In this episode I talk about my frustration of downloading crap freebies from the internet and the importance of providing valuable lead magnets. A lead magnet is a piece of free content offered in exchange for a user’s email address and is a crucial tool for marketing. I provide 6 key qualities of a successful lead magnet and explain how to measure the success of lead magnets.
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14 Examples of Strong Lead Magnets
My Resources Page (Lead Magnets)
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Hello, and welcome to the small business sweet spot. I’m your host Barb Davids, and this show is dedicated to helping small business owners like you get more organic website traffic and also to help create and distribute content and analyzing the numbers so that we can make better informed marketing decisions. It is action oriented, direct, and conversational. And if you’ve been looking for SEO or content marketing help, please stick around to the very end where I share about the group coaching program, small business sweet spot. I’m so glad you’re here. Let’s go.
You know what really chaps my ass is when I download a freebie from the internet from some website that I’m looking to get some more information about and it turns out there is zero substance to it.
So what I’m about to tell you in this episode and the next, I hope, encourages you to provide a full value experience for the person that you help. And I’m talking about lead magnets.
You are listening to the Small Business Sweet Spot. I’m Barb Davids, and this is the place for direct, actionable information to help you get more out of your direct marketing so that you can make better informed marketing decisions.
A lead magnet is the formal term for a piece of content that you provide to the people that you help to bring them into your area of expertise.
It’s a piece of free content that you offer in exchange for an email address and usually also a first name. Other known names are freebie, sign up or opt in.
Once someone has received your lead magnet, the hope is that they will continue to want to hear from you.
And if they do, it’s an opportunity to build that relationship with that person and be able to offer the service that you provide to help them with the challenge that they’re having.
a lead magnet has two jobs. First being to provide value to the person who’s receiving the lead magnet. And secondly, to encourage the person receiving the lead magnet lead magnet to engage with your business.
Lead magnets are often thought of as a digital marketing strategy to grow your email list.
And brands and businesses have been using things like coupons, flyers, postcards for customer information for decades.
Maybe you’re even old enough to remember putting in your information on the back of certain flyers with all your information to get the coupons or even like the free beauty sample.
So it’s not really a new idea. And it’s also more affordable and easier to create a lead magnet. So that’s why almost every business, and even their office dog has a lead magnet.
So if that’s the case, you’d probably think they’re pretty effective, right? Right. Otherwise I wouldn’t intentionally have a whole page even devoted to lead magnets. Side note, they are at compassdigitalstrategies. com slash resources if you’d like to check that out,
or you wouldn’t see them on almost every website that you landed on,
but they are only useful if they bring in sales.
And if the idea of a lead magnet sounds like a lot of work, it’s because it kind of is.
A good one is
so to maximize the chances of the lead magnet being good, being able to offer solid support and having the person that you help engage with your business. It needs to have the following qualities.
Number one, it needs to understand who your content is for and quickly fix a problem that they are experiencing.
As with all marketing, the content that you create needs to speak to the person that you’re talking to.
Doing this, it makes it easier to create a lead magnet that provides value.
And when it comes to what people value the most, it’s almost always their time.
The lead magnet being an introduction to your company. You want to get right into who this helps and how they can help in the shortest amount of time of possible, or even if it’s not the shortest amount of time, the most effective use of their time.
Number two, it needs to deliver what it will say it will deliver.
And as you heard in the beginning of the episode, click baity lead magnets, chap my ass,
you know, these ones.
The ones that tell what they have inside of the lead magnet, and then all of a sudden you get it, and then you are left feeling kind of defeated, or maybe not defeated is the right word, but like, um, where’s the beef?
Okay, so that’s another reference, depending on how old you are, whether or not you’re going to get that one, but there’s an old commercial, just look it up, where’s the beef? You’ll get that.
Number three, it needs to give them something that they can’t get anywhere else.
It doesn’t matter if it’s a recipe to make your own unicorn poop or the top 10 foods to avoid when you’re on a diet.
If someone can find the information that they are looking for without having to put in their email address, they’ll go to the other place.
So find ways to make your lead magnet a must have.
And this could be something just as simple as a quote that can’t be found readily on the internet or even a free consult or upgrade to services that you have.
Number four, it should arrive in an instant.
As you are probably well aware, people hate waiting.
If you wait hours or even days to deliver the lead magnet, chances are they’ll have moved on to something else before it even arrives.
Number five, it needs to be sexy AF as fudgesicles.
Okay, so design doesn’t count for everything, but it does count for a lot.
What you create needs to look good for whatever platform your audience is on the most, either desktop and/or mobile.
And if it’s an audio or a visual, you’ll want to ensure really good audio quality.
Number six, it should leave them wanting more. Accepting this lead magnet is the very first step in their relationship with you as a business or what a lot of people call the customer journey, the buyer journey, the marketing journey.
By the time they’ve consumed the lead magnet, you will want them to feel like, okay, I would love to hear more on the subject or maybe a subsequent related topic.
And you do this by putting a call to action at the end. You put something that says what to do next explicitly so that they’re not left wondering, um, what do I do now?
So those are the qualities of a good lead magnet. But how do you know if one is successful? How do you measure success? What is even considered successful?
So the most common metric to know if your lead magnet is a success is the conversion rate of the landing page. So you’ll take the number of people that land on the page, the sign up area for the lead magnet, and divide that by the number of people who actually request the lead magnet.
so here’s an example. Let’s say a thousand people land on your page, and then a hundred people sign up for your lead magnet. You take the hundred divided by a thousand, and that is a ten percent conversion rate. That’s great.
Generally speaking, 10 percent is a good conversion rate in
that’s a 10 percent conversion rate, which is great. Generally speaking, if you have consumed some of my content before, you probably already know I am not one for specific numbers because there are so many reports out there and there are so many different benchmarks that you can go off of. But just as a general guideline, I’d say that you could use this one as a good number, but
That’s a 10 percent conversion rate, and generally speaking, that is good. If you’ve listened to some of my content before, you’ll know that I have this thing about numbers. If you want to talk more about numbers, let me know, but just take the idea of a landing page conversion rate being 10%, being really good.
That is a 10 percent conversion rate. Is that good or bad? That is going to depend on your numbers. Generally speaking, 10 percent is a great conversion landing rate. It’s going to vary by industry. It’s going to vary by Lead magnet is going to, there’s so many different variables, but you can generally speaking say that 10 percent is a good conversion rate.
Now that said, I would always encourage a higher number, or as high as you can get. Always strive for more when it comes to the conversion rate.
Now here’s the kicker. That number is only half the story.
Let’s say your lead magnet is drawing people in, and even let’s say if we had to have a number, let’s say 50 percent of them are converting and getting the lead magnet.
But if your unsubscribe rate from your email list goes up, and the number of sales or customers aren’t in line with the velocity of the lead magnet conversions, then your subsequent information isn’t proving to be helpful with the person’s challenge.
The content isn’t keeping the interest of the person that you’re trying to help. So the lead magnet effectively is not working. It isn’t successful.
At this point, take a look at the lead magnet and all of the workflow going through to the end of the journey to see where they might be falling off or see where the disconnect is.
Okay. Now you know the qualities of a successful lead magnet. Stay tuned for the next episode, where I go over lead magnetic examples and why they work. See you in the next sweet spot. Cheers.
Thank you for sticking around. I hope you enjoyed the episode. If you’re looking for SEO and content marketing help, consider joining the small business sweet spot. It’s a group coaching program where you can get answers to your questions about your business directly and clarity around the marketing strategies that you would like to implement in your business.
You can find all kinds of information at compassdigitalstrategies. com. And if you liked the episode, please tell a friend. Cheers.
