Every website needs a great lead magnet. Lead magnets are key in building your email list, providing value to your visitors and establishing your expertise in your industry.

What Is A Lead Magnet?

A Lead Magnet is a free incentive that you can give to your website visitors or audience in exchange for their email address and contact information.

Lead magnets are also often called signup incentives, signup offers or freebies.

Why Every Business Needs A Lead Magnet

The reason is simple…you need an audience to talk to!

Sure, advertising and publishing content on social media, your blog, are all a must to generate awareness for your business.

However, as we get a bit closer to a sale, we need to create a personal relationship with our users, get to know them and better, understand their needs, and talk to them 1-on-1.

We can achieve this by simply building an email list!

And Lead Magnets are the number one way to build an email list.

What Makes A Good Lead Magnet?

The goal of a Lead Magnet is to generate leads that we can then nurture and turn into paying customers.

The more leads a Lead Magnet can generate, from the same audience, the better it is, so this should be our baseline criterion for judging their performance. To make a Lead Magnet convert at an efficient rate, between 5-15%, we need to keep in mind the following principles when creating them:

• It’s relevant to your audience: An “Intro to Email Marketing” guide is a great idea if you’re a business coach or offer marketing services. But if you offer a product like beauty products or planners, a 20% discount or free shipping on their first is a great lead magnet for your audience.
• Solves a specific problem:  Try to identify one particular problem your potential customers have (e.g., writing better headlines, generating leads, reducing fine lines, etc.) and make a resource that addresses it and creates one quick win. Your audience will love you for it.
• Provides Instant gratification: it needs to solve your users’ problem and deliver on the promise and fast. A 12-part mini-class where users get access to one class per day is definitely valuable. However, if it takes 12+ days for users to get the full value of the Lead Magnet, you risk losing their attention and the sale along the way. A 5 day challenge, guide or checklist works much better.
• Demonstrates your expertise: the Lead Magnet is just another step on the way to making a sale. As such, it needs to increase our authority and build trust with our audience. This is especially true with educational Lead Magnets, who aim to provide useful information to the people who go through them.

Creating Your Lead Magnet

1. Do Your Research

In any kind of Marketing research, one of the first targets is usually our competition. More specifically, your direct and indirect competitors that bring in the most sales.

What kind of Lead Magnets are the offering? Look at their Facebook, Instagram or Pinterest ad’s and see what they are offering. Check out their website home page or blog where there is usually a section for their Lead Magnet or a pop up.

*You can not download and copy someone else’s work. This is for brainstorming ideas and then making it your own.

2. Choose a Lead Magnet Category

Lead Magnets can be grouped into specific categories based on their content. Pick the one that would best serve your audience.

• Useful / Execution focused

The goal is to help people do their jobs faster and better. Combine your domain expertise into one specific problem solver, and you got yourself an irresistible Lead Magnet.

Examples: Checklists, Scripts, Templates, Planners, Worksheets, Content Upgrades

• Engagement

Getting your audience engaged with interactive content is one of the best ways to activate them and make them part of the process. Your Lead Magnets can provide personalized advice and get them to their ideal solutions faster. Other times they can be just fun and entertaining.

Examples: Challenges, Quizzes, Assessments, Calculators, Giveaways

• Educational

This works wonders in industries and for products that require even a small amount of education before the user is ready to make a buying decision. By providing these Lead Magnets, brands can generate and nurture leads at the same time, which means getting them closer to a purchase event.

Examples: Mini classes, Webinars, PDF Resources, Email courses

• Sales related

These are Lead magnets that are close to the purchase and signify a high purchase intent. They lead people into the final purchase, and they are also a great way to keep track of these customers on your CRM.

Examples: Demos, Free trials, Coupons, Case study, Free Consultation, Free Samples

3. Build your Lead Magnet

I recommend starting with a Useful/Executional Lead Magnet in the form of a Checklist, Guide, Template, Planner or Workbook.

You can create one in Canva or InDesign. You usually need a landing page and a good offer to go with. I recommend using Flodesk because you can create the landing page, the delivery email with a link to your Lead Magnet to download and manage your email marketing to them now that you have their email address. Flodesk is very user friendly, aesthetically beautiful designs and has all of the necessary bells and whistles at very affordable pricing. (Get a free 30 day trail and $19 a month subscription (50% discount) by clicking Flodesk here or using code SCSWANEY)

You can host your lead magnet in Google Sheets, Google Docs or Dropbox. Your Lead Magnet doesn’t always need to be a PDF. You can use editable documents to allow people to copy and use your formulas and templates when needed.

4. Promote your Lead Magnet

You got your new Lead Magnet! Now, what do you do?

Simply launching it and praying that new leads are going to jump into your CRM isn’t going to be enough.

Here are 3 basic ways to generate leads with your Lead Magnets.

1. Main website

How about the traffic you already have on your main website? You want to convert them into leads, right?

It makes sense because if you’re browsing through a service page about coaching that you would download a “10 Benefits To Hiring A Coach” guide or on a product page to download a 10% discount coupon or a free trial if you’re looking for on the way of evaluating a product before purchasing it.

2. Blog promotion

If you have a blog, there’s no reason why you shouldn’t be generating leads from it.

In fact, it’s a pretty standard Content Marketing recipe to generate traffic to your blog through your content, and then turning them into leads using your Lead Magnet.

You can offer your Lead Magnet in your blog. For example: an Article about Email Marketing + a Lead Magnet about Getting Your First 100 Subscribers.

3. Ads + Landing page

What about businesses who just started, or who are looking to generate new leads from Cold Audiences? Creating a Landing page with a strong Lead Magnet and running Facebook Ads to it can work wonders for that matter.

It is pretty common for Marketers to run ads to free resources, like Educational and Engagement Lead Magnets to generate leads that they can then upsell to paid products.

This gives you a great outline to create your own Lead Magnet. If you would rather not put the time into creating one yourself, a done for you Lead Magnet is one of our fast & affordable Branded Marketing Collateral offerings.

Dream big!

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