A lead magnet is anything that your potential customers will find valuable. You’re going to offer it for free in return for their email and sometimes their phone number, increasing a chance to develop a relationship with them.
Most marketers automatically think of eBooks while brainstorming ideas for a lead magnet. It’s true that EBooks are awesome lead magnets, but they also take a ton of time to write.
Know that a lead magnet does not need to be a 100-page ebook. It can be as short as a 1 page PDF, a template, or a short how-to guide. This lead magnet just has to provide value to your users. Using a lead magnet that’s not massive can have a lot of upsides.
- It can provide immediate gratification to your users. We have to face that to captivate someone’s attention during this day and age is being more of a challenge. Provide value quickly and efficiently.
- It can quickly age the relationship with the lead to be ready to move to the next phase of the sales funnel and become paying customers.
- They take less time and effort to create
Examples of Lead Magnets you can offer:
Articles: Often you don’t need to write a whole book, especially not start there. You can offer users a downloadable .pdf version of your top articles or any work you’ve done that they would find value in.
eBooks: One of the most classic lead magnets to provide a lot of initial value. The only downside can be that they take a long time for the user to read and even longer for to write and finish for us.
Free Tools: Offer you, users, a free tool (online or downloadable). This Lead Magnet has a very high perceived value and you can ask more information about the user in return for it. Of course, the downside can be the $ to create a tool and/or developer and coding skill sets necessary to create them.
Discounts: These are widely used. Sign for to the newsletter and immediately receive a % discount. They can be somehow less performing in comparison with other methods, but they take about no time to implement!
Special Offers: Offers that you only make once in a while that has scarcity and urgency. There’s “X” amount of vouchers available, claim yours! Again, this can perform less in comparison, but take no time to implement. I often start here with a lot of clients that want to start pulling in leads asap.
Checklists/Templates: It takes little time to create these magnets and they’re valuable for the user to apply what they’ve read. Examples include excel templates of reports, how-to guides and so on.
Prizes: Contests with prizes are quick to setup, easy to promote and can go viral. Be sure to give away prizes strictly related to your industry. Such as giving away a GoPro when you’re selling cat shirts and hats, or you’ll end up with totally useless leads. A common one I see is the “cash” giveaways… Get creative on what your audience really wants or you’re burning money with this one.
Video Trainings: Video trainings are a fast way to age the relationship with your lead since it’s so extremely personal. It creates loyalty and a strong connection with your potential customers. The downside is that they can be very time consuming. You have to have some experience or lots of practice not to look like an amateur. You’ll either have to have video editing skills under your belt or hire someone to edit the cuts, uhms and all the other imperfections.
Email Courses: This format is just great for repurposing. Have you created a great post or ebook in the past? Can you split it up into multiple parts and offer it as a daily/weekly course on the subject. It’s super easy to create but the downside is the user won’t be ready to move to the next step immediately. You have to have more patience with this one.
Quiz & Surveys: Some users love Quizzes & Surveys. They can work very well in certain industries, but not all. The perceived value is usually pretty low with this one since they’re so common.
Email Courses: This format is just great for repurposing. Have a great post or ebook? Just split it up in 10 parts and offer it as a daily/weekly course on the subject. It’s super easy to create but the downside is the user won’t be ready to move to the next step immediately.
As you see there are so many different Lead Magnets that you can use and offer to pull in leads. This is a list just to get your brain started on the subject, the options are only limited by your creativity. The more perceived value, the more success you’ll have with it!
The Ideal Lead Magnet
Now that you know some of the options you have, it’s time to better define what the ideal lead magnet consists of and looks like.
- Address a very specific niche of users aka Dream Client.
- Solve a problem they have by offering a solution.
- Easy to take in.
- Perceived as high valuable
The first point is the most important here. Knowing and targeting your Dream Client(s) is the key to success. If your target is ‘everyone’… you’re going to run out of advertising budget, FAST.
The more specific you are, the easier it will be to drive traffic to your lead magnet through Facebook Advertising and the higher your conversion rate will be.
Let’s say you want qualified leads for pet owners. An ad promoting something like “Subscribe to our newsletter and receive our Pet Owner Tips” won’t be so tempting. You’re not addressing a specific problem your users have and you’re not identifying a specific and highly relevant niche to target for Facebook Ads leads generation.
You could offer a PDF download, “10 foods you that can destroy your German Shepard’s health… #7 Will shock you.” This is something specific! We have a buyer persona for our lead magnet. German Shepard (big dog) owners.
With focused targeting, you’ll be able to drive cheap traffic from Facebook Ads and you’ll have a great conversion rate on your landing page with a great relevancy score.