“Lead magnets” might sound like marketing jargon, but trust us, they’re the real deal.
Done right, a lead magnet can contain much value and help you attain your desired goals—and these benefits just make the tip of the iceberg.
Want to know what lead magnets are and why are they important? You’re on the right page—dig in to find all the need-to-know details!
What is a lead magnet?
Have you ever visited a website to read a research report or an e-book they published? However, the website asked you to fill out a form with your email address to access it.
Congratulations, you’ve just seen a lead magnet in action.
Marketers specifically use lead magnets (like e-books, research papers, trial periods, newsletters, white papers, webinars, etc.) to get the contact information of potential leads so they can be nurtured and converted into future customers. Content localization plays a crucial role in this process by ensuring the lead magnets are tailored to the linguistic and cultural preferences of different audiences, enhancing their effectiveness.
Popular lead magnets can be of different types, such as video (e.g., webinars), text (reports), interactive (e.g., quizzes), access (e.g., product demos), or monetary (e.g., discounts).
Why are lead magnets important?
Aside from being a great tactic to get the customer information of prospects, lead magnets also:
- Allow you to position yourself as an industry leader and build authority (i.e., if you repeatedly keep publishing valuable information, you end up building a brand name for yourself—e.g., Gallup, McKinsey, Reuters, etc).
- Help you increase brand awareness through link-building (e.g., if you produce some noteworthy research, publications will link back to your website to support their claims).
- Play a role in building your email list, qualifying leads, and boosting conversion rates by using a people search tool to provide relevant information such as email addresses, names, and physical addresses (i.e., once your audience becomes aware of/interested in your brand, they sign up for your marketing materials and eventually become a customer).
- Most importantly, you end up providing valuable and actionable information not only to your ideal customers and prospects but also to the larger audience out there.
What makes a good lead magnet?
A few key markers of a good lead magnet are that it’s valuable, relevant, and engaging.
Aside from the basics, here are a few more things you could do to ensure your lead magnet classifies as “high quality”:
- Make sure it’s delivered promptly (i.e., don’t make the audience wait a day or two to email them the lead magnet).
- Integrate expert insights or your unique brand-led advice to make it actionable.
- Write in an easy-to-understand language so the content is digestible.
- Add social proof that showcases your expertise or USP.
- Focus on a specific, niche issue.
3 examples of great lead magnets
Need some inspiration? Take a peek at these effective lead magnets to spark ideation for your own.
Example #1: Breadcrumbs
Not to toot our own horn here, but you could use Breadcrumbs as inspiration for your lead magnet, and here are all the reasons why:
- The lead magnet (aka the gated demo) doesn’t ask for many details, only your email ID.
- We have surrounded it with social proof (i.e., pointers that show what you can achieve from the tool, a case study on the right, and names of our clients).
- The demo is also extremely high-quality and delivered promptly 🙂
Example #2: Unkover
Like Breadcrumbs, Unkover’s lead magnet (free trial) only asks for limited information (contact details) when asking to sign up and provides social proof (client list) as well as product screenshots to show the readers exactly what they’re signing up for.
They also mention their USP and the duration of the trial on the Unkover Trial page to maintain transparency, thus building trust with their audience.
Example #3: StudioSuits
StudioSuits, a clothing brand known for its men’s seersucker suits, employs a unique lead magnet strategy by offering free fabric samples with a refund incentive.
While traditional lead magnets often involve digital content, StudioSuits takes a tangible approach, providing potential customers with a physical product.
This strategy attracts potential customers and increases the likelihood of conversion by initiating a relationship and guiding them toward purchasing. If we do think so ourselves, it’s a clever blend of tangible offerings and incentive-driven marketing.
How to create a lead magnet that works
Onto the meatier bits, let’s dive in and explore how to create a lead magnet that actually works!
Offer your audience value
Trust us when we say this: Your desired outcomes are going to be only as good or useful as the lead magnet proves to be.
These days, potential customers don’t want generic stuff (they can get that from browsing a query online); what they really need is a reason to take action, and you’ll need to hit on the prospect’s pain point to act as the “reason.”
