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As a small business, it may be a struggle to attract new customers to your business. One effective solution to this predicament is to create a lead magnet.
Lead magnets offer valuable information to clients for free; all customers have to do in exchange for helpful knowledge is leave their contact information. Consent to send newsletters to your client’s emails gives you the opportunity to send more high-value resources straight into their inboxes.
Not all lead magnets are created the same, some come in PDFs while others come in a video format, but they all work towards your company’s growth through increased lead generation and revenue.
In this guide, we run you through what a lead magnet is and how you can use it to build a better relationship with your target audience, establish your brand as an authority in the market, and ultimately grow your business.
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» What is a Lead Magnet?
A lead magnet is a tool that companies provide free of charge to their clients to establish authority and trust. 50% of marketers have reported having higher conversion rates due to lead magnets. That being said, it’s hard not to see this tool’s benefits. You can think of lead magnets as a free taste of what your company can offer.
Lead magnets can be a free webinar, case study, or eBook. This marketing tool can come in many different forms. The only thing that matters is that you provide your client with answers to their problems without giving away the whole solution. After all, you want them to still need your services after experiencing your solutions.
» What Can a Lead Magnet Do?
A lead magnet isn’t just there to help you attract new clients, and it’s also there to assist you in establishing your brand’s authority and fostering trust between your company and customers.
Indeed, a lead magnet can aid small companies in competing with bigger brands by giving them the privilege of nurturing a relationship with their client base. Now, that’s not something big corporations can do because of the scale of their operations and the number of people that reach out to them daily.
The carefully cultivated connection that SMEs have can work positively for them, seeing as how 7 in 10 customers purchase more from brands that they trust. For small companies, this can lead to a significant impact on their annual revenue.
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Of course, the benefits we’ve mentioned are just the tip of the iceberg. We go further into what a lead magnet can do for you below:
1. Build Trust
An important job that lead magnets have is to further your company’s relationship with its clients. With 88% of customers opting for a genuine brand, it’s clear that you must walk your company’s talk.
Yes, products and services are made as a solution for certain problems, but clients don’t just want to see ads. The customers of today prefer purchasing from brands that they can trust, and this can be difficult to achieve if you’re not talking about your business’s mission or adding value to the lives of your customers.
Have you ever noticed how global brands have started to become more transparent with their process and advocacies? This is a push for them to humanize their brand and build better rapport with their clients. By showing customers what goes on behind the scenes, corporation’s help consumers gain a deeper understanding of the work that goes into their products and why they should choose their brand.
Building trust with your clients is a crucial step in showing them what it’s like to work with you and reinforcing your commitment to fulfilling their goals with them.
2. Establish Authority
Because lead magnets contain a trove of information, it’s a great way for you to establish your authority with your customers.
While you may not give the whole solution to your client’s problems, a lead magnet is still an excellent step in flexing your expertise.
In addition, once you’ve gotten customers to leave their details in exchange for your lead magnet, you can provide them with additional resources, such as links to your blog, podcasts, and videos. Further proving to them that you’re an authority in your field.
3. Grow Your Email List
As we’ve mentioned above, lead magnets are often given in exchange for a client’s contact details. Meaning lead magnets are a worthy technique you can employ to grow your email list.
By providing customers with high-value information at different digital touchpoints with your brand, you’re given the opportunity to improve your relationship with them and increase sales.
Of course, you shouldn’t forget the benefits that email marketing can do for your business.
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4. Find New Leads
By creating a helpful lead magnet, you can attract new customers into your organization’s orbit. Using this content marketing tool to generate leads is a sure way to find high-quality leads who are genuinely interested in your products and services.
Your lead magnet is meant to serve your company and, possibly, help upsell and cross-sell your services. By crafting a top-notch lead magnet, you’re assured of an increased number of high-value leads. But how exactly can one create a good lead magnet? We answer that in the next section.
» What Makes a Good Lead Magnet?
We’ve said it before, and we’ll say it again, not all lead magnets are created the same. Lead magnets come in various formats and styles, but the good ones will always be made with a specific intent in mind and a format that’s built to bring them down the sales funnel.
In this section, we’ll tell you how you can make a good lead magnet:
1. Target Your Audience
The first step in creating an effective lead magnet is targeting your audience. You’ll need to think of your ideal reader and make content that’ll appeal to them.
Let’s say that you’re a digital marketer. Your ideal reader could be someone who owns a brand and doesn’t know how to maximize their online assets.
To address their concerns, you could create an eBook on how they can utilize different digital assets to increase their conversions.
While you plan out your lead magnet, you can also investigate your competitor’s strategy and see who they’re targeting, what they’re putting out, and how they’re addressing their customer’s challenges.
