Lead Magnets the Easy Way

What is a lead magnet?

A lead magnet is an incentive that is given to a customer in exchange for something of value to him or her. There are many effective lead magnets used all over the web and in industry, some of which I’m sure you’ve seen before.

Have you ever seen the popup that asks for your email address before continuing to read on a blog? Maybe with a locked section? That my friends, is a lead magnet called locked content. By opting-in, you are exchanging your information (maybe a potential spam email account name) for the ability to read the rest of the blog post.

There are a number of lead magnets that don’t include exclusive content too. Some you may recognize are free PDF’s, eBooks, checklists, free samples, and calculators. All of these are free incentives to get you to exchange your email address for some offer that is valuable to you. If you are willing to spend the time typing in your email address or fill out a short form, you are a warm lead for the company that is slowly reeling you in.

How can you use lead magnets in your business?

Lead magnets are much more powerful than you realize. One email may not be enough to get a sale, but one thousand emails gives you a lot of power in a marketplace, especially one that does not have much digital competition. Here are a few things that you can use the data for:

• Paid Advertisements on social media
• Target segmentation 
• Determining metrics on your customers
• Keywords that attract clients for SEO
• Sending a newsletter for client retention and remarketing
• Warm lead emails from your sales team
• And much more

So how exactly can you implement lead magnets?

The first step is to create something of value to your customers or determine an offer that is actually different from others in the marketplace. Start with testing your one lead magnet and its integration into your digital ecosystem. If you have no file-based resources like checklists or eBooks, just offer something simple like a free consultation. It doesn’t need to be brain surgery.

Lead Magnets Step-by-Step

In an attempt to cover all bases of understanding, we will assume you have a completely new startup with little or no current business and no digital presence. Feel free to skip any of these steps that you have covered.

1) The first thing to do is to create a website or landing page. At the expense of time, you can also create social media accounts and gain a following. The former is recommended if testing a lead magnet.

Either way, you need some sort of way to attract an audience and accept emails or information. We will not be going over how to get a domain, hosting, and design a website in this blog post. We recommend setting up a WordPress website through one of the major hosting companies.

2) Once you have a digital presence, the next step in building your lead generating machine through lead magnets is to determine a way to exchange your offer for information.

The easiest way to do this is through a web form or popup. If you are using a web form, make sure it’s on a high-quality landing page.

Look into Contact Form 7 for WordPress users or WPforms Lite to make use of forms. For popups, use things like OptinMonster for creating a triggered popup on your site.

3) Make sure you are in compliance with federal, state, and local laws. Your privacy policy needs to be intact and reachable by the customer.

Collecting sensitive information can be risky, so stick to as little data as you need. Preferably just collect a name and email. Have a checkbox to accept communications.

4) Determine the metrics you want. At minimum, determine the cost per lead that you want to achieve. Optimally that is $0, but in reality it totally depends on your market.

Do some research and look to beat the average cost per lead in your industry.

5) Start generating traffic to the form or landing page so that people see your offer. There are many ways to do this, from running paid ads, to SEO optimization, to cold email marketing.

Figure out what works for you and use it exclusively. Typically, SEO is a long term solution to traffic, and cold email is slow to get started on a new server, so we recommend running either Meta Ads or Google Ads to immediately get views.

Keeping your landing page speed optimized with a good looking design is usually sufficient, but to get the attention of scrolling passersby on the internet, you may need to use some open source content or create/buy your own to get people to click on the ads.

6) Check the data and optimize.

If you are getting traffic but no leads, there is something wrong with your landing page or web form.

If you are not getting any traffic even though you’re paying for ads or marketing, you may want to look at the ads themselves.

For Google Ads your keywords probably are too competitive if you’re spending money to no avail.

For Meta Ads, your creatives are the bread and butter. If you are spending too much money, the target and/or the creatives are wrong. If you are getting leads, now you can move to the final step.

7) Once you have a sufficient amount of leads (preferably over 50), now you can start remarketing to these leads that have already seen your brand.

You can set up automations to send newsletters, updates about your company, and more lead magnets to these potential customers.

As long as you continue to provide valuable information, these folks will refrain from opting out. Make sure you remove them from your marketing list if they do choose to opt out, as failing to do so could result in fines or worse.

Keep it transparent and in good faith and you shouldn’t have a problem.

Conclusion

Hopefully this gives a reasonable overview of setting up and implementing some lead magnets.

Simply stated, the lead magnet is an offer that you can provide to a customer in exchange for data that you can use to remarket, educate, and hopefully drive sales to your business.