A good lead magnet is the heart of an exceptional marketing crusade. It’s a powerful tool to help you generate high-quality leads. Lead magnets are high-converting and offer much more caliber to the target audience in a seamless way. Lead magnets are hands-down the best manoeuvre into the marketing world. That being established, they require a lot of time, effort, research, and the right approach to be successful.
Time and information are the most valuable asset when it comes to leads and most brands lack these focus areas when choosing the right lead magnet system. The more well-worked and refined the lead magnet produced by your brand is, the more capable your brand is to procure high qualified potential customers because you will be offering exactly what they require at the precise time.
Lead magnet work across any niche to target whichever category of demographic, especially for B2B and B2C businesses. Examples of a good lead magnet include whitepapers, podcasts, eBooks, product demos, Quizzes and more.
But some formats like blogs or unclear landing pages can’t be termed as lead magnets. To help you better understand, we’ve put together this post, where we’ll be discussing:
- What is a Lead Magnet?
- What Does Not Work as a Lead Magnet?
- What Makes a Good Lead Magnet?
First, learn what a lead magnet is.
What is a Lead Magnet?
To understand how a lead magnet works, let us briefly define what a lead magnet is.
A lead magnet may be refined as a resourceful marketing tool that offers a free service in exchange for contact information to contact a potential client.
What makes lead magnets an effective marketing tool and a high conversion rate simply lies in the barter system. When a potential client gives their contact information, they imply that they want to be contacted by the company and are interested in the services offered. This simple component is what makes lead magnets a success.
Lead magnets vary from free samples, and trial subscriptions to e-books and white papers. They rely heavily on customer communication and connection. The communication converts to purchases which convert to profits.
What Does Not Work as a Lead Magnet?
Lead generation is a barter system. In exchange for a service offered for free, you get valuable contact information to communicate with the client.
This system works as a customer who is interested in what you have to offer would be happy to impart contact information to further communication with your brand.
Now if you see other content marketing techniques such as blog posts, there is no exchange of information in place for this lead generation to work.
Here is a list of the format comprising formats that do not work as lead magnets:
- Social Media Posts
- Blog Posts
- Email Newsletters
- General Website
- Unclear Landing Pages
- Weak CTAs
Why don’t these work as lead magnets? Let’s have a look.
Social Media Posts
Social media marketing is one of the most popular forms of digital marketing. It has been used extensively by brands to promote themselves and their services over the years.
Even though they are a very popular and effective way to “promote” a brand, it is not a lead generator. Social media posts are just informational and promotional content that does not include free services in exchange for contact information. This is why social media posts do not work as lead magnets.
Blog Posts
Blog posts are essentially informational content, that is mainly promotional. They do not contain compelling information enough for customers to want to sign up or exchange contact information. This model of digital marketing does not work for lead generation rather it is for garnering the attention of a client pool.
Email Newsletters
The email newsletter is a technique that can be compared to shooting a target blindly and hoping it falls on it. They are one of the oldest techniques in the marketing book for nurturing leads. They are not lead magnets as you’ll be nurturing the lead rather than generating them.
Main Website
While you will be attracting traffic to your website, it’s not enough to generate leads. If you want to generate leads, it’s really important to deliver value to your audience. Your audience will hop onto your website, explore a bit further and may eventually bounce off. And even if they were willing to purchase from you at a later date, they may eventually forget about your business.
If you want to turn them into paying customers, you need to nurture them. And you’ll never be able to do that if you don’t have their contact information as a general website will not make them submit their contact information.
Unclear Landing Pages
Unclear landing pages won’t help you generate leads. In fact, if you are spending your top dollars in attracting traffic to your unclear landing pages, you’re just wasting your money. You need to make sure that your landing page is attractive, delivers the right message and has everything in place to make your audience take the desired action. After all, you want as many of your website visitors to submit their contact information, don’t you?
Weak CTAs
Another important point to note in this view is the Call to action or CTA. CTAs are usually good lead generation tools if used appropriately. Weak CTAs can lead to the loss of potential leads.
If you want your audience to take some kind of desired action, let’s say – submit their contact information, you need to let them know that you want them to submit their information. Otherwise, they’ll never know.
Hence, it’s really important to strategically implement strong CTAs across relevant sections – which will help you generate high-quality leads successfully.
What Makes a Good Lead Magnet?
In order for a marketing technique to be a successful lead generator, there are certain aspects that need to be hit for it to be fruitful. These are as follows:
- Specific Content
- Ease of Usage & Simple Interface
- Issue-Specific
Specific Content
A good lead magnet is one that aims and focuses on a particular demographic of audience. To ensure that the lead magnet targets the specific target, the content of the lead magnet has to be carefully crafted and tailored to the definitive needs of this focus group. Creating specific content in the lead magnet for the particular niche is imperative for it to be a success.
Ease of Usage & Simple Interface
The lead magnet has to be easy to use and seamless for it to be able to reach the minds of the client. The content has to be easy to understand, and simple within the reading limits of the end-user.
Issue-Specific
What makes lead magnets different from other marketing techniques is that they can solve real-world problems by offering solutions. Problem-solving is one aspect that gives the lead magnet an upper hand over other marketing techniques. This aspect should be utilized by a brand if they want to create a real change and gain well-qualified leads.
Conclusion
Lead magnets are a tricky field to maneuver. However, if used with the right technique and combination it has the potential to be the best investment of your time and efforts. Apart from the points mentioned in the article, there are a few other aspects that may not work as lead magnets.
The common element in all good lead magnets is valuable information and clear content.
Hence it is important to have information that a client would want to get in exchange for their contact information. A unique purpose with your content that a client would want to exchange should be your end goal. Lead magnets are one of the most versatile ways to ensure a constant inflow of leads which will eventually galvanize into greater sales.
