Lead magnets are content offers designed to attract and convert prospective customers into leads by providing them with valuable information or resources in exchange for their contact information. A lead magnet is foundational to a successful eCommerce marketing strategy.
Business and courtship have a lot in common.
If you want a beautiful girl to fall in love with you, the first step is to get her attention. If you can’t make her interested in you, forget it.
Forcing yourself onto her or inserting your emotional desires into her will only push her away. Many guys end up in prison like that.
Exhibiting all the traits and behaviors that give her the feels and make her like you is a surer way of winning her heart.
I bring that up because landing a high-paying client requires that you put the same amount of work into cultivating the relationship. That’s where lead magnets come in.
Effective lead magnets capture a prospect's attention and give them something of real value that solves a specific problem or meets a need.
If you want to project yourself as a respected authority in your industry and develop relationships that can result in long-term commercial success, creating high-converting lead magnets is one of the most efficient ways.
Read on for the practical guide for creating lead magnets that make bank and not the ones that cricket into the content abyss. You’ll learn how to generate more leads, increase conversions, and grow your business faster.
What are Lead Magnets?
A lead magnet is an ethical bribe to get someone to take a specific action, such as subscribing to your newsletter.
No one wakes up one day and magically decides they want to be your client. So lead magnets are content offers that help you attract and convert potential customers into leads by providing them with valuable information or resources about the conversations going on in their heads. That is, they give you their email address, and you provide the help that effectively addresses their needs.
The aim of a lead magnet is to:
Attract prospective customers by addressing specific problems for them.
Put them in a state where buying decision is the only reasonable outcome.
Hence, once you’ve got the contact information of interested prospects, you must begin nurturing them toward completing a purchase by producing good content or incentives on your owned platform.
Examples of lead magnets include blog posts, ebooks, white papers, webinars, free trials, checklists, and templates. And they work because these magnets help you produce high-quality leads and cultivate relationships with potential clients without spending excessive ad money.
If you’re not using lead magnets as part of your marketing strategy, you’re doing marketing wrong.
Unfortunately, many eCommerce merchants approach lead magnets like a guy asking out a beautiful girl with zero interest in them. They do it thoughtlessly and wonder why they’re not getting tangible results.
How to Create Lead Magnets That Make Bank
Before we go through the step-by-step processes of creating lead magnets that are guaranteed to work, here are some numbers you might want to keep in mind:
A HubSpot study finds that companies using lead magnets and other inbound marketing strategies have a 62% lower cost per lead than those who use conventional outbound marketing strategies. They also found that businesses with effective lead magnets generate 30-40% of their leads through content marketing.
DemandMetric says content marketing (including lead magnets) costs 62% less than traditional marketing and generates about 3x as many leads.
76% of B2B buyers claimed they would be prepared to trade their contact information for access to a white paper or ebook, according to BrightTALK research.
In a survey by MarketingSherpa, 72% of marketers said content marketing was their most effective lead-generation strategy. And 69% of B2B marketers say that creating more high-quality content was a top priority for lead generation.
Bearing that in mind, the steps below will show you how to create lead magnets that actually work.
#1: Know Your Target Audience
Back to our dating analogy: the first step to making the girl love you is getting to know her. You try to be a part of her world, to be with the people inside her social circle so you can understand her interests. Likewise, understanding your target market will help you design more efficient marketing efforts, better tailor your messaging to appeal to them, and ultimately raise the likelihood that they will care about what you’ve got to say.
Do your due diligence.
Research and compile details about your target market's demographics, hobbies, behaviors, and pain points. Instead of creating fathom lead magnets and hoping someone will pay attention, you can be intentional. Look into your Google search console or Google ads click data to understand what your prospects are searching for, look into social media analytics, evaluate customer feedback, send out questionnaires, or conduct focus groups.
Once you get a good grasp of your target audience, the next step is to craft buyer personas for your ideal client using data from the above. These personas should include information about their age, gender, location, income level, education level, job title, interests, and pain points. That’ll help you tailor your marketing messaging and tactics to resonate with them.
#2: What Does Your Ideal Customer Need?
As noted in the passage above, you can’t stand out from the sea of content if you do the same boring thing many eCommerce brands do: create content NOBODY wants to read and hope they somehow convince you to give a damn.
You’ve got to be intentional about the need you’re solving for your customer. If you don’t understand their pain points, creating products or services that meet their expectations will be difficult.
Remember, it’s not about you. It’s about the prospect.
Hence, the first step here is to go through the entire customer journey, from unaware, problem aware, solution aware, product aware, to most aware.
Dig into conversations online or do keyword research with tools like Semrush or Ahrefs to understand conversations your prospects might have.
Some key areas to focus on include:
Problems and challenges: Be sure about your target audience's issues or challenges related to your industry or product category and beyond for insight into their pain points and possible solutions.
Expectations: Be precise about what success means for your target audience; what they intend to get from your offering.
Motivations: Identify the causes and drivers behind your target audience's behavior, including positive and negative motivators: E.g., desire for convenience or fear of missing out.
Having such insights puts you in a better position to create a lead magnet your prospects cannot resist. You can better develop solutions that meet their needs, address their pain points, and create marketing messaging that resonates with them.
