Bro…What’s A Lead Magnet?
Glad you asked…and this is one of the most important tools in my humble opinion – that’s why I chose to include it in “7 Mandatory Tools To Make Money Online“.
It’s the thing that initially gave me any success online…because it enabled me to start building a list fairly quickly. A lead magnet is an incentive which allows you to collect contact information.
You provide some sort of valuable content to a user, and in exchange, they give their name and email address.
Lead magnets are designed to be a give-and-take, which is why it is crucial to design something that actually provides a user with something valuable they would not find elsewhere or something that will help them get results almost immediately – check mine out here for some examples.
Why would you need a lead magnet?
This is because there almost always has to be a middle step that involves building trust and following up with prospects until they are ready to buy.
Furthermore, 98% of your traffic isn’t ready to buy right now, and 70% of all website visitors on average will never return to your website. So we offer them a lead magnet in exchange for their email address.
Why do you need their email address? Email marketing, of course! The give and take of using a lead magnet establishes a relationship from the get-go. It can position you as someone that is knowledgeable or a leader in the space.
Also, rather than spending time nurturing leads that might not be as useful, the lead magnet identifies which users are truly interested in your brand or service. They would not have accepted your offer if it didn’t apply to them.
The content of the lead magnet becomes the jumping off point from which you then have a chance to continue nurturing the lead.
The lead magnet incentive comes in many forms, and there is no “correct” way to do it. So get creative – just make sure it’s simple and can provide instantly actionable material.
Some offer digital, downloadable content such as white papers, reports, or eBooks, while others give out checklists or generally useful information.
How Do You Create a Lead Magnet That Converts?
How do you get the process started? Great question…and trust and believe there is a process to this.
First, you must identify who it is that you actually want to sell to. There is no point in developing long-term content if you do not know who you are writing for.
Identify your ideal buyer avatars or personas, very important. Well how do you do that?
Well here are some questions you can ask to help you along the way. What are their pain points? What problems are they are facing? What valuable content can you offer that can help them with these issues, or provide more insight?
Use this brainstorming as a starting point to determine what type of content you should develop. Remember, your lead magnet will be free to the lead, so it should be something that you can give away but would still be considered valuable to your customer base.
Do Lead Magnets Actually Work?
Long story short – Heck Yes, but there are some little things you can do to it that can make it more successful or increase your conversions.
You have to work to make the content look good, drive value, and provide real insight.
If you are able to accomplish this, you can use your lead magnet to grow your email list and create focused and targeted advertising.
Rather than using generic social media marketing strategies, an effective lead magnet helps you understand who your target audience is and learn more about them.
This helps you create better marketing strategies that actually address audience needs, and gives you better overall leads.
Think of lead magnets as the first step in a long-term strategy to drive organic and overall growth.
By receiving the email addresses of users who actually want your content – you now have a custom audience that you can direct to any channel you wan’t to grow. You can send them to affiliate offers. Your own program. An MLM program. A CPA offer.
Grow Your Social Media Accounts Like A Boss! Share If You Like That Idea!
Got a Youtube channel with small view counts…send links to the people on your list so they can watch your videos.
Got a Instagram post that needs some love – send the link to your list. One important thing I wan’t you to keep in mind. Try to make sure it’s inline with what they opted in for.
If your lead magnet is “6 Strategies To lose Weight Fast”, then it’s safe to say that you should keep your follow ups contained to the fitness arena – Right?
You can deliver better results with your marketing – better open rates, more clicks, and more engagement.
You can gather all the email lists you want, but what’s the point if a majority will opt out every time you send an email?
So be kind to your list and give more than you take.
If you ever get confused on this concept, just apply Gary Vee’s strategy. Jab, Jab…Right Hook. The jabs are you delivering value and the right hook is your ask or offer.
Just know this…the more jabs you deliver the more hooks you’ll land.
4 Examples Of Lead Magnets That Convert Like Crazy
Here are some examples of some Fantastically Awesome Lead Magnets
LEAD MAGNET EXAMPLE #1 – WEBINAR OR RECORDED VIDEO TRAINING
Entrepreneur On Fire
Well you might not need one if your your not running an online lead generation system – it’s a necessary part of all online campaigns if you want results fast and hope to be profitable.
What is it: John Lee Dumas is famous in the “quit your job and do a startup around your passion” community for the swift progress he and EntrepreneurOnFire have made over the last two years.
The landing page above is for his weekly webinar, Podcaster’s Paradise, where he teaches viewers about the benefits of starting their own podcast. The webinars are usually well-attended, regularly bringing in over 100 people at any given time.
The upsell on the webinar is the private community and info product that teaches students how to create their podcast and earn a living from it.
How this lead magnet idea works: The landing page design and lead magnet work to drive leads using a two-step opt-in process (visitor reads page, and then clicks on the “call to action” button to view a pop-up with a form field to input their email).
Why it works:
- High visibility: Multiple pages on the EOFire site are linked to this landing page, including an ad in the sidebar of their blog which, when clicked, immediately shows the pop-up form instead of taking the visitor to the landing page first. Visibility is one of a four or five key “levers” you can pull to increase your lead generation / email sign-up rate.
- Free. (Noticing a pattern here?)
- Specific value. Just like the other lead magnet ideas listed in this article, it’s all about matching value to the needs of the market. It’s harder to deliver more value in the form of one-hour live, interactive show.
- Simplicity. One form field; just enter your email and you’re in.
LEAD MAGNET EXAMPLE #2 – CASE STUDY
James T. Noble
What is it: James T. Noble is a marketing consultancy/agency specializing in helping other agencies (like web designers and developers) to grow their business.
