How to Create a Lead Magnet: Ideas & Tips

In this day and age, businesses try experimenting with multiple tactics to generate leads. However, one of the top techniques for it is a lead magnet. For those who aren't aware of what's a lead magnet, fret not! It's a tool that marketers have been using for decades.

A lead magnet is a tool that helps in lead generation by providing a long-form resource in exchange for the contact information of the prospect. Lead magnets can take the form of whitepapers, ebooks, templates, cheat sheets, checklists, and a lot more!

Before we discuss different lead magnet ideas, tips, and examples, let’s review the conversion path transforming website visitors into leads and the role of email marketing in this entire process:

• CTA (Call to Action): Website visitors click this button to access the resource you are providing them with.
• Landing Page: When website visitors click on the CTA, they are directed to a landing page. On this page, the visitors fill out a form where they enter details such as name, email address, and other important information you may need.
• Thank You Page: Next, the visitor-turned-lead is directed to a thank you page. This page has the required information regarding where to access the resource.
• Kickback email: After a brief time, you send a kickback email to the lead. You can think of it as a follow-up message. This email marketing campaign begins a conversation with the lead in order to keep them engaged with your brand.

How to Create a Lead Magnet?

Let's discuss the steps to create an effective lead magnet:

1. Know Who You Are Targeting and What They Want

The aim of a lead magnet is to provide a resource your audience wants and get their contact information in exchange. To determine what to offer your prospects, learn about the user persona you are targeting and what you can offer to entice them.

You create a user persona (a semi-fictional character) to represent different types of customers who use the services or products of your business.

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When you create user personas, you may end up having 1-3 of them with different pain points and needs. Keep in mind that one single lead magnet may not suffice in appealing to different personas.

For instance, you have created two user personas. One of the personas may need knowledge-based magnets such as ebooks. Whereas the other persona may require resourced-based magnets such as tools and templates.

Tip: To create different lead magnets for different user personas, you can check the lead magnets of your competitors to get a fair idea.

2. Create and Name Your Lead Magnet

After you decide what you will offer your prospects, it is time to create and design. To undertake the design work, you can take the help of an in-house designer or outsource the work using an independent contractor. You can also not choose either of the two options and simply use Canva.

Tip: Canva contains hundreds of customizable templates that let you create different lead magnets such as worksheets, reports, presentation slides, and books.

Post completion of this process, give a catchy name to your lead magnet that can effectively attract your audience. Also, highlight its advantages in the name itself. For instance - 102 Ways To Monetize Your Brand.

3. Create Your Conversion Path

The next step is building your conversion path, which should include your landing page, form, thank-you page, and email sequence.

Some practices you can follow to increase conversions are:

• Create a dedicated landing page without a navigation bar. Doing so will make the user focus on only your offer without any distractions.
• Your CTA must have words that can appeal to your prospects in the best possible manner. It should also be short, clear, and crisp in its message.
• Add testimonials and reviews to your landing pages to improve conversions. As per the latest testimonial statistics, 72% of consumers have stated that positive reviews and testimonials increased their faith in a business.

Tip: In the form, name and email are the two information pieces you should definitely include. Asking for other details is optional. We recommend you include fewer fields so that the user doesn't get frustrated and abandon the form.

Next, let's talk about your email sequence. After you acquire a lead, you can move them further down the funnel by adding them into a nurturing sequence. It can include newsletters, webinars, and other additional resources.

Lastly, ensure you track your conversion path and check the behavior of users on it.

4. Update Regularly

You need to regularly update your lead magnet so that it provides only the current data to your audience. If you do not do so, the resource will no longer stay valuable to your audience.

Tip: Carry out feedback surveys on your offers and check your lead's comments. When you take these steps, you get to know more about how you can improve your offer.

Lead Magnet Ideas

The most famous lead magnet among subscribers is an ebook. As per the latest statistics,Ā  27.7% of marketers are using them. Other famous ones are free tools and webinars.

There are plenty of ideas for lead magnets out there. Let's discuss some of them in more detail:

1. Webinars

A webinar is a seminar carried out over the internet and is a great way to create a sense of urgency that can push your audience to sign up. If you decide to go with this idea, we recommend you put a countdown timer to tell individuals how many hours or days are remaining to be a part of the webinar.

