The Best Practices for Using Lead Magnets

Using lead magnets to attract more prospects is a no-brainer when it comes to growing your business. Quality lead magnets will help you to build your audience and build credibility and trust at the same time. It’s important to remember, however, that all lead magnets are not created equally! Also, you don’t want to strictly rely on your website to create leads. If you’ve created an offering that doesn’t seem to be gaining any traction, it could be because you’ve overlooked some of the golden rules of constructing the type of lead magnets that get results!

The Basics of Using Lead Magnets

Lead magnets are essentially your way of offering your audience something that it wants and needs in exchange for their contact information. Once you have that, you can consistently keep your product or service fresh in their minds by sending pertinent content regularly, building trust, and converting your site visitors to clients. There are a few basic rules you will want to follow from the start!

Know Your Audience

In order to create a quality lead magnet, you have to know who you are speaking to. Putting together buyer personas for your target market will help you to talk to prospective clients in a language that they will understand.

Make Your Offer Relevant

If you are in the process of trying to promote your new line of cookware, it wouldn’t make sense for you to create a free webinar teaching your audience how to grow a garden. A free e-book filled with healthy recipes or a guide on how to best organize kitchen cabinets would be far more effective in attracting an audience who cares about your product or service. Always make sure that your lead magnet is relevant to your business.

BONUS: As an example, take a look at the ebook we created, on how to have an effective website. Here’s the link: https://freemarketingebooks.com/

Offer a Solution

A good lead magnet will identify a common problem experienced by your audience and offer an easy solution to that problem. The faster your prospect experiences a benefit, the more rapidly your product or service will gain their trust.

Keep it Simple

Lead magnets do not always have to be super complicated. In fact, sometimes overdoing it can be a deterrent. Create lead magnets that are simple to follow and easy to use.

Don’t Be Overly-Promotional

Even though a lead magnet is ultimately designed to bring awareness to your business, making it feel super “salesy” is a surefire to turn your prospects off.

Be Consistent

Make sure that your lead magnets are in line with the underlying brand messaging of your company. This will help your company appear to be put-together and professional.

Create Evergreen Content

Create lead magnets that will stand the test of time. A 30-day challenge to get more organized, a mini-course teaching your audience how to do something specific or an e-book filled with time-tested tips and tricks will ensure that you don’t have to constantly be creating new offerings.

Lead Magnet Content

Speaking of content, it’s important to know what types of information your lead magnets should include. Follow these best practices to ensure your lead magnet content is top-notch.

Showcase Your Expertise

An effective lead magnet will prove to your audience why you are the best person to help them solve their problem. The more knowledge you can show, the more your prospects will trust your product or service.

Go With What You Know

While you certainly shouldn’t be afraid to try new things, as a general rule, you’ll want to stick with what you’re good at. If, for example, you’re a great writer but feel completely uncomfortable in front of a camera, you’ll probably do best to share an e-book or guide with your audience as opposed to hosting a webinar or creating a video course.

Include Visuals

The majority of people (up to 65%) are visual learners, making it imperative to include attention-grabbing graphics as part of your lead magnet.

Give Examples

Don’t just expect your audience to know what you are talking about. Remember that you are the expert. Your audience will likely benefit by having simple examples that help them to process the information you are giving them.

Reflect Your Brand Personality

Make sure your content clearly reflects the values of your business and is cohesive with your other marketing materials.

Create Urgency

Your lead magnets should create a sense of urgency within your prospects. If you’ve done a good job of identifying the common problem and solution we spoke of earlier, you should now be able to use words and imagery that further evoke the feeling of desire within your audience. Words like “now,” “fast” and “hurry” are all great examples.

 

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Be Honest

Only promise what you can actually deliver! If, for example, you create a free checklist of things to do to help you feel less stressed, you want to make sure it’s simple enough to follow that it doesn’t actually end up creating more stress as your readers try to figure out how to do each technique for themselves.

Pay Attention to Detail

You do not need to have a degree in English or internet marketing to write quality content, but you absolutely want to make sure what you are putting out into the world makes sense. Lead magnets quickly lose their effectiveness if they leave your prospect feeling confused, making these next steps extremely important.

Proofread

Do not assume you have created your content without errors. The likelihood of that is slim to none. Proofread your content multiple times before allowing it to go live. It never hurts to have a second, third or fourth set of eyes look over it as well. Typos, using words in the wrong context and misplaced punctuation, to name a few, are a quick way to lose the attention of your audience.

In fact, as of today, we’ve published over 200 blog posts about digital marketing. We always make sure to proofread our content multiple times before publishing it. However, even now, there are times we will read an old blog post of ours and discover a typo. Typos happen, even with careful proofing. But, they shouldn’t happen often.

Test Your Links

If you post links within your lead magnet (which you should to help build credibility and support your expertise) check them prior to making your content live and periodically for the duration of time that you are using your content, to make sure they are still valid. Having a prospect click on an invalid link does nothing to build their trust in you. You may even want to use an auditing software like SEMRush or MOZ to see if you have any broken links. This is the easiest way to make sure everything is working properly.

Make it Cohesive

We touched on this earlier, but that’s because it’s so important. Check your lead magnets against your website, social media platforms, blog and marketing materials to make sure your brand is fully recognizable across all marketing channels.

Lead Magnet Accessibility

Once your lead magnets are created, make them work for you! There are multiple ways to do this.

Share Intelligently

Each lead magnet you create will likely target a different buyer persona. Each of these personas will spend their time, energy and money in different places, so make sure you are leveraging your lead magnet the most effectively by posting it in the places where it is most likely to be seen by your intended audience.

Add to Homepage

The homepage of your website is a great place to put a lead magnet. This allows your site visitors to get a taste of who you are and what you do almost instantly upon interacting with your brand.

Create a Landing Page

Creating a separate landing page for your lead magnet will help to gather your prospect’s information before they are able to further interact with your brand.

Insert Your Lead Magnets Into Blog Posts

Don’t underestimate the power of your blog! Casually mentioning your lead magnet with a link can help to drive quite a bit of extra traffic to it.

Use Your Email List

If you are in the habit of sending out newsletters or bulk emails, drop a link in there, too! An email is an excellent way to spread your lead magnet around.

Use Social Media

Mentioning your lead magnet on your social media sites and/or embedding it into your profile is another great way to generate some traffic. Then, you can ask for the user’s email address and build your email list.

Make Your Lead Magnets Shareable

Lastly, don’t forget to make your content shareable! Most of your prospects will know of at least one or two other people who could also potentially benefit from your content. Including the option for people to share your lead magnet will make it much simpler for them to pass it on and grow your email list for you!

Track Your Data

This is one of the most important parts of using lead magnets. Do not forget to check in regularly to see where you are gaining the most traction. If one or two of your lead magnets are generating a lot of interest, this is a great indicator that you’ve created an offer your audience can’t ignore. If, on the other hand, you find certain lead magnets are not getting great results, you create an opportunity to do something differently. Sometimes you might choose to scrap a lead magnet and start over, but more likely you will just need to play a little with it and determine what needs to be tweaked to get it performing optimally for you.

Lead magnets can be extremely effective at helping generate new business, if you follow these best practices! As always, please fill out the form below if you ever need help with your digital marketing, or setting up lead magnets.