Lead Magnets Explained With Popular Lead Generation Offers

Effective Lead Magnet Ideas - Increase your Lead Generation

For which content, information, product or service would you give a company your highly personal contact information like your email address?

You got to ask yourself this question when planning campaigns and optimizing your website for capturing leads. In this article we examine how to you can convince your page visitors give out sensitive contact information via lead generation magnets, short "lead magnets".

What is a Lead Magnet?

Lead magnets are valuable content offers on a web-page in exchange for money, personal or contact information like email address. Many websites offer valuable content like downloadable pdf's even without asking for email which also an interesting tactic to build trust with your audience. However, that's not strictly a lead generation magnet as it won't give you details about the leads to follow-up and covert the lead into a customer.

Now, let's discuss why lead magnets are such a promising solution for successful lead generation in online marketing and how you can implement it on your own website.

Why are Lead Magnets so important?

One of your company goals should be to generate more significant customer loyalty to consequently generate more sales in order to maintain your company sustainable.

Through a good lead magnet, a bridge from awareness of your company's existence to sympathy and trust in your company can be built. Therefore, it can be one beginning of a valuable customer relationship.

Relevant information and contact details of potential customers are collected while they are filling out your options form to get your offered incentive. Consequently, your company can stay in contact with already generated leads. Your offer, therefore, conduces the expansion of so-called “list building”. Finally, lead magnets are an effective medium to support your company's lead generation.

Creating a good lead magnet provides you with more information about the needs and interests of your target group. Thus, your company can generate new customers, which results in higher sales. Hence, the more qualitative leads your company captures, the more possibilities you get to increase your sales. This is why it is so important for your lead generation to present your website visitors an effective lead offer.

Providing your company with an email address, which is a very personal detail, can represent an obstruction. Your potential buyers are not giving you their email address for free, your company has to give them a compelling reason.

What makes a Good Lead Magnet?

The following checklist will provide you with an overview of what makes an effective and convincing lead magnet.

✔︎ It solves a problem of your potential customers
To make a lead magnet work, it should give an exact solution to solve a concrete problem. Apart from that, it should give the website visitor what they want so they will be interested in your offer.

✔︎ Promise one success
Your offered incentive should help interested prospects easily achieve their set goal.

✔︎ Specified offer
The more specific your lead offer is about its benefits, the more website visitors will convert into leads.

✔︎ Easy to digest
Your prospects should not feel overwhelmed by the length or complicated input of your free provided product or service.

✔︎ High value
Your company's lead offer should communicate a high perceived and actual value to convince website visitors to give you their email address. Besides content, clear statements are supportive.

✔︎ Instantly access
You should deliver your promised material right away so instant gratification can be guaranteed.

✔︎ Present your expertise
Within the lead magnet, you should demonstrate your expertise or unique value to purposefully turn leads into customers.

To create an attention generating lead magnet, you have to know your target group and their needs. If you can identify them, you know what challenges they face and thus can provide a perfect fitting offer. At the same time, you can promote your company's products and services.

Most popular Lead Magnet Categories with Examples

Next, the most popular lead magnet examples are pointed out.

Useful Lead Generating Magnets

Lead generating magnets offer one specific, actionable solution for a defined problem of your potential customers. They can consequently save time and energy which makes you attractive for future needs.

- Template

Lead magnet example, providing a template in exchange for the email address of a website visitor. Source: https://www.robin-data.io/en/free-consultation

A template delivers an already done outline for your potential customers, they just have to fill in the blanks. Super easy.

- Checklist
A checklist simplifies everything your website visitor needs to know in a quickly compiled and easily consumed list.

- Cheatsheet
With this lead magnet, your potential customers will receive a guideline which leads the way constantly step by step to a specific benefit. It is kind of a variation of a checklist, but the benefits of a non-time-consuming creation and easy consumption remains the same.

Other useful lead magnet examples that your company can deliver are calculators, scripts or resource lists, calendars or worksheets. This will let your website visitors help you to expand your email list.

Educational Lead Magnets

Educational lead magnets teach your audience something new about a specific, highly relevant topic regarding the problem or pain point. Whatever it is you offer, there is always something you know that others in the market don't. Put your knowledge, your passion and skills into content assets, and build it in a way that helps your audience solve a specific problem. Present your company as an expert in the field you are active in, create a series of valuable lead magnets via educational content, promote those offers and you'll have great chances to attract more leads into your funnel. Here are a few options of educational lead magnets you can create:

- Tutorials

Lead magnet example providing a tutorial after the prospects enter their email address. 
Source: https://therisetothetop.com/

A tutorial can be provided in form of a video or text content, e.g. a pdf file. It's used to explain the solution to a problem on a step-by-step basis. By using headlines like “10 Easy Ways to Get Started Real Estate Without Any Capital, The Beginners Course”, interested prospects know exactly what they can expect and whether it helps them with their individual problem.

Try to use specific headlines rather than generic ones where nobody knows what to expect.

- Gated content
When having a website with blog posts you can provide lead magnets, embedded in the web-page, within your content. This can also combine a small version that everyone can access and another, more exclusive lead magnet. This one can only be downloaded by entering email address or other personal details like phone number, company name, etc. Gated content is the next logical step in blog post content marketing. Just bringing people to a website and reading through a blog post is just part of winning leads. The more important one is converting blog reader to the next step, giving them more specific and more valuable information on what they are interested in. This lead generation offer is using already existing content, it is just hiding the “premium” content, which is why it is so easy to create with no great effort.

- Reports and infographics
Downloadable reports can be used if you are active in a research-driven sector, e.g. Information technologies, Financial Energy or Clean energy. Reports are very valuable content assets, but also take a bit to time to produce. An alternative to report and research are infographics.

