Getting your website visitors to become buyers isn’t all that simple. It takes time, effort, and constant persuasion.
This lengthy process is known as lead nurturing. But before you can nurture leads, you must first acquire (attract) them. The more leads you can attract, the higher your chances of making a sale.
And one effective way to attract more leads is by using a lead magnet.
What is a lead magnet?
As the name suggests, a lead magnet is any material that attracts — traps — leads. It does so by compelling them to give up their email contact.
How?
Have you ever come across an ebook on “# hacks to get that killer body in 7 days”? To get it, input your email, and it will be sent to your inbox. You can’t resist having such a valuable resource, so you input your email to receive the ebook.
Within the next couple of days, you start receiving email newsletters and offers from whoever sent you the ebook, nurturing and persuading you to buy one thing or the other.
Because the lead magnet was effective, it enticed you into the sales funnel. Now, how could you create such effective lead magnets that will not maximize your conversion rates?
6 tips for creating an effective lead magnet
1. Lead magnets have to be precisely targeted
What happens when you offer Dwayne Johnson a lead magnet on bodybuilding? Or Zendaya, an eBook on weight loss? They’re never going to give you their email because they don’t need that.
Here’s another: you put up a graphics design tutorial on Linkedin. You won’t get many leads because most people on LinkedIn are professionals, not people looking to learn graphic design basics.
For your leads to be effective, they have to be well-targeted. For example, on a blog post or landing page on digital marketing, you can include a lead magnet on “A guide on using persuasive copy for your marketing.”
That way, the lead magnet will be relevant to whoever finds it.
2. Highlight the benefits
When your page visitors know what benefits they stand to gain from the lead magnet, their interest heightens. Hence, they are more likely to input their email to get the material.
So, besides your lead magnet form, highlight the pain points and desires your target audience experiences, and then point out how the resources you’re offering address their issue.
This is a vital strategy to execute effective lead generation for small businesses. You have to provide value to your audience constantly. And if you’re a fledgling small business and unsure how to do that, you can always work with an expert lead generation service provider to maximize your results.
3. Use different lead magnets for different stages of the buyer’s journey
A fundamental guide on marketing may work for someone looking to learn digital marketing. But the same won’t work for a certified one.
Then, you might need to offer something more, like a resource or tool to speed up their campaigns and increase results.
That means you’ll need not one lead magnet but several, catering to prospects at each stage of the buyer’s journey.
4. Use your best-performing content
Which web page or blog post gets the most monthly traffic, shares, or reviews? This is where you want to place your lead magnet to get the maximum result.
But that’s not all. For it to have performed so well also means it’s pretty valuable to a large audience, and they like it. So why not make it a lead magnet?
It may be an eBook, webinar, or how-to blog post. If any of these is your best-performing content, design your lead magnet form for it. If it’s a blog post, you’ll need to repurpose it as an eBook, no longer as a regular post.
5. Include the eBook version within the blog post
One way to create an effective lead magnet is to offer an eBook version of a blog post within the same post.
If you have a high-performing blog post that users are spending time reading, give them the opportunity to have the content in a PDF or stackable format. That will make it easier for them to refer back to the content whenever they need it.
Readers find your content useful and would gladly provide their email for the downloadable copy to be sent to them.
This technique helped Brian Dean of Backlinko increase his conversion rate from 0.54% to 4.82%.
6. Use something other than eBooks
We’ve been mentioning eBooks in the lead magnet context almost throughout this content. You may think that’s the only or best lead magnet you could use. Not so. Depending on your business type, you could use a host of other lead magnet formats.
For SaaS, the lead magnet could be:
- A Free trial
- Freemium account
- Demo version
E-commerce:
- Membership
- Coupon
- Free gift with first order
- How to save money when shopping
- Content on the problem they need the product to solve
Experts B2B:
- Mini-courses
- Videos
- Whitepapers
- Podcast
- Webinars
Conclusion
Generating leads is critical to every business. Rather than wait for prospects to find you, you are going out there to find whoever may be interested in your product or service, nurturing them till they convert. With the strategies above, you’re well on your way to increasing sales.
