Lead generation can make or break any business or campaign. Don’t believe us? 91% of marketers surveyed by Ruler Analytics state that it’s their primary goal when creating campaigns, and 53% of business owners also reveal that they spend at least half of their marketing budget on lead generation. Right off the bat, how do you even wrangle something that costs so much, but is essential at the same time? By zeroing in on quality over quantity and finding that elusive lead magnet. But what then?
Thankfully, there are several ways to boost acquisition with lead magnets, and we’ll show you exactly how to generate leads consistently, all while not making it seem like it’s rocket science. You in?
What Are Lead Magnets?
Lead magnets are perks used to entice clients and customers to your website or business. Usually, they take the form of something valuable, for example, a test product or a special deal, and are offered for free.
To access these deals, offers, or incentives, a customer will usually have to input their email and other contact details, which businesses can then use to send targeted marketing materials to get them to make further purchases and interactions with their brand.
What Types of Lead Magnets Are There?
One of the most common and most recognizable lead magnets is a 10% discount when a customer signs up with their email. This attracts leads as they can access cheaper products and encourages them to shop with your business instead of your competitors.
There are plenty of other types of lead magnets, with some common options that many companies use, including:
- Webinars
- White papers
- E-books
- Free trial periods
Lead magnets aim to entice clients into the marketing funnel, from which they’re easier to persuade. This approach works exceptionally well for many business owners, being one of the most reliable marketing strategies for new leads.
Do Lead Magnets Really Work?
50% of marketers who use lead magnets report a higher conversion rate. This means that leads who are receiving marketing content after being lured in by a lead magnet are much more likely to interact with your business and purchase your products and services.
Applying Lead Magnet Campaigns
It’s best to be deliberate when deciding how to implement your lead magnet campaign. You want to ensure that the enticing offer or asset you use matches your audience. To find the lead magnet that’s more likely to make an impact, you will need to determine your goals. For example, a white paper will help you build brand authority and trust but won’t be as effective at getting people to use your service as a free trial would.
Once you’ve determined your goals and settled on the lead magnet you want to use, you’ll need to track the performance with key performance indicators. This lets you know if the campaign is working. Some examples of KPIs to follow in lead generation include CTR, open rate, and ROI.
6 Lead Magnet Strategies To Set You Apart
Although common lead magnet strategies like white papers and e-books work and can help you pull in more leads, they’re not as exciting as other options. Plus, most businesses within your industry will likely use these methods, so you will struggle to stand out if you adopt them too.
Furthermore, many customers have gotten savvy and understand what businesses are trying to do when offering free white papers and newsletters, so they may be put off from interacting with them, even if they’re helpful. That’s why you should offer something different to help you stand out among the competition and captivate your audience.
Interactive Quizzes
Photo by Antoni Shkraba on Pexels
Business owners can obtain a lot of information that can help with marketing through interactive quizzes. By adding one to your website, you offer leads an engaging and sometimes fun activity that enables you to learn more about them.
Lead magnets like quizzes can be very helpful to the customers, too, as they help them find more tailored solutions, products, and services and show that you care about their needs.
The best example of this technique done right is CLCK, an Aussie lead generation agency. Using TryInteract, an inexpensive quiz creation tool, they’ve managed to generate 400+ new leads with a $426 Facebook ads budget. From the get-go, they’ve shown that you don’t need to risk your whole financial future to find that lead magnet.
Quizzes are a great, interactive way for you to find out more about the lead and for the lead to find out more about themselves, and they’re one of the simplest lead magnets for a business owner to implement.
Free Tools
Leads always look for tools to help them in their day-to-day operations, yet many don’t want to commit to a paid solution. Free trials can help with this, giving customers a taste of what your solution can do for them. Unfortunately, many leads never convert into paying customers once the trial period ends.
Free tools can be an alternative solution. Here, you’re giving your audience unlimited access to a bespoke solution, which can increase how often they interact with your products. If a lead enjoys your free tools, they may be more inclined to try a paid option.
Not only can free tools encourage users to try your premium solutions and products, but offering them also alters the public’s perception of your business. Free tools make it look like you care for your audience’s needs more than about money, helping to build trust and loyalty.
