaluation of a prospective buyers network. It’s important to note that, with this type of offer, you should clearly state what prospects will and will not get. In this case, the IT security consultancy might make it clear that a security engineer will spend two hours with the client and provide a range of options that may be a good fit, while a sales associate will provide estimated pricing.
How can a lead magnet improve your business?
There’s no doubt that lead magnets are essential for businesses to grow today. This is why new businesses should consider creating blog posts as one of their first content marketing strategies.
Build know, like, and trust
Seth Grodin’s book, Permission Marketing: Turning Strangers into Friends and Friends into Customers, was a game-changing concept when it was published in 1999.
This principle has been guiding email marketing since it became effective. Today, we still receive a lot of unwanted emails in our inboxes. When you offer something of value in return for someone’s contact information, it shows that you are committed to providing them with what they need. This also indicates that you are more concerned with meeting your client’s needs than achieving your own business goals.
Build brand awareness
A lead magnet is a great way to build brand awareness. The only way your potential customers will know what you can do for them and how you can help them achieve their goals is if you put your message in front of them. If you do a good job, people will tell their friends about you and your work will spread through word-of-mouth. This could lead to a lot of people knowing about you and your work.
When you let potential clients sample your products and services, they can not only see for themselves that working with you offers unique benefits, but they can also try them out to see if they like them. This means that you should not be stingy when creating a lead magnet. When you give something away, it creates a connection and engagement with others.
When you send your subscribers an email announcing a new product or service, they are more likely to click through and purchase it.
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