Every marketing team can relate to this as the challenge to come up with good ideas to generate leads is never-ending.
Have you tried creating a lead magnet? Not only can it generate quality leads but also create your brand authority. Read on to learn all about them.
#1 What is a lead magnet?
A lead magnet can be anything that you offer to your audience in exchange for their email address and other relevant details. It’s one of the most used tactics in the B2B industry for capturing website visitors and generating leads by offering a valuable product or service.
Some of the common examples of lead magnets include:
- E-books covering a topic in-depth
- Product demo recordings
- Pre-made templates for different use cases
- Checklists to approach a certain task
#2 Why create a lead magnet?
A lead magnet is the hidden tool in a B2B organization's arsenal that paves the way for high-quality lead generation at a lower cost.
Grow your email list
One of the major goals of having a lead magnet is to build an email list. Not only does an email list lets create an owned audience, but it also gives you access to communicate directly with them. So, if you have a thorough understanding of your audience’s pain points, you can create lead magnets to serve those pain points and encourage them to share their details with you.
Help qualify leads
Lead magnets come in all shapes and sizes and different people in your audience will resonate with different lead magnets. This is good as you can segment your audience based on which lead magnet they prefer and engage with the most. Besides, this will also offer you insights into qualifying leads.
For example, if someone downloaded your case studies or signed up for a free tool, it reflects their interest in buying is higher. So, you can nurture these leads to conversion.
Boost website traffic
If you have a lead magnet, you are bound to promote it to get more people to register with your brand. This will help you bring more traffic to your website and build brand awareness. Besides, when your lead magnets are packed with insights and relevant information, you can get more traffic via word of mouth and referral.
#3 How to create a good lead magnet?
Steal our step-by-step guide to creating a high converting lead magnet:
Step 1: Begin by identifying your target audience
A good lead magnet is one that resolves your audience's pain points and offers them the most suitable solution.
For that, you need to understand your audience, use your sales and marketing channel data, and do customer research through interviews and surveys.
Once you have the data, look for the patterns and traits to segment users based on a different attribute which can be:
Demographics: Age, gender, ethnicity, occupation
Behavioral: how they interact with your website which page they clicked on, how they engage with you on socials
Geographical: County, city, postal code, locality
Psychographic: Interest, hobbies, lifestyle, values.
Step 2: Do a keyword analysis
Once you know your target audience and their pain points, run keyword research in tools using Ahrefs, Semrush, or Moz. Then, pick all the related keywords and put them in a cluster to target them to bring organic traffic.
The keyword research will also help you determine which topics to cover and how to format your lead magnets.
Step 3: Pick the right tool to create the lead magnet
Once the keywords are finalized, look for the right tool to help create the lead magnet. Some tools you can use are:
For design: Canva or Figma
For pdf creation: Adobe document cloud
For writing: Google Docs or Notion
For interactive funnels: MarbleFlows
#4 Top 13 lead magnet examples
Here’s a list of 13 examples of lead magnets you can take inspiration from
1. Create a checklist
Checklists are the easiest to create and they’re the most loved lead magnet. It’s because they tend to make people's lives easier and help them finish a task more efficiently.
To get more people to download your checklist, make it compelling and easy to consume.
One good way to harness the power of a checklist is to tie them to specific content. For example, if you have a blog post about onboarding emails you can create a checklist that users can read to create compelling onboarding emails for higher engagement.
2. Use cheat sheets
Cheat Sheets are nothing but a twin of checklists and are great for any niche. They create a clear roadmap to do a specific task without much hassle and that’s what makes them so compelling. You could do a glossary, buzzword, or keyword cheat sheet for newbies or even a list of easy calculations everyone forgets.
The best way to come up with a high-converting cheat sheet is to figure out the questions your audience needs answered, gather up all the answers, and put them on a nice and easy-to-use reference guide.
Here’s an example of a cheat sheet created for bloggers: 52 Headline Hacks: A Cheat Sheet for Writing Blog Posts That Go Viral by Smart Blogger.
3. Offer a free tool
Free tools showcase your offering instantly attracting the right leads to your business. If someone signs up to try these tools, it shows their interest in your product/services and you can use this data to qualify leads and nurture them towards conversion.
A free tool can show one of the features of your tool.
For example, Hubspot is a CRM but it offers many tools for different use cases which aren’t directly related to its main service.
Other great examples of free tools we’ve seen include MarbleFlows builder as shown below. You can build an engaging interactive flow with its no-code editor.
4. Whitepapers
Whitepaper is an in-depth content piece that offers insightful, thought leadership content and solves a certain pain point. The purpose is to demystify a complex topic and offer a solution to the audience.
Whitepapers are one of the best B2B lead magnets as B2B space involves technicalities and topics that are difficult to understand for people with less know-how.
Here’s an amazing whitepaper on digital marketing by Hubspot. The title specifies who this whitepaper is for and this helps attract the right people to this lead magnet.
5. E-books
E-books are an expensive version of whitepapers that are more in-depth, data-based, and information-rich. There are many formats you can use to create an ebook.
You can
- cover a topic in-depth related to your industry or target audience’s pain points
- Talk about industry trends and statistics
- Challenge a truism and share your thoughts on that
- Compile insights from industry leads and offer as a mini e-book
Some of the best ebook lead magnet you can take inspiration from include for instance Priceonomics Content marketing Handbook.
6. Pre-recorded webinars
Webinars have become a great way to capture leads as they offer instant value and are easy to consume.
