What Is A Lead Magnet? And How To Use Them

In this article we break down a question that we get asked a lot: what is a lead magnet? We’ll also break down how to use them.

Lead Magnets Are A Powerful Tool

Lead magnets are powerful tools meant to do exactly what their name implies – magnetize attention towards your website, blog, product/service offering & make people subscribe their interest through designated landing pages on your website.

Digging deeper; ‘lead magnet’ is a term used to describe a free sample or service given out with the goal of collecting contact information; for example, trial subscriptions, white papers and eBooks can all be classed as lead magnets.

Sales leads are generated by marketers using lead magnets. These sales leads are then nurtured by sales teams or automated digital marketing strategies.

This makes lead magnets a cost-effective tool to capture leads and begin nurturing prospects through your marketing funnel.

The Recipe For A Decent Lead Magnet

Keep It Relevant

Even the greatest offer will be meaningless if it doesn’t appeal to your intended audience.

A high amount of low-quality leads, on the other hand, might backfire quite badly, wasting a lot of your time in follow-up.

Make certain that your lead magnet satisfies a useful purpose and taps into a desirable target audience segment of yours.

Add Value To Your Audience

The finest lead magnets offer professional advice, insider information, a quicker method to accomplish something, or some other innovative and different solution to a genuine problem.

What are you providing that is so valuable that I’d give you my email address? If it’s something I can find quickly on Google, I’m not likely to sign up for your list.

How will you assist me? Will getting access to your lead magnet save me time or money, or offer me some other advantage in my life? Send me an email! Give me your money! “

Become The Authority

A good lead magnet honours the promise you made when soliciting their email in the first place. You should never leave someone hanging with a clickbait offer that you can’t keep.

The best lead magnets provide enough of the solution that the person understands that you have the knowledge (or your product is the answer) and can finish the job, placing you as an authority within your industry.

Lead Magnet Examples

Lead magnets can be anything from eBooks or PDF downloads to webinar recordings and cheat sheets.

These are often things you could have sold without giving them away, so it’s an opportunity to pre-sell your business by giving something of value away for free.

Here Are Some Lead Magnet Examples:

• Free eBooks/Video/Infographic/Report Download
• Trial Subscriptions
• Free Samples
• Free Consultations
• Cheat Sheet or “How To” Information
• Webinars
• White Papers
• Newsletter Subscription

So What Exactly Makes Lead Magnets So Effective?

You can and should use lead magnets in conjunction with lead nurturing campaigns.

Those who subscribe to your lead magnet will automatically become part of future lead nurturing campaigns (if set things up properly and play your cards right).

Lead magnets are most effective when they’re strategically re-purposed and distributed to segments of your audience that aren’t yet aware of or engaged with your business.

In this way, these assets can be used as a low commitment way for prospects to get to know you by giving them an initial taste of what you have to offer.

These are are simply cost effective tools that generate leads for you via your website and digital marketing.

This is one of the best ways to start generating interest in whatever product/service it is that you’re peddling, without actually having to sell anything right away.

Why Lead Magnets Are Good For Lead Generation

Lead magnets are a way of generating leads which cost little to nothing.

You can use Lead Magnets as a stepping stone between being an anonymous website visitor, and becoming a lead or customer by offering free content for potential customers to download and absorb.

This makes Lead Magnet offers highly valuable in the eyes of the consumer – if they’re good enough for you to give away something that could have been sold, they must be pretty special!

Lead Magnets Help To Establish Trust With Your Audience

Lead magnets will help you establish trust with your visitors and offer them more detail about who you are and what you do too.

You can then continue nurturing those visitors into paying customers.

But first things first. Make sure you’ve got a Lead Magnet campaign running.

How To Plan Your Lead Magnet Campaign

To make the most out of your lead magnet(s), you’ll need an email autoresponder service.

Lead Nurturing plays a vital role in the success of your lead magnet campaigns.

When you setup an automated email sequence that gets triggered by the download of your lead magnet, your subscribers automatically become part of your lead nurturing campaigns.

This is a great opportunity to work on nurturing prospects into the next phase of your funnel.

Read more about Lead Funnels here.

Conclusion: What is a Lead Magnet? And How To Use Them

Bottom line: your Lead Magnet should be irresistible.

It should offer something so incredible that people willingly want to exchange their contact details for a copy or viewing of it.

If they’re not interested in what you have to offer them for free, why would they even bother giving their email address and becoming a lead?

Make them something really valuable and you’ll be on your way to building a new business relationship with a steady influx of brand new leads.

Lead magnets do not need to be “free” per se, they can also drive traffic and conversions, but the concept is that your lead magnet represents value; this may or may not cost you money to create.

As with all things in business marketing, lead magnets require planning, research, and careful thought to develop a masterpiece that will work for your business and start enhancing your lead gen game.