What is a Lead Magnet? 5 Great Benefits to Consider

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Overview of Lead Magnets

Have you heard of marketers buying email lists? While this can work for a shorter time, most people on your list will report you for spamming.

After a hefty fine, you’ll probably realize it’s better to have a genuine email list. That way, you'll only email people that allow you to market your products or services to them.

And this is where lead generation is one of the biggest goals for marketers. However, the proportion of marketers whose lead magnets work effectively can shock you.

In this definitive guide, you’ll learn what a lead magnet is, the benefits of a lead magnet, how to create a good lead magnet, and examples of lead magnets.

Let’s get started.

Defining a Lead Magnet

A lead magnet is a free resource that marketers give away as an incentive to collect personal information, such as email addresses. The free resource can be an ebook, newsletters, whitepaper, trial subscription, and other incentives.

Your lead magnets have to offer value to your website visitors. In addition, they have to resonate with your target audience.

What are the Benefits of Lead Magnets?

Lead magnets are more like a trade. You share your knowledge in exchange for continued attention.  

And the longer your subscribers remain attentive to you, the higher your chances of converting them into clients. While all marketers want to convert their leads into customers, implementing their lead magnets is what matters. 

Here are the common benefits of executing lead magnets correctly:

1. Grow Your Audience

Lead magnets are an efficient and effective way to increase your audience - by growing your email list.

Most marketers prefer emails to other marketing campaigns because emails are:

  • Personal in nature
  • Have a high click-through rate
  • Purposeful

This approach is effective for all businesses that wish to grow their email list. Whether it’s the health industry, consultancy, or a small business, lead magnets can help build relationships with your target market. 

2. Build Trust

Trust is the foundation of all good relationships.

To build trust in the competitive online world, you need to focus on three aspects:

  • Competency: Show your buyers that you can genuinely solve their problems. This means that you are an expert in what you do. Always aim to provide value for your client’s money.
  • Integrity: For your potential clients or existing ones to trust you, deliver what you promise. Ensure the products or services you offer are of top quality. Otherwise, you’ll undermine your integrity.
  • Consistency: Keep providing quality services and delivering the promises in your marketing communication. Let your prospects know they can always rely on you.

3. Build Brand Awareness

By constantly emailing your audience, you build brand awareness by being the first person or company your audience considers when they think of a particular product.  

Given that this is an evergreen lead magnet, you'll keep your audience engaged by updating them on the latest news and hot deals.

If most of your leads start following you on various social media platforms or visiting your landing page, there are high chances your lead magnets and emails are effective and useful to them. 

4. Educate

A lead magnet enables you to educate your potential buyer persona on what you can offer.

This entails showing them that you perfectly understand their problems and you’re ready to offer solutions.

To do this, provide the pros and cons for various options.

Note that any information you provide should be easy to understand, straight to the point, and reliable.

5. Problem Solve

Clients usually have a problem that needs solving.

That’s why they’re willing to risk their personal information - they want the solutions you offer.

All you need to do is prove your competence and show them what you can do.

How to Create a Good Lead Magnet

As a marketer, your time is valuable. 

Well, you’re probably always looking out for effective digital marketing strategies that can convert any visitor into a subscriber. 

Lead magnets let you save time because you can create them in less than 20 minutes. Here are the steps to develop high-value lead magnets:

Step #1: Discover and Understand Your Audience

Identifying and knowing your target audience is the first and most challenging part of creating leads. 

Who are your ideal clients?  When you understand the kind of people you want to attract, you can easily create effective lead magnets.

Some factors that can help you determine your target audience include:

  • Age, education level, gender, income, and more.
  • The problems the prospects face (these should be solvable problems).

Being clear about your target audience will elevate your status and make your website visitors see you as an expert. 

Step #2: List All Ideas in a Spreadsheet

To develop a good marketing lead, brainstorm the situations that your audience may need help with.

Create a spreadsheet or worksheet of common problems that your target market faces. After listing their daily, weekly, monthly, or yearly problems, list five steps to solve the problems.

The number of leads you generate will largely depend on promises you make to your prospective leads and how well you can solve their problems. Ultimately, the faster you solve their problems, the higher your chances of getting referrals.

Step #3: Name Your Lead Magnet

Naming your lead magnet makes it easier for the target audience to identify your product or brand. The name should be a title or headline that appeals to your prospective leads. 

Crafting a lead magnet name is similar to creating a headline for your article or email. An appealing headline grabs the attention of your audience and keeps them engaged.