You can choose from different types of webinars such as product demo sessions, QnA, guest post session, expert interview, etc. You can offer your live webinars as a lead magnet by asking for visitor’s details to access the recording of the webinar.
This is an example by SEJ and how they used a registration form to let users give access to their past webinars.
7. Courses
Courses attract the TOFU audience and are one of the widely used lead magnets. To leverage this lead magnet, build a compelling landing page for courses and add testimonials, and case studies to display the benefits of taking the course.
Besides, by making your courses self-paced and interactive via quizzes and polls, you can keep the registrants hooked. Furthermore, providing a transcript of a pdf of slideshows can have a massive impact on people.
Here’s an example of Drift’s certification training and courses and how they have divided it into sub-categories.
Even though this lead magnet doesn’t attract high-quality leads, it’s still beneficial as this audience can help spread the word via referrals and the world of mouth marketing. Such free advertisement will help build brand awareness.
8. Templates
Everyone likes templates as they help defeat the creative block, save time and maximise the output. By offering the relevant templates to your audience you can grab loads of eyeballs.
You can offer email templates, email flow templates, design templates, blog outline templates, templates to hold an effective meeting and the list is endless. To leverage this lead magnet, you need to think about your target audience; pain points and to create one that dissolves it.
Here’s an example of MarbleFlow’s template gallery.
9. Free consultations
In SaaS business, consultations are high-converting lead magnets. Sometimes your ICPs might want to talk to an expert about their pain points or want to clear some doubts. It offers two benefits:
- You showcase your expertise to your ICPs strengthening trust and building Goodwill
- Based on their pain points, you can easily qualify them and see if they’re willing to pay.
Besides, a consultation can bring hot leads that are closer to conversion. So, it’s a win-win for both parties.
Here is an example of Excelhelp offering free consultation as a lead magnet.
10. Swipe files
Swipe files also work as a lead magnet as they attract people who want a duration of the best resources in an industry. Often, swipe files attract TOFU audiences who are getting to know the industry and related products and services.
You can become a go-to source for your audience by collecting the best examples, and insights and inserting resources in a single space.
This reduces the work of the audience to a great amount and who doesn’t love that, right?
A great example of this is the AdEspresso Ads Library. It’s over 130,000 examples of ads across many different industries, strategies, and styles. This is incredibly useful to their audience.
11. Quizzes
Quizzes are a fun and interactive lead magnet. It tends to have a higher engagement rate, as who can resist interacting with a quiz?
Besides, compelling your visitors to interact with them, you can use the answer to segment the leads.
Furthermore, you can use quizzes as a way to navigate users to the relevant lead magnet based on their answers. For example, Neil Patel uses a pop-up that displays a SEO quiz and based on the visitor’s response it recommends a personalized lead magnet that suits their need.
12. Reports
Reports are among the most powerful and appealing lead magnets, especially in a technical and B2B business. People need real data points, benchmarks, industry trends to curate their business strategy and make changes to sustain.
You can analyze your client’s data, run surveys and conduct interviews and analyze all the data to create a compelling and value-packed report.
One other way to leverage reports is to release a quarterly or yearly report to build authority in your industry like Litmus does with its quarterly email client share report.
#5 Bonus! 20 more lead magnets ideas
- Bi-weekly newsletters
- Everyday prompts.
- Infographics
- Comics that demystify technical concepts in a fun way.
- Exclusive podcasts
- Toolkits
- Free quote
- Free business assessment
- Email courses
- Loyalty programs
- Pre-booking offers and deals
- Webinar transcript of PDFs
- Slideshows of a webinar or other events
- Exclusive one-on-one demo
- Audiobooks
- Certification for courses
- Waiting list
- Event tickets
- Calculator
#6 How to drive traffic to your lead magnets
Follow our seven easy tips to bring more traffic to your lead magnets and collect details of prospective customers:
Send promotional email campaigns
Promotional emails are one of the best ways to spread the word about your lead magnets. Email is the most direct channel to communicate with your target audience. To leverage this channel, create a drip email sequence and send emails to different segments at the right interval.
Spread the word on social media
Harness the power of social media to promote your lead magnets aggressively. Create a compelling copy and design and drive website traffic to your lead magnet.
Reach out to your target audience via cold outreach
The traditional approach of doing cold outreach still works and if done right it can give you good results. Before you start pitching your lead magnets, build a strong relationship with the recipient and make them familiar with you.
Partner with other brands in your industry
Another way to promote lead magnets is to get in a partnership with related brands in your industry and ask them to talk about it. It will help leverage their audience as well.
Run ads on different channels
Use paid ads and run them on different channels where your audience is likely to see and interact with them. It can be social media, organic channels ,or newsletters.
Use pop-ups without being annoying
Put pop-ups on your website and make sure they aren’t annoying to the reader. Avoid showing myriad of pop-ups as soon as someone comes to your website. Instead, use time-based or scroll abed pop-ups to let them time to interact and show at the right time.
Besides, exit intent pop-ups are also great to bring the leaving visitor's attention to your lead magnets.
Way forward
Keep experimenting with your lead magnets as one that works today might not give you the desired result one year down the line. To turn visitors in leads, you need to develop an attractive landing page that highlights why they should sign up for your lead magnet.
Besides, a thorough understanding of your ICPs will help you develop a high-converting lead magnet that will bring more high-quality leads and improve your ROI.