2. Design It According To Your Brand
Once you have a clear image of your target audience, it’s time for you to design your lead magnet.
No matter the format you choose, you must ensure that it reflects your brand. You can do this by simply using your brand’s colors for your lead magnet’s design. Practicing this can establish consistency amongst all your products and services, free or not.
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3. Address a Specific Problem
When you’re creating a lead magnet, it’s best that you diagnose a specific problem and prescribe a solution for it.
To demonstrate, imagine if you were to choose between these two eBooks:
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- How to Cook Healthy Meals
- 15 Healthy Recipes That’ll Inspire You to Cook
Odds are you’ll be choosing the latter option because it details exactly what you want to know from the title. Additionally, the former option is vague and can sound bland to clients.
4. Add a CTA
Of course, one shouldn’t forget to add a Call-To-Action (CTA) in their lead magnets.
When you add a CTA, you guide your clients to wherever you want them to go. So, you can lead customers to book your services, avail of your products, or to other free resources you have on your website.
CTAs are there to spur your customer into moving further into your company’s world.
5. Ask For Feedback
Before you publish your lead magnet, it’s best if you test it out first. Ask your friends and family to go through the material and ask for honest feedback.
The feedback you receive will help you improve your lead magnet’s content or direct your attention to something you may have missed.
6. Share Your Work
Finally, it’s time to publish your lead magnet.
Make sure to utilize your marketing channels to get the word out about this resource. Whether you share it on Facebook, post it on Instagram, or announce it in your newsletter, announcing this material’s existence is the first step to driving conversions.
An extra step you can take is to add keywords to the lead magnet’s landing page of the lead magnet to improve its SEO performance. This can improve the chances of your lead magnet ranking on Google’s search engine results.
7. Analyze Results
Now that you’ve made your lead magnet, it’s important to remember that you should monitor its performance.
We’ve listed some of the ways you can check for the effectiveness of your lead magnet:
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- Note the number of customers who have given you their contact details in exchange for the resource.
- Check to see how your company’s revenue has improved since the launch of the lead magnet.
- Monitor the number of visitors you have on the lead magnet’s page.
It’s also good to remember that as your company continues to evolve, so should the material you have on your website. So, make it a habit to update your lead magnet’s contents every now and then to reflect developments in your field.
» What are Some Examples of Lead Magnets?
Now that you know how to create a lead magnet, you can now look at some examples for inspiration.
Here are some examples of lead magnets that you can also do for your business:
1. eBook
Creating an eBook to address your target customer’s problems is a tried and tested method that has proven to be successful. You can use your eBook to deep dive into your field while answering some of the market’s burning questions.
Take, for example, Max Weber’s eBook. Weber’s eBook tells you what to expect right from the landing page. On the landing page, Max outlines what his readers will learn and what benefits they can get from his eBook, The Fundamentals of Fitness.
2. 15-Minute Consultation
If you have enough members on your team, you can designate one teammate to provide visitors with a free online consultation. That way, you can create a specific solution for your client’s problems.
Companies like Little Marketing Genius execute this type of lead magnet. Little Marketing Genius’ aim is to have potential customers book a free consultation for a brand evaluation.
3. Class
Some companies offer a full-blown class to bring customers into the fray, just like Hubspot.
Hubspot is one of the leading software developers in the world. This company offers free marketing courses in exchange for their client’s details.
This generous approach has kept clients loyal to Hubspot and has provided the company with many opportunities to upsell and cross-sell its products to customers.
4. Tools
Tools are an excellent technique to bring value into your customers’ lives.
You’ve seen how apps roll out a limited free version of their products and put the full capabilities of the product behind a paywall. Lead magnets can also function like that, but the currency is the customer’s contact details.
An excellent example is this tool that calculates customer acquisition costs created by ProfitWell.
5. Quizzes
Quizzes are a fun and interactive way to help your clients, which is something Virtue Map has taken advantage of.
Virtue Map is a company focused on helping procrastinators gain confidence to execute their tasks immediately. This company puts customers through an interactive quiz to help them identify their needs. Once the quiz is completed, clients receive their results about what kind of procrastinator they are and what they can do to kick this habit.
But, before test-takers can see their results, they must first enter their contact details. Making this quiz an effective lead magnet.
» What Can You Do to Improve Results?
We hope that you learned how to create an impactful lead magnet for your clients. Once you’ve implemented what you’ve learned and you’ve increased your leads, you’ll need to employ software to help you manage your growing business.
Author Bio: Marc Bartolome
Marc Bartolome is the Head of Business at SEO Services Australia, a strategist, and an enabler of hundreds of successful digital marketing campaigns. Always looking out for the little guys, he specializes in helping SMEs create a bigger impact online – which is why he writes blog posts like this.