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2. ebook

An ebook is another idea you can go for. But there is something you should know here. Your target audience will have to take out time to read your ebook because of its lengthy nature. So, ensure it features an irresistible benefit when you decide to offer it as a lead magnet.

3. Tutorial

We all are aware of what a tutorial is. It is a content piece that teaches you how to do a certain thing. It can take the form of a PDF download or a video.

If you decide to go for this lead magnet idea, ensure you use a list-style headline such as X Steps to ABC. Doing so lets your audience know how many steps are there in the tutorial.

4. Checklist

Checklists are easily consumed and extremely quick to create. They condense all the things your prospect should know in a single, actionable list. For instance, you can turn your instructional blog posts into checklists.

Tip: Ensure you provide the checklist in a printable format to make it easy for individuals to tick off an item when they complete it.

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5. Cheatsheet

Cheatsheets provide the user with a process or a list of guidelines they can follow again and again in order to obtain a certain result.

Cheatsheet is an amazing lead magnet idea because it takes away the need to think - a person no longer has to rack their brain if they wish to achieve the desired result.

The list certainly doesn't end here. Other lead magnet ideas include discount codes, workbooks, case studies, newsletters, and so much more.

Lead Magnet Examples

Let's look at two lead magnet examples that can come in handy when you decide to create a lead magnet:

A. MuleSoft

Take a look at this lead magnet by MuleSoft. They have focused on a particular goal for a particular buyer persona. They are targeting Saas executives and their offer guides them on how to make their app enterprise-ready.

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B. HubSpot

Another great lead magnet you can consider is a calculator or grader. HubSpot provides a website grader that scans your website in seconds and offers a score based on the mobile experience, performance, security, and SEO.

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After a person enters their website and email id in the website grader, they get an exhaustive report about their website performance. The grader helps their audience recognize the potential problems with their website and provides a solution to rectify them.

Lead Magnet Tips

Now that you know some lead magnet ideas and examples, it's time to know how to use lead magnets in the correct manner:

1. Understand Your Audience

Not everyone who comes to your website is your target audience. So, if you provide a generic lead magnet, you may receive irrelevant information. So, we recommend you thoroughly know your audience before creating a lead magnet. Determine and understand who they are, what they want, and where they are coming from. This basic rule will aid you in creating the correct lead magnet.

2. Take a Look at the Analytics

Make it a point to check your analytics and know specific information such as the number of individuals who come to your website, the number of individuals who decide to access your content, and how many individuals take the step to download or use it.

Knowing these things helps you determine how you can improve to get more individuals to sign up.

3. Use Your Best-Performing Content

Check your content library and look for your best-performing content resource to create an effective lead magnet that too, in a lesser amount of time. It can be your most viewed/shared Slideshare presentation deck, the most downloaded ebook, or simply a webinar with the most number of attendees. Webinars, slide decks, and ebooks can be readily used as lead magnets.

In case you want to employ your best blog post as a lead magnet, ensure you repurpose it in a downloadable file. A word of advice here - never put a blog post behind a form. We suggest that you repurpose the blog post into a cheat sheet or a checklist and then use it as your lead magnet.

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All in all, when it comes to deciding your lead magnet, your star content is your best bet.

4. Make It a Point to Offer Top-Notch Content

Lastly, we would say that ensure your lead magnet is highly useful to your website visitors. Even if a half-cooked lead magnet gets you a thousand leads, most of them may not convert eventually.

Remember the following pointers:

• Ensure your content resource is easily understandable
• Never provide obsolete content resources
• Provide content relevant to your typical site visitor.

Conclusion

The bottom line? Ensure you understand your audience and offer useful resources to them when you decide to use a lead magnet. Remember, a lead magnet forms an integral part of marketing content. With its help, your prospects get a useful piece of content and you are able to maintain a healthy lead pipeline.

Now that you are armed with this knowledge, you are now in a more informed position to make a decision regarding your lead magnets. Use our lead magnet ideas and tips to see drastic improvements in your digital marketing efforts!

Lastly, we hope this guide gets you more signups and increases your conversions. Now it's our turn to ask you questions - which lead magnet ideas do you like and are definitely going to try?