Want to engage your casual leads effectively and convert them? You need a lead magnet!
The WHAT – Free pieces of content that attract prospects and engages them are termed as lead magnets. They are effective because they entice your audience in giving you their contact details so you can nurture them further. These are pieces of content that address your audience’s pain points, their needs or topics related to their areas of interest. Lead magnets can be of multiple formats depending on what works for your target audience. From long form content like eBooks, in-depth subject-matter guides, webinars with SMEs case studies to short form content like checklists and actionable tips, one-page action cards, quizzes etc. can all be lead magnets that get your prospects to take action and experience your product/service.
Before you begin to build a lead magnet, it is crucial to truly understand your audience and what resonates with them. A lead magnet needs to be relevant – hence addressing their peculiar pain points as well as be specific and action orientated. Furthermore, it is important for the lead magnet to be easily accessible. Readers today are time strapped, ensuring your lead magnet is easy to search and access will ensure more traffic coming your way and take action.
The WHY – So, why do you need lead magnets? Most often the aim of a marketing campaign is to increase the number of leads, engage prospects and nurture them along the funnel to ultimately convert these leads into customers. A lead magnet facilitates growing your data lists as the audience need to often part with their email addresses or some form of marketing contact. These assets engage the audience by giving them the information they asked for, nurturing their interest and building trust in the process. A lead magnet is a crucial tool for moving a not-so-engaged lead to becoming an engaged visitor and further converting them into a paying customer!
The HOW – Now that we have a lead magnet it is important to use it strategically within a marketing campaign to attract, capture and nurture leads.
Identify goals – If your goal is to grow your email contact list, promote your product or brand awareness, then the content for your lead magnet needs to be positioned in a certain way that contributes towards meeting these goals. Prompt them to complete a form, download an asset, view a video, register to a webinar, fill out a survey etc.
Create a high conversion landing page – A landing page with clear headlines, brief sub-headlines, easy-to-the-eye layout, a good combination of attractive visuals and shorter paragraphs are key to host the lead magnet. The opt-in form on the landing page needs to have fewer fields encouraging prospects to give details quickly (you don’t need their dogs name, unless you are a vet!), three fields are enough followed with a clear call-to-action.
Promote your lead magnet – Knowing your target audience will give you a good idea of where and how you should promote the lead magnet. Outline a time specific social media strategy, email marketing campaign with clear cadence for email sends, paid ads on relevant syndication websites, engaging blog posts, paid ads targeting the right audience and finally PR if relevant. Randomly blasting off your lead magnet everywhere will not get you relevant, good quality leads. It is about the quality and not the quantity.
Entice to take action – Creating a sense of urgency by offering time specific discounts, offers, samples or initial consultations will encourage your prospects to take action and now. These need to be followed with relevant comms like emails as now you are taking them further into the funnel.
Convert – Set clear conversion goals for these follow-up actions so you know your lead magnet is working. Go back to your goals and check if these are being met. You don’t want the lead magnet to just get you contact lists (tumbleweed!), but also to nurture the most relevant leads out of those and progress them through your sales funnel.
Measure – The last and one of the most important steps in a marketing campaign.- measure how your lead magnet performed. You can do this by calculating if the goals were met, was there an impact, were there any shortcoming in the asset itself or the nurture strategy? Change a few parameters and test it again. Pivot your strategy based on the results.
If you want to know more about building efficient lead nurture campaigns, check out this blog for more.