Here are a few tips you can use when naming your lead magnets:

  • Provide value: Your lead magnets need to offer value to your audience. Do this by stating what your lead magnet focuses on in the heading.
  • Focus on how-to phrases: Most people visit your landing page to find answers, guidelines, or instructions for something new. Think of something you can teach clearly and concisely - use it as your lead magnet name.
  • Use power words: Power words make it easy to convince your target audience to give you their emails and any other contact information. 
  • Ask a question: Consider asking questions that provoke one’s thoughts. Out of curiosity, they’ll want to download your content- even if it means sharing their contacts to get the content.
  • Build trust and establish expertise immediately: The last thing your website visitor wants is to exchange their contact information for another checklist or guide that doesn’t solve their problem. So, make sure you provide the solutions as promised.
  • Use numbers: Numbers usually make your lead magnet credible. They promise focused and specific content.  

Step #4: Create Your Lead Magnet

Now write content for your lead magnet. You can use free tools such as Microsoft Office and Google Docs to create engaging content for your prospective leads.

Take time to research and create useful content for your audience. That can take hours, days, weeks, and sometimes, a month. 

Generally, start by creating an outline of what you want to write. You can also get a skilled copywriter to create the content for you.

Step #5: Design the Lead Magnet

To create a lead magnet that attracts visitors, you also need to consider every design aspect. 

Designing your lead magnet shouldn’t be a problem with several affordable tools in the market. Some of these tools include:

  • Adobe illustrator 
  • CamStudio
  • Infogram 
  • Canvas
  • Stencil
  • Piktochart
  • Draw.io
  • Raw Shorts

If you’re not familiar with any of these tools, worry not. You can also request someone to design one or buy existing lead magnet templates/designs. 

Websites like Fiver.com and UpWork.com give you access to a wide variety of designers or designs that you can buy instantly.

Step #6: Put Everything Together

After ensuring your content is accurate, informative, and valuable to your target audience, copy it to the tool to design your lead magnet.

If you’re using Adobe Illustrator, copy and paste every section of the content. Then, compare the final product, such as a PDF file, and the Google Doc or Microsoft Word content. 

Go through your final lead magnet one last time to ensure neither the design nor the content has errors.

What Are Examples of Lead Magnet?

Now that you understand what is a lead magnet and how to create one, here are lead magnet examples to engage your audience and generate leads.

Example 1: Educational Lead Magnets

Educational lead magnets teach your site visitors something new in exchange for their contact details.

E-Book/Guide

An e-book or guide is a document that contains simplified content that is usually complex or hard to grasp. This type of lead magnet is perfect for a series of blog posts about related topics.

SEO for Lawyers Guide

Instead of creating one from scratch, compile the most popular blog post(s) and pack them into one convenient bundle for your audience.

Your main goal is to give your prospects a complete analysis of a given subject. It takes an in-depth look at a topic and gives a step-by-step recommendation to achieve certain goals.

Reports

Generally, reports are suitable in industries that rely on statistics and research.  To prove your expertise to your target audience, conduct research on a topic and share the results via email.

This way, your audience can share and reference your work, so you get a better reach.

The Content Marketing Institute conducts research on the latest trends and insights for marketing. They release reports that describe what they found in the research.

Webinar

Create a webinar to illustrate your expertise and communicate with clients visually. Then, when they ask questions, you’ll get a better understanding of what bothers them.

Since the exercise involves registration, it’s a great opportunity to request users for their email addresses.

Webinars can be pre-recorded or live.

Hubspot, for example, offers free webinars with topics ranging from social media to advertising to design.

Useful Lead Magnets

Useful lead magnets save your prospects time, money, and energy. They provide tools or resources that help in solving specific problems.

Templates

A template is an outline or a draft a prospect can follow. Your ideal customer doesn’t have to create or design things from scratch.

More often than not, users download the templates and modify them to suit their needs by filling in the blanks.

You can create a collection of templates on different subject areas in your business niche.

All you need is to tap into what attracts your audience and create that for them.

Loganix provides free SEO templates for content briefs, keyword research, SEO roadmap, and more. In order to download them, you give them your email, which is a form of gated content.

Cheatsheets

A cheat sheet is a list of essential data that provides references for specific tasks.

They’re easy to create and usually help your audience solve problems and reach their goals faster.

Vertical Response, an email marketing software, wrote a copywriting cheat sheet. It details how to write for email, social and the web.