By showing that you understand their needs and can provide solutions, you build trust and credibility with your target audience, which leads to increased loyalty and high conversion rates.
#3: Create a Lead Magnet Your Competitors Are Too Lazy To Create
You’ve done the work in understanding your prospect and their pain points. The next step is to choose the type of lead magnet that’ll appeal to them.
While many eCommerce merchants often default to ebooks when the subject of lead magnets comes up, ebooks are but one lead magnet option to choose from. It all boils down to how your prospects like to consume their content and whether you can package your lead magnet to give them the best possible result.
In that order, your lead magnet can be a:
Landing page
Blog post
Coupon
Webinar
Video tutorials
Quiz
Webinar
User-generated content, such as a video testimonial
Case study
Free sample or trial
Discount
The rule of thumb is that your lead magnet does not have to be extremely polished or perfect. You want to create something useful, a lead magnet that provides a clear benefit, and get it in front of your prospects as quickly as possible.
Remember that you’re not selling the brand, an offer, or seeking to get them to exchange cash immediately. Your goal is for them to opt-in after consuming your content or using your free trial.
Again, when you’ve acquired the lead, nurturing is where the magic often happens. You can establish a positive relationship with your target audience, leading to increased engagement, loyalty, and revenue.
How to Create Content that Provides Real Value
To create content that escapes the gravitational singularity of an internet black hole where useless copies are crushed into infinite density, pay attention to these tips:
Deliver on your paper promise by addressing your prospect’s pain points, not to sell.
Know what’s happening in your industry and incorporate that into your content.
Use visuals and examples to illustrate points for better comprehension.
Ensure your content reflect your brand's voice and values.
Some shortcomings to avoid include the following:
Making promises you cannot keep
Poorly crafted opt-in page or call to action
Creating for everyone and no one in particular
Excessive focus on content creation, not distribution
Creating content that’s a vitamin and not a painkiller
Having a generic offer or targeting the wrong audience
But of course, if you’ve created a lead magnet that secures the bag but no one can find it, that defeats the purpose.
#4: Make Your Lead Magnet Easy to Access
Focusing too much on content creation without considering the distribution and use benefits is a mistake. You can have the best lead magnet in the world, but if no one can find it, you might as well bury it under a rock.
Remove these roadblocks to ensure your prospects can readily access your lead magnet:
Optimize your website UI for seamless navigation, starting with the onsite search.
Use pertinent keywords, meta descriptions, and title tags to make your material more search engine friendly.
Write intuitive headlines that accurately reflect your content and highlight specific problems solved.
Structure your lead magnet to show your prospects what they stand to gain from your lead magnet.
Provide multiple access points to your lead magnet through social media, email newsletters, and RSS feeds for your audience to access your content through their preferred channels.
Ensure your lead magnet is suited for mobile devices and readable on smaller screens by using a responsive design that adjusts to multiple screen sizes.
Consider promoting your lead magnet with paid ads.
But all that might not yield the intended results if you don’t help readers understand what to do after encountering your lead magnet.
How to Improve Your Call To Action (CTA).
Provide clear calls to action that help your audience take the steps you envisage. Make your CTA compelling with the following tips:
Clearly state what action you want your audience to take. For example, "Schedule a Demo Call" or "Sign up for our newsletter" is better than “Click for more.”
Use action-oriented language to encourage your audience to take action. For example, "Start your free trial" or "Get instant access now."
Create a sense of urgency to encourage your audience to take action immediately. For example, use phrases like "Limited time offer" or "Don't miss out."
Use visual cues such as buttons or arrows to draw attention to your call to action and make it more effective when necessary.
Now that you’ve got their attention to, review the signup process to ensure you don’t acquire leads only to lose them to a horrible onboarding process.
Keeping the Signup Process Simple and Quick
Encourage your target audience to take action and sign up for your content or offerings with hassle-free onboarding. Here are some tips for simplifying your signup process:
Keep your signup form as short as possible by only asking for important information. Having many unnecessary fields leads to signup abandonment.
Offer social login options when necessary to reduce friction in the signup process.
Use one-click signup options such as Google or Facebook to make it even easier for your audience to sign up without filling out a form.
Provide clear instructions and guidance throughout the signup process to make it easy for your audience.
Offer a preview of what your audience will receive after signing up.
In the final analysis, there’s no one way to get it right. Testing and iterating with user feedback help you to better connect with your tribe and serve their needs in ways they’ll keep coming back for more.
The best practices we’ve outlined in this piece—focusing on your audience, understanding their pain points, offering excessive value, and making your lead magnet easy to access—will give you a solid headstart in creating lead magnets that attract and convert prospects into loyal fans, standing out from your competition, carving out a lucrative niche in the more crowded eCommerce industry, and scaling your company.
About the Author
Tom-Chris Emewulu is HeyDay’s Digital Evangelist. With 8+ years of digital marketing and business development experience, he crafts high-intent, high-converting, data-driven SEO articles that put brands on page 1 of Google search. Forbes, DW, Business Insider, Businessss2Community, and many other publications have featured his works. You can find him on Social Media via @tomchrisemewulu.