What you see above is a lead magnet that gives email subscribers a free “case study” in exchange for their contact info.
How the lead magnet idea works: Landing page visitors are asked to input their first name and email address to get access to a “case study” that shows how SalesForce.com implemented a new content strategy, which netted them over 10,000 new leads per month.
The reason I put “case study” in quotes above is because it looks like the PDF lead magnet is telling the story of what SalesForce did to get results, but not because they were an actual client of JTN. (Not Actually His Results but a very effective Lead Magnet – Remember this for later)
Some might see this as deceptive, in that they aren’t more upfront about that fact and while I agree, I think it’s also quite clever. More on this below…
Why it works: Even if you don’t have a big client name that you’re currently working with right now, you can still leverage their brand to build your own brand, by telling the story of how they got results.
Of course, if this is a problem for you it’s probably a good idea to be more upfront about the fact that they aren’t a client and you’re just reporting the news.
For me it’s not, and I’m sure SalesForce and the lead had no issue with it all!
Why:
Well it’s simple. SalesForce gets more exposure and the lead actually got real info that can aid them on their journey, and not hypothetical info.
Were talking about real info based an an business platform that’s crushing it. Need more?
- People like to read about what has worked for others when it comes to getting results and how they accomplished it, especially when its step-by-step.
- People like success stories.
LEAD MAGNET EXAMPLE #3 — COUPONS
Win in Health
What is it: Win in Health is an e-commerce retailer that sells vitamins, supplements, health foods, and sports nutrition. They offer a combination of both information on products and a way to buy those products all on one site.
How the lead magnet works: Win in Health’s lead magnet is a coupon that appears as an exit pop-up on their site. It offers 10% off a user’s next purchase.
This lead magnet works because it is simple as well and the value proposition is very clear. If you care about saving 10%, you’ll be incentivized to shop at Win in Health.
That said, I believe this lead magnet could be better. If there was only an email field required to get the code, that could potentially attract more subscribers, because asking for less info increases conversions 100% of the time. Offering more money off, like 15% or even 20%, would also be good.
Why it works: Win in Health’s lead magnet is good in several ways. Since it’s an exit pop-up, it only appears when users are about to leave the page. That recovers potential abandoned carts.
The pop-up also shows up across the entire site so it would be very hard to miss it.
LEAD MAGNET EXAMPLE #4– INSTAPAGE
Instapage.com
What is it: I love this example because it’s one of those lead magnet examples that has worked to get massive results with seemingly little effort. The guys over at Instapage.com came from the back with this style of lead magnet. Thier now one of the top dogs in the industry.
All it is, is a super simple landing page, offering visitors a free trial with a Request a Demo button!
How the lead magnet idea works:
- Visitors arrive on the page.
- Visitors read the sales copy with the offer.
- Visitors decide to try the free trial OR Request the free demo and enter their email and alot more info to get a deeper experience.
Why it works:
- Simplicity of design with an extremely focused offer
- Two options…same result.
But How Would YOU Create an instant Lead Magnet?
I know that was a lot of information just to get here but I really feel it’s important you have a thorough understanding of what were creating and what it’s suppose to accomplish.
That being said, creating your Instant lead Lead Magnet is going to be incredibly simple.
Like I said…Lazy Proof Style!
Before I tell you how, let me give you a little background. I’ve created many a lead magnet that took a lot of time to create, and a lot of them failed or got minuscule conversions.
So that’s wasted time, effort and sometimes money.
That’s what led me to come up with an easier way…I some what came across this concept when I created “The Lead Converter Cheat Sheet“
I was fresh off of a video training by Russel Brunson about Funnel Hacking, so I was looking for a successful marketer and funnel to model.
I chose Ryan Diess owner of Digital Marketer, who is a mentor of mine.
I was on his blog where he actually reported which one of his lead magnets and pages was converting the highest on got him the highest ROI. So you know where we went from there.
I found the actual funnel, went thru it, bought some stuff and basically checked out his entire funnel. I got my hands on some awesome products, learned a lot and was ready to go.
I made a landing page that modeled his perfectly, and was super pleased with myself. I even made a video about it.
But when it came to actually creating the lead magnet I was not to impressed with the quality. I mean the info on it was spot on, super valuable and actionable.
The stickler in me was not satisfied in the visual quality tho…so I spent a bit of time revising it but then remembered a lesson that I learned which was “just get it out there”. Which I did, but in the process it sparked a thought.
Why not just use someone else’s product, blog post or whatever as long as there already giving it away free. If you think about it it’s a win win win.
I get the lead with minimal effort or no lead magnet creation, the creator gets the traffic for free and the person that opts in gets the valuable information that was built to help them out immediately.
So what do you need to create this Instant lead Magnet Funnel?
- A landing page with copy that converts and will redirect the lead to the info that they opted in for
- An autoresponder to capture your fresh new leads and follow up with them with your own content
- An blog post, training, video, PDF that fulfills the requirement of a lead magnet, easy to digest and gets immediate results
Ultimately, lead magnets can be an incredibly useful tool for digital marketing, if executed correctly. Find or focus on building content that:
- can really provide value
- solves a real pain point for your potential customers
- makes customers say, “Hmm, this looks interesting – tell me more”
By really getting to know what your potential customers or leads want, combined with some simple creative content development, you can easily develop some great lead magnets that definitely help your email marketing grow massively organically or thru paid ads for optimal growth!
Start now! Easy…and it is!
Check out our video as well….there are some gems included there as well.
Another Video is coming.
Oh yeah, If you have any questions please ask them below but If you would like other Entrepreneur Related content you should check these out below.
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