Checklist

A checklist type of lead magnet summarizes an article or strategy with an easy-to-follow action item. It’s simply a list of things your prospects need to do.

Acts as a reminder during strategy implementation.

Semrush provides an SEO checklist that focuses on SEO basics, keyword research, technical SEO, on-page and content, and off-page SEO.

Toolbox

The toolbox combines multiple resources that you use to accomplish a given task. For instance, it might include a template, a checklist, a calculator, or a brief ebook.

When creating a toolbox, there are no rules. You just need to be creative.

Calendar

Create a calendar template that your target audience can print or use online. This type of template emphasizes dates.

It’s useful for specific events and recurring activities.

Potential clients might use the calendar to track personal growth, weight loss programs, or fitness classes.

Asana, a workplace management tool, has a social media calendar template that makes planning posts and content easier.

Calculators

If your users have to deal with numbers, create a calculator to help them perform quick calculations. 

A great calculator can be a lead magnet.

It’s important to ensure it works as advertised and is helpful.

Spreadsheet

Spreadsheets make work more organized, functional, and accountable.

Design a spreadsheet that is useful to your target audience. Additionally, you can provide a detailed manual or video guide on how to customize the spreadsheet.

Example 3: Entertaining Lead Magnets

Entertaining leads are mainly for entertaining your audience.

Quizzes and Surveys

Use online quizzes and surveys to generate new leads. Do this by creating a site that hosts quizzes and surveys that relate to your industry.

It’s also a great way to get prospects' opinions on your brand.

Get participants to give their contact information to receive results for the quiz or survey. Ensure participants get these results instantly.

You could also include images, descriptions, and other engaging materials.

Always make the questions thought-provoking and fun. 

Giveaway

Giveaway lead magnet is an effective way to make your customers exchange their contact information for gifts. Your giveaway or free product should have the desired impact.

Your reward should be something in your catalog.

For example, W Hotels The Store is giving away a 2-night stay at W Hotels. The entries just provide their name and email.

Example 4: Bottom of Funnel Lead Magnets

Bottom-of-funnel lead magnets give your prospects a reason to use your services or buy a product.

Free Trials

Companies with products that are complex or need illustrations tend to use free trials. For example, most software companies encourage buyers to sign up for a free trial or demo.

If the potential customer finds value in a product after a trial, they may make a purchase.

Moreover, free trials allow your product to sell itself.

Case Studies

Case studies provide detailed information on a successful outcome or actions taken in your interaction with a customer.

Case studies establish credibility and trust with your customers.

Shopify, an enterprise eCommerce platform, compiled a list of client case studies. The case studies describe the problem, solution, and results for each client.

Discounts

Give customers discounts in exchange for their email addresses.

It’s also a way of rewarding your enthusiastic buyers.

Free Shipping

Free shipping attracts customers.

It encourages them to purchase products at an indicated price without worry about paying an extra shipping fee.

Whether you are selling your product online or offline, free shipping can be a great lead magnet for you.

Example 5: Community-Building Lead Magnets

Community-building lead magnets create a way for your audience to interact with each other as well as your brand.

Challenge

A direct challenge can be a great way to engage your audience. For example, you could challenge them to accept a dare, create something or do anything.

If they hand over their contact details, you’ll list them as participants or winners of the challenge.

Membership Site or Forums

Using forums and membership sites is a great idea to engage active members. They create room for members to share tips, ask questions and even discuss professional issues.

Members get a sense of exclusivity.

By creating a membership site with free registration, you can collect more emails on your landing page. 

You could offer members resources like:

  • Webinars
  • Resource library
  • Templates
  • Mentorship and coaching

Facebook Group

Facebook is the largest social media network in the world. It’s an excellent platform for businesses to generate leads.

Since there are many Facebook groups, create one for your business and make it private. That will attract people who like moderated communities.

To make this an effective lead magnet, let people join your group through email subscription.

Slack Group

Similar to Facebook Groups, a slack group is a powerful way to generate leads.

Using a slack app, you can broadcast messages to groups of people.

Final Thoughts

Having a good lead magnet is the first step to building a strong, respectful, and long-lasting relationship with your leads.

To create such a relationship, focus on delivering one crucial, elaborate, or big thing to your prospective leads. This method has proved to be effective for many years because almost everyone loves freebies.

The idea is to find a product or service that provides value to your website visitors such that they can allow you to market your resources to them in the future.

If you're looking to create the perfect lead magnet to boost your lead generation efforts, reach out to us today!

Drew Hendricks
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