Bring People to Your Business With Attractive Lead Magnets
Valuable giveaways are a key part of good marketing campaigns
To get leads for your business, the easiest way is to draw them to you, and that’s where lead magnets come into play.
Marketing is based on leads. Having a magnet to draw them is less work and irritation than cold calling — especially in a cold winter. Lead magnets can involve storytelling, polls, email, contests — whatever generates audience interest and — if done well — participation.
Gina Schreck is the owner and chief operating officer of SocialKNX, a digital marketing agency. She has learned to put a premium on seemingly simple yet invaluable giveaways.
“Lead magnets have evolved into a critical piece for our clients,” Schreck said. “You just can’t throw things on social media and expect customers to come in the door. You really need to have a strategic plan, and lead magnets are a big part of that.”
A lead magnet is whatever you can publish about your goods and services that best relates to your audience and attracts their attention.
“A lead magnet is the object that you’re giving away, so it’s something of value,” Schreck said. “It could be a picture, tip sheet, webinar, videos or a series of blog posts you have not exposed your audience to before. These are objects of information that you’re going to exchange to collect information.”
She added, “In the Digital Age the most common piece of information to collect is an email address. The fewer things you have to ask for, the better.”
As social media changes through the years, Schreck said the audience also has to move. Building email lists gives you a way to stay in contact with or market to people without having them move along to another social media platform.
They’re people, not numbers
“The caveat is, don’t just build a list of numbers,” she said. “You have to nurture that email list and have a plan for what you want to do with the people.
“Segmentation and what you offer become important,” Schreck said. “There are so many pieces that come into play when you lay out a content marketing strategy, and lead magnets are the first piece.”
Based on her experience, she said webinars are the highest-converting lead magnet. The easiest lead magnet is a tip sheet — make a list of 25 tips you can offer or a how-to resource guide.
eBooks are another lead magnet possibility, but Schreck emphasized not to offer an entire book. Offering the first chapter of a high-quality book will leave recipients impressed with the work and wanting more.
“Short and sweet really moves great these days,” said digital marketing expert Madalyn Sklar. “Give me something that is useful and practical.”
Worth giving an address
Above all, Schreck said, a lead magnet has to be “something of value to make it worth giving my email address. That’s harder to get because we don’t want to be put on another list.
“Give away something that people can go and apply and get an easy win,” she said. “You want them to think that person was so awesome that I want more from her.”
She acknowledged that marketers are reluctant to give away their best stuff, “but that sets the tone of the content you’re going to give.”
Lead magnets can be created on the cheap, but quality — or lack of it — will show through. Creating a PDF from a Word document or PowerPoint slide qualifies as a lead magnet, but it won’t appear as good as an original using tools such as Beacon.by to create professional-looking infographics.
Moving pictures
The hottest thing for lead magnets is video, according to Schreck.
“If you can deliver an e-course via video,” she said. “You need to be creative. Have a brainstorming session and come up with something really unique that people aren’t getting from everyone else. That might be a good exercise for a team to do.”
She emphasized that a series of lead magnets is also important to see how you’re filtering or have gravitational pull with your content.
Finding those kinds of attractions is increasingly difficult because of what Schreck acknowledges is “an oversaturation of content. The hardest thing in marketing right now is we’re all in the pool of sameness because there’s so many of us.”
Fighting through such sameness can be a challenge.
“There is so much out there that if your content is not unique or truly valuable, it’s just the same as everyone else’s,” Schreck said. “We all fall in love with our content. We think it’s great, but everyone else is seeing a hundred others that look just like yours.
“We tell people to think of what gets you really excited or frustrated in your industry,” she said. “That puts you into thinking more on the edge instead of that middle oatmeal area that everyone else in your market is in.”
Key questions and answers
Focus on the crux of your business.
“Think of how you can provide the answer to this thing, which makes me crazy, or how can I provide help that makes people experience what makes me so excited about what I do?” Schreck said.
Mindset is one drawback of lead magnets because clients expect a direct line between offers and sales. Not so, she said. Schreck prefers to reverse engineer the process, starting with a sale and working back to the number and types of magnets needed to reach the preferred result.
“You find out it takes more than a tip sheet to get someone to sit down for a $10,000 seminar,” she said.
Measuring the success of lead magnets is more involved than social media metrics. Schreck prefers tools such as Leadpages or ClickFunnels for metrics.
“You’ll see the percentage of people who clicked on your lead magnets and then how many go through the download,” Schreck said. “We aim for a minimum of 20 percent conversion.
“You may have a thousand people who click over to the landing page that tells people about what they’re going to download,” she said. “If only 10 people download, that tells me you have trouble with your landing page.”
In that way, she explained, looking at conversion rates shows where things need to be fixed.
“Definitely measure performance of lead magnets,” Schreck said. “If they’re not working, you need to fix that piece of the marketing process.”
About The Author
Jim Katzaman is a manager at Largo Financial Services and worked in public affairs for the Air Force and federal government. You can connect with him on Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn.
Thanks for reading The Marketing & Growth Hacking Publication
Follow us on Twitter. Join our Facebook Group. Contact us for a sponsored post. Get early access to our job board, GrowthJob.
