Effective Use of Lead Magnets
Shweta Jhajharia
Award-winning Business Coach, Business Investor, Entrepreneur & Author ? Helping 7-figure trade contracting and sub-contracting businesses become profitable powerhouses through right plan, people, and processes
A lead magnet can help you to stand out online, in an increasingly competitive space. Your well-earned visitors need a reason to stay.
If you have spent money on acquiring your visitors, through paid ads, for example, this becomes even more important.
With a lead magnet, you are able to capture lead details in return for providing something of value to the prospect, usually a resource they can download.
What makes a good lead magnet?
An opt-in is basically what we call it when people voluntarily give us their details!
If you’ve seen those little tick boxes on website enquiry forms asking you to sign up for a newsletter, that is a form of opt-in, which helps the organisation to build a list of interested people to market to.
However, this is not usually an effective way of adding to your list of prospects unless they are already familiar with your brand and you have a level of trust and credibility built up.
That’s where lead magnets come in!
Through providing something to your prospects, in return for their information, you are sharing a small example of your USP and you start to build that trust.
Ideally, the lead magnet should be a stop-gap service, to solve their current problem and leave the door open for more future business. The perfect lead magnet is perceived as a high value and low risk opt-in. If it is high in real value, then even better
An easy framework to use
I wanted to run through this framework to help you in creating your own magnets. It’s something we have learnt in the past and used for our own magnets:
- Crap – This is something that is of low value (desire) and low risk. Nobody really wants it and it doesn’t take much effort to opt-in - an example is the email sign-up box I mentioned.
- Trap – Something that is low desire but high in risk – an example is getting someone to come to a meeting – they have to risk their time and effort to get involved but for an unknown value.
- Gap – This is something that is high in perceived value but there is also high risk – an example is a long webinar where they might have to risk a lot of time and they know they will value it but there is a hesitation to cross the gap because of the risk.
- Snap – This is where you want your magnets to be sitting ideally – high value, low risk and provides instant gratification – could be a simple download for example.
Some pointers for creating and sharing lead magnets
Your lead magnet should ideally be a quick fix, something that sits in the ‘snap’ category will not be a long document or video, it will be a straight forward solution for your customer. Try to make them as attractive as you can too, no matter how dull the subject matter! Using a cool design and numbers, infographic-style can help.
Once you have the magnet ready, make sure to make it available on your website – this is your main shop window and you need to be capitalising on your audience online.
You can also use it in places like email signatures, thank you pages and newsletters. The big one you don’t want to miss out on is social media. This is especially true if you have an engaged audience already.
If you need any help putting together some effective lead magnets or with any other aspect of your marketing, please feel free to get in touch with us. We’d love to help.