What Is A Lead Magnet And How To Create One

What is a lead magnet?

A lead magnet is a lead generation tool that you use to trade for a customer's contact information for free stuff, like a free sample, resource, or tool. The most popular type is a free resource that educates potential customers about something in your industry.

For example, a mortgage lender might offer prospects a first-time home buyer checklist in exchange for their contact information. Educational lead magnets work by teaching, not selling, with relevant information.

Lead magnet examples

There are several types of lead magnets to choose from. What's most important is that they're relevant to your audience.

For example, the mortgage lender we used as an example wouldn't create a lead magnet about second mortgages when trying to attract first-time homebuyers. Great lead magnets solve problems and are easy to digest while providing high value. Yes, your lead magnet can and should be simple, but your website visitors won't give their personal information out for free, so you must find a topic that interests them.

A few lead magnet ideas to help spark inspiration for your lead generation campaign include:

Ebook

Ebooks are easy to digest and provide prospects with detailed information about a specific topic. Lead magnet examples of ebooks for financial firms may include topics like personal finance, taxes and business finance.

Template

Templates are another good lead magnet option if you offer a service where customers need templates. Lead magnet examples include a digital marketing agency that might create a template for how to perform a social media marketing audit or an accountant offering personal finance tracking templates.

Offering a template is a quick way to engage customers because you're giving them something easy to understand and actions to take. Creating templates also allows you to demonstrate your authority to build trust with prospects.

Webinar

Webinars allow your prospects to learn more about a specific topic and meet you online to ask questions. With webinars, you can showcase your expertise in an industry and attract more customers. It also allows you to meet your prospects to help them build trust with your business before they become customers.

Whitepaper

A whitepaper is an in-depth document highlighting different business features. They're similar to case studies in that they position the business as a solution to a problem. However, they're often more in-depth to inform readers about complex issues.

Whitepapers can be used in all industries, ranging from IT to ecommerce, to inform potential customers about certain topics instead of directly selling your services to them.

Case studies

Case studies are one of the most digestible forms of content businesses use to highlight the benefits of their solutions and the success they've had with other clients and customers.

Case studies are proof of a company's abilities and skills, but they can also be used to generate leads. For example, you can let prospects download case studies by exchanging their emails.

Why businesses should create lead magnets

Most lead magnets are part of the wider lead nurturing strategy. However, to nurture leads, you have to get them first.

The main goal of lead magnets is to increase lead generation, allowing you to collect potential customer contact information and help prospects enter the sales or marketing funnel. Any business that relies on customers should have a lead magnet of some kind. For example, e-commerce businesses may use a free offer as a lead magnet, while B2B businesses may use other types of content that we've just discussed above.

Your customers don't want to share their personal information with just anyone. Getting them to share contact information without offering something in return will take more effort than it's worth. Marketers know they have to entice customers to take action; one way is with lead magnets. However, the most popular lead magnets do more than simply help you collect more leads.

Benefits of lead magnets include:

• Establishes yourself as an expert: With lead magnets, you give prospects unique content based on your expertise. Not only can this help build trust, but it also positions your business as an authority on a particular topic.
• Builds relationships and credibility: When you give prospects something, you can start building relationships with them. If you ask customers to give you their name, phone number, and email, you can start to build out more personalized sales and marketing campaigns. This strategy allows you to build trust and credibility while making your business more personable.
• Enables lead nurturing: As we've mentioned, you can't start nurturing leads until you have them. Once you have leads, thanks to your lead magnet, you can begin building personalized marketing campaigns and contacting prospects to learn more about them before pitching your business or its services as a solution.

How to create a lead magnet

Before creating lead magnets, you should understand the marketing funnel and conversion path. While all lead magnets are part of a greater lead nurturing strategy, you should always consider how you'll convert website visitors and what the specific process or path looks like.

Lead magnets consist of more than just the resource you provide them; you'll need a call to action (CTA), a landing page where you can capture customer information, a thank you page where they can access information, and a follow-up email that allows you to start a conversation with prospects.

Depending on your conversion path, the process might be slightly different. However, in most cases, a customer will land on your website or landing page where they can exchange personal information for the resource. Then, you'll allow them to download the resource directly from the thank you page or deliver it to their inbox using automation software.

After a set period of time, your customers will continue through the funnel when you contact them to learn more about their unique situation to determine whether or not they're your ideal customer.

Steps to creating a lead magnet include:

Find your target audience

Before you can craft your lead magnet or decide which content you want to use as the resource, you should learn as much as possible about your target customer. If you've invested in marketing for some time and have a lot of customer data, you may already know your customer. However, if you don't know who to target, you should review your customer data to determine which topics customers would be most interested in.

Determining who you're targeting and what their problems are can help you find the right people to target with your lead magnet and what type of lead magnet to offer them. For example, a dog trainer might find that their customers are primarily first-time pet parents with puppies. In this case, they may create a guide for taking care of a puppy for the first time, including personalized tips, the tools they need, and what to expect in the first few months.

Build your lead magnet

Once you know your target audience and the type of content you want to produce, you can begin to build your lead magnet, so you'll need to create content.

Every successful lead magnet has two components: content writing and graphic design. You can begin writing your lead magnet with the target audience and topic in mind, but remember that it should be easy to read and understand. In addition, the design should reflect the brand's identity while enhancing the visual appeal of the lead magnet.

Put your lead magnet out there

When your lead magnet is ready to go live, you can publish it on your website or set it up in your email marketing automation software to send to prospects who exchange their content information. Individuals downloading your lead magnet are likely at the awareness stage of the marketing funnel, so you can easily add a form to your home page or specific service pages, depending on your business and chosen conversion path.

Your form can be as simple or complex as you want it to be. However, keep in mind that customers are more likely to exchange contact information when the form is simple. Therefore, you may want to include only email and name.

If you want customers to enter your sales funnel and intend to contact them on the phone, you can include the option to add a phone number. Of course, the more form fields you have, the fewer leads you'll get. However, the leads you get will be more qualified because they showed how interested they were by filling out a longer form.

Depending on your overall strategy, you might create a dedicated landing page for your lead magnet and use various forms of marketing and advertising to attract more website visitors. For example, if you're active on social media, you might create an advertising campaign to attract new visitors to your site, where they can sign up to receive your lead magnet. You can also use social media posts, Google Ads, other advertising tools, and search engine optimization to increase your lead magnet's online visibility through paid or organic search traffic.

Use data to refine your lead magnet

After your lead magnet and setup are complete, you should continue to monitor your campaign to determine whether it's working as you intended. You can track everything from the conversion path to customers earned from the lead magnet to improve your marketing and sales processes. For example, you might experiment with different form lengths and different types of content to increase conversions and win more customers.

Generate leads

Lead magnets allow you to generate leads effortlessly from your website or a dedicated landing page. First, however, you must know who your target audience is and the types of content that will be most interesting to them. In addition, you should have a clear conversion path planned before building out your campaign.

Of course, to have a winning lead generation and nurturing strategy, you need an effective website or landing page, a form, and automation software to help you nurture leads in the marketing funnel.

Mailchimp's all-in-one marketing automation software makes it easy to set up your lead generation campaign with forms and marketing automation workflows to keep your audience engaged throughout every stage of the customer journey.