Infographics are also built on data and research, but provide much more condensed information. Infographics need a professional designer to produce but have the benefit to be re-shared and re-used across social media channels and different blog posts. While it may be hard to capture email addresses from infographics, it's still a possibility when embedding the infographic into a valuable blog post. Alternatively, you can offer the lead magnet for free and no email required, enticing people to re-share and even re-use the graphic on their website, which can help you gain mentions and links to your website.

Reports and infographics are two powerful lead magnets, useful to generate traffic to your website, particularly B2B businesses. In B2B lead generation it may be time-consuming to create a report or infographic but the effort usually pays off by converting new leads which are the lifeblood for any business. Furthermore, you can think of offering both infographics and reports together. Infographics help people to visualize a concept to fully understand. This is why infographics work perfectly as an addition to your report.

To name a few more ideas for your lead magnet: How-to guides, webinars, mind maps, e-books, newsletters, event tickets and predictions are other options of educational lead magnets. This will help to have a convincing reason for website visitors to enter their email address.

Community-Building Lead Magnets

Community-building lead magnets are mainly used to create an interaction between interested prospects and your company/ brand. In this communicative process, your company culture can be built by your company's most important people: Current and future customers.

- Challenge funnel
Within a challenge, everyone is potentially engaged and while your audience is in conjunction facing the same challenge, a sense of community can be developed. Moreover, anyone who is part of your challenge will turn into a highly qualified lead. A challenge for your audience could be anything like a 28-day SEO challenge, asking attendees to rank their website in certain amount time based on the knowledge you share.

Also, it could be something like a 5-Step training course by which you ask participants to take a test at the end. The result of hosting a challenge or running a challenge funnel for your audience or website visitors: Growing trust with your brand name, engaging users and providing a positive case for learning and getting results from your knowledge. Your company's brand awareness and your lead generation is growing as a nice side effect as well. By setting a start and end date for your challenge, urgency consequently makes your lead magnet more compelling.

- Membership site or forum
Creating your own membership site or forum for your audience with free registration, asking and answering questions can be a great way to build engagement, trust and even recurring income. Phenomena like social proof and fear of missing out will assist your community in pushing your lead generation. A membership platform can be created even on third-party channels like a Facebook group or slack channel. We got a Facebook group for LeadGen App users. Feel free to apply to join here and engage with a passionate marketing community and get access to B2B lead generation content: Marketing Mavericks Group.

Lead Magnet Funnel

Most of the time, moving top-funnel prospective customers into the middle of your funnel represents the goal of lead magnets. The top of your funnel is the first stage at which potential customers engage with your brand. Moving to the middle, you aim to convert those cold leads into email contacts with lead magnets.

But what about the potential customer group who are already at the bottom of your lead magnet funnel? Just because they are not yet on your company's email list, doesn't mean you should wait for aim to get in touch or for your sales team to reach out. Instead, do whatever it takes to get those people inside your funnel or to re-engage them with new content, even when are already part of your contacts. They may just need one more reason to get in touch or to be open to buy.

What can you offer people and companies you want to work with that are the bottom of your lead magnet funnel?

Here are a few simple tactics you can straight away use:

- Free consultation

Example of a lead magnet providing a free consultation in exchange for contact information 
Source: https://www.robin-data.io/en/free-consultation

The perfect fitting lead-generating magnet for companies offering a service can be a free or paid consultation. A consultation is something anyone can offer and is an easy approach to ask for relevant information like the email address and phone number of interested prospects.

Just make sure you create an enticing offer with a distinct proposition. The term "Consultation" has been a bit overused. Think of using terms like "Strategy session", "Demo Session" or "Onboarding Call".

- Free Trial
A free trial or demo version of your company's product or service represents an effective B2B lead-generating magnet. It can easily convert leads because it's free and because it doesn't require your leads to commit to anything or to spend time on calls with your sales team. Sparkbay also gives a choice you can either hop on a free trial or keep learning more. A free trial is usually risk-free with no obligation. However, you can also think of combining it with a mandatory activation or onboarding call. This may lower your activation/ conversion rate in the beginning but brings you better chances to win real leads that can turn into long-lasting customer relationships.

- Case Study
Case Studies can be a highly effective idea for a lead magnet to show your potential customers the value of your products and services. Just make sure you got a series of different case studies available, especially if you serve different market segments. Make sure it's relevant and something your leads can relate. A case study allows you to capture the lead, and may even give them last push they need to become a customer when are already in the bottom of your funnel.

Additional bottom of lead magnet funnel is coupons, free shipping, free quote or a catalogue as well as a waiting list when your product is not saleable yet.

Entertaining Lead Magnets

Entertaining lead magnets are used to inspire or entertain website visitors, but they still pursue the goal of converting a prospective customer into a lead.

- Quiz
A creative and diversified quiz related to your company can be entertaining for your interested website visitors. In order to get the results, participants have to leave their email address.

- Giveaway
Offering the opportunity to win a free product or service of your company can be appealing to potential customers. Just ensure the the prize is relevant and leaves enough room to convert the winner and the other attendees into sales. Avoid attracting irrelevant leads by creating a specific offer that is only relevant to your target audience.

Other entertaining lead magnet ideas include surveys, online form calculators, gamification, mobile apps or a manifesto.

Your perfect fitting Lead Magnet

Whenever your company wants to collect information about your audience, you should use a lead magnet, the perfect fitting one of course. Spend some time to think about the right type of content your audience is really interested in based on their pain points and goals. This blog post is providing you with some effective lead magnet ideas, but now it's your turn to create the perfect fitting one for your company!