Experts recommend segmenting your audience (based on their interests and niche) and creating unique lead magnets for each individual audience. To make this process easier, you can use the Breadcrumbs Reveal tool to segment your ICPs strategically.
Demonstrate your credibility
Next up, your lead magnets will need to contain key markers that showcase their credibility to the target audience. For example, here are some things you could do:
- Provide author credentials (i.e., a research paper written by a well-known industry expert might be more trustworthy to the audience).
- Showcase snippets of the insights they might get
- Interview customers and other stakeholders
- Provide testimonials and other social proof
- Use data, stats, and case studies
- Back your points with examples
- Integrate expert opinions
- Add original research
Make it shareable
Last but not least, once your lead magnet is ready for the world, you only need to make it easily shareable.
That’s to say, share it on all your social media platforms, embed it at the bottom of blog posts, email the lead magnet to your niche audience, link to it in your ads and landing pages, add social sharing buttons, tag the experts/customers you interviewed on social media (so they can share it further), and encourage your own employees to share it in their network—basically, do whatever you can to ensure people see it.
At this stage, you can also track your likes and shares with the help of media monitoring tools. Some tools that can help you undertake this task are SproutSocial, Zoho Social, Keyhole, Brand24, etc.
Lead magnet strategy
Alright—so we already discussed the process of creating a lead magnet, but before you share it with others, here are a few strategies you can undertake to ensure it makes the impact you want.
Optimize it
Let’s be real for a moment here: Your customers want results quickly delivered to them, which is why if they look up a query about your lead magnet, they want to see it (the lead magnet) in the first few results of the search engine.
To ensure this happens, optimize your lead magnet landing page with the keywords and phrases. Tools like Unkover, Ahrefs, or Semrush will help you find SEO and content gaps.
We even recommend optimizing your landing page for factors other than SEO keywords—i.e., optimizing your offer, the way you present it, the social proof you share, etc.
Test it
By “test it,” we mean A/B testing your lead magnet offer (and other elements of your lead magnet) to see how they impact your results.
If you’re unaware of what A/B testing is, here’s the long and short of it: You create split tests, wherein you test “Offer A” vs. “Offer B” to see how customers react to both these offers. For reference, here’s an infographic of how A/B tests work.
In real life, here’s what the A/B testing process could look like:
Step 1: You define an objective (e.g., you want to see more product sign-ups).
Step 2: You decide what to test (e.g., offer, elements, format, design, etc).
Step 3: You create alternative variations for the test.
Step 4: You set up the test and track the results (tools like Unbounce help with the task at hand).
Follow up
Once you have the information of your prospects from lead magnets, don’t forget to follow up with them in a timely manner. As a matter of fact, a whopping 80% of prospects convert into customers after the fifth follow-up.
Folks usually employ email or SMS campaigns to get in touch with their leads, but you can choose any follow-up process that works for you.
On the flip side, if you don’t follow up with customers in a timely manner, they may forget who you are or be poached by your competitors (assuming that they’re on your website with the intention of booking a demo of your service, they might be looking for other such service providers as well).
Converting leads into customers
To ensure your lead magnets result in customer conversion, here are a few strategies you can employ:
- Nurturing leads with targeted content (you can set up automated campaigns, too)
- Leveraging urgency or scarcity tactics
- Creating different types of magnets based on where your customers are in their journey (for example, a BoFu lead magnet would be excellent for customers who are in the market for buying a solution like yours, so they might ideally benefit from free consultations or product demos. A targeted offer like “Get a Free 30-Minute Consultation to See How [Your Product] Can Boost Your [Specific Benefit]” might just do the trick).
Final thoughts
Now that we’ve discussed what lead magnets are, why they are important, how to create one, and which strategies to leverage, the next steps would be to create one yourself. What lead magnet ideas do you have to capture qualified leads?
If you need some help, you can use tools like Breadcrumbs Reveal to segment your audience for your lead magnet campaigns and optimize those campaigns with the help of tools like Unkover, which will help you gain competitive intelligence.
On that note, go ahead and book a demo for Breadcrumbs, or sign up for a 14-day free trial of Unkover!