What Is A Lead Magnet And How Does It Help Sales?
Driving traffic to your website is not enough to have an impact on your business. In order for those website visitors to provide any value to your company, they need to either become subscribers, leads, or customers through your website. One of the best ways to convert website visitors into leads is through the use of Lead Magnets. What is a Lead Magnet?
What Is A Lead Magnet?
A Lead Magnet is something that you offer prospects in exchange for something they give you in return. The most common goal of a Lead Magnet is to capture website visitors’ contact information and gain permission to market to them directly. In exchange for their valuable contact information, you as a business, need to offer something that your prospects deem of high enough value to trade their contact information for it.
The more information you hope to capture, the higher value your Lead Magnet needs to provide.
Lead Magnet’s get their name from their nature of attracting leads into the sales and marketing funnel.
What Are Different Kinds Of Lead Magnets?
Lead Magnets can come in many different shapes and sizes. Again, the more valuable your Lead Magnet is to your ideal customer, the more likely they will be to request it. Depending whether you are a service company or selling products, the kind of Lead Magnets you offer will vary. Some popular kinds of Lead Magnets are:
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Ebooks
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Templates or Digital Toolkits
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Email Series or “Mini-Courses”
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Industry Guide
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Buying Guide
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Educational Material On Ways To Use Your Product
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Free Consultation
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Free Assessment
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Free Demo
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Free Shipping/Discounted Price
How To Create A Lead Magnet
There are 4 basic steps to creating a quality Lead Magnet.
1. Choose A Product/Service To Promote
You want your Lead Magnet to be something valuable, but also highly relevant to your business so that you attract ideal customers and not just “everyone.” Think about companies who give away iPads if you enter their contest. Who wouldn’t want an iPad? Everyone is interested in getting an iPad for free, but that doesn’t mean they should be targeted as a potential customer for your business (unless of course you sell iPads or electronics or something).
2. Determine What Kind Of Value You Can Offer
Now that you know what product/service you are going to be promoting with this Lead Magnet, think about what kind of information you can put into a digital product that would be practical and valuable to your ideal customer.
Ebooks are always a way to put your expertise into a document that can help inform and educate prospects who are researching to make a purchasing decision. If you can put together some kind of worksheet with questions for a self-assessment or a spreadsheet with formulas to help people with their problem (you know, the one that you solve and they need you to fix), that can be something worthwhile to attract prospects.
If you sell products, offering a discounted price or free shipping is always an easy way to provide real dollar value to your prospects and get them to make a purchase. Offering a coupon code that will be emailed when someone signs up on your site is a good way to drive quick sales and memberships.
Whatever type of Lead Magnet you decide to go with, just remember that it must be seen as valuable to your prospects. Something that they really feel that they want and can help them.
3. Create A Landing Page For Your Lead Magnet
Once you have created your Lead Magnet, you will need a place for people to actually sign up for it. This would be a landing page on your website.
A landing page is a web page that has one, sole purpose, and that purpose is to convert that visitor into a lead.
Your landing page should be concise and simple, clearly telling your visitor what the value is, what they are getting, and how to get it. You’ll need a form to collect contact information.
The more information that you try to have a visitor fill out in a form will, however, deter them from filling it out and the length of the process leaves too much opportunity for them to be distracted and disappear before filling out the form. Keep your form as short and simple as possible, only ask for the information you absolutely need at this point. First name and email should be the max, and only using the First Name so that you can personalize your automated emails.
Oli Gardner has provided 101 more landing page optimization tips for you if you are going to be building it yourself.
4. Set Up An Email Autoresponse
You don’t want to have someone manually emailing everyone who fills out a form on your website. Plenty of different technology options are available today to automatically send email responses to your prospects. Whether you are using something built into a Gravity Form plugin, a lightweight email marketing third-party like MailChimp, or marketing automation software like Hubspot or Infusionsoft, this process should definitely be automated. It will save you time but more importantly, when someone fills out that form, they are going to expect their Lead Magnet offer immediately.
Driving Traffic To Your Landing Page
With your landing page set up, now you need visitors. We primarily focus on content marketing to drive traffic, but there are various techniques for driving traffic to your website. With content marketing, you would create different articles that focus on the same topic of your product/service and promote it via different social media channels. On those blog posts, you would have a link in your article as well as a Call To Action graphic in the sidebar and at the bottom of the post that would encourage the reader to go to your landing page.
A few other ways to drive traffic could be posting links to your landing page to your different social media channels. You could also run PPC campaigns for your Lead Magnet and drive those clicks to your landing page. Sending an email out to your list is a fast way to get traffic to your site, though they may not be ideal for this particular Lead Magnet if it’s focused on top of the funnel prospects.
Measure Your Results & Make Adjustments
As with anything in business, you need to be tracking and analyzing your Lead Magnet value. Using Google Analytics, setting up Goals is very simple for your website manager. Understanding how many people are getting to your landing page, where they are coming from, how many are actually converting into leads, and how many of those leads are becoming customers is how you can measure the effectiveness and ROI of your campaign.
Seeing where the best leads are coming from will allow you to focus more efforts in that direction and attract more prospects to your lead magnet. Understanding which leads are becoming customers and where they came from will increase the ROI of your efforts and make your business process more efficient and profitable.
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