Grammarly is an excellent example of a business that uses the free tool lead magnet model. You can use a free version of the content editing software that works just fine and helps you improve your work; however, some features are locked behind a paywall. After prolonged usage of the free version, many people usually upgrade as the free version has already proved its worth.
If you don’t have the capacity to create a free tool for your business, you can offer a curated newsletter that features useful free tools related to your industry. Including automation and the top marketing tools for small businesses will help you generate leads and appear as an authoritative business in your niche.
Exclusive Templates
This type of lead magnet is great for B2B marketing and can help you build a strong relationship with potential clients.
Businesses need to conduct many repeat tasks to function, and many of these tasks follow templates. This can include content calendars, market research sheets, and schedules. Often, the creation of these templates can take a lot of work, especially for new or small businesses.
By offering free templates as a lead magnet, you’re giving away something very helpful and valuable to the lead, and they may come back to your business when they need other solutions.
In addition to this, building templates can help your business position itself as a thought leader. This is because you can demonstrate your business’s expertise by marketing them as quality templates that get results.
The best example of this is Beginner Bookkeeping, a website that seeks to educate new business owners on how to manage their accounts. Using a simple, free Excel template, they’ve managed to popularize their service and onboard new SMBs onto their platforms. It’s the quintessential lead magnet.
Private Community Access
It’s exciting being part of an exclusive club. Utilizing FOMO with your lead acquisition can help create an effective lead magnet strategy that has users interacting with your business in a pretty intimate way.
If you’re in an industry with many educational opportunities or support you can provide, then creating a private social media group can be a good idea. Here, you can build up a community of clients and customers within or interested in your community and give them a platform to share their expertise and network. Building a thriving private community can help increase brand authority, trustworthiness and allow you to build a strong online presence.
A great case study for this technique are content creators on Twitch and YouTube. In addition to giving their viewers a window into their lives by live streaming, they also allow fans to pay a small monthly fee in exchange for an invite to a private Discord server. The chance to talk privately with a famous person is a powerful lead magnet, which results in an increase in sign-ups.
Businesses can also apply this template, with a few tweaks. Interested leads can be asked to join in exchange for their emails and be able to interact with like-minded individuals and share and review their own insights. With their email obtained, you can then re-market to them from a more advantageous and engaged position.
Calendars
Calendars are the perfect blend of visual and textual, professional and personal. And they’re especially important for businesses that run any kind of social media or editorial calendar.
Photo by Firmbee.com on Unsplash
This allowed Later, a social media automation tool provider, to provide several free social media holiday calendar templates. In addition to providing something useful, Later also subtly began the onboarding process, since the features resemble those in their app.
If you’re selling a product, think of which problems your product solves and try to think of a one-time solution to use as a lead magnet. Just like in our example, the mix of onboarding and usefulness will be hard to resist.
Online Courses & Videos
Education is one of the most valuable things you can give your customers. Most online users seek knowledge to help them achieve something, so offering education as a lead magnet can make your business stand out. It also boosts brand authority and trust, as being seen as a source of education makes it look like your insights can be trusted.
When making online video courses, it’s a good idea to focus them on your services or products. By creating how-to guides, you can build intrigue on the solutions you offer while showcasing the benefits of your product, making the freshly acquired lead more likely to purchase.
But courses and guides don’t have to last hours or have any resemblance to the traditional format. Take the Indian WordPress development studio Brainstorm Force as an example. Instead of using courses as another revenue stream, they instead upload use cases and guides to their YouTube channel. This lets devs and business owners learn how to use their WP plugins, serving as a valuable lead magnet.
If you’re stuck on what to turn into educational video courses, you can always adapt and revamp old white papers and e-books you may have created in the past. This is an excellent way to give your old content a new lease of life. Video content is the most popular lead magnet among solo entrepreneurs and business owners, so it’s a good idea to make the most of it and use it in some way with your content.
Conclusion
Lead magnets can seriously improve the total lead acquisition of your business and turn these leads into valuable ones that are more likely to convert and interact with your business.
There are plenty more lead magnets that you can try in addition to the options mentioned, we’d also like to hear about your experiences with lead magnets.
What’s a lead magnet that turned one of your campaigns upside down? Can you replicate it? After sharing your insights, you can also book a demo and find out how you can scale your top lead magnets and increase sales organically.
Share
Guest Author