In digital marketing, lead magnets are among the most effective ways of capturing the contact details of your prospects so you can convert those people into paying customers.
When used correctly, a lead magnet can significantly increase the conversion rate of your website’s inbound traffic.
However, there are a lot of small businesses that still ignore the massive benefits of using lead magnets because they believe that they are time-consuming to create. This couldn’t be further from the truth.
In fact, you can create a very effective lead magnet such as a checklist in just minutes if you know what you’re doing.
Even with the bigger undertakings such as e-books or video courses, there are a lot of content creation services that are available to help you with this.
This means that there’s no excuse to not have lead magnets on your website.
There are a lot of different types of content that you can use as lead magnets. The more you have on your site, the more you’re able to switch between them to mix things up for your audiences.
In this article, we look at seven tried-and-true ideas for lead magnets that will get you tons more leads on your website.
1. Cheat Sheet
The cheat sheet is essentially a compact version of a guide which highlights quick, lesser-known shortcuts that your audience members might not be aware of.
In a nutshell, anything which contains tactics to save time while doing routine tasks, or tips that help people exploit obscure loopholes (which many others are not aware of) counts as a cheat sheet.
A good cheat sheet should have the following:
- When you create your cheat sheet, identify some of the negative experiences that your audience has on a daily basis, then figure out some hacks that can be used to avoid them.
- Spice up those hacks using effective copywriting to make them sound even more enticing to readers. If you’re not sure that you can create effective copy, it’s very easy to hire a copywriter who can do it for you and ensure that your message gets across exactly as you want it to be heard.
- Use lots of screenshots or examples for illustrating your hacks. This will help your readers be more successful in implementing those hacks themselves. Hacks that are poorly explained are worth nothing.
Find relevant blogs within your niche to share cheat sheets on. You can also share them on social media as well as in your newsletter so you can get more exposure and increased downloads.
Whenever you share content through any medium, always ensure that you don’t miss out on collecting leads because of an email gateway that is not active.
As an example, if you have a website that caters to bloggers and online business people, you might focus on a goal that they want to achieve.
One of the main goals of online marketers and bloggers includes achieving success in their content marketing in order to bring in more traffic to their websites.
A good example of a cheat sheet that this group of people would find extremely compelling would be a cheat sheet for ‘Writing Blog Posts That Go Viral’
2. Guides
The Internet is so full of stuff that in today’s world, it’s becoming increasingly difficult for anyone to come up with original content ideas in competitive industries.
In fact, the vast majority of marketers would say this is now virtually impossible.
It doesn’t matter which subject you choose, a simple Google search will show you that there is already tons of literature online which makes it very hard for anyone to add unique value or insights.
If you are a blogger or online marketer, then you’re already aware of this and you can probably relate well to such a scenario. One way of trying to tackle this situation is to create a guide on the subject.
This can be something you create all at once or it can be a comprehensive collection of blog posts on that particular topic. An ‘Ultimate Guide’ is one of the best ways of collecting leads on your website.
Here are some things that you need to keep in mind while creating your ultimate guide:
- When creating a guide, instead of recycling old blog posts, you can directly link to outside sources which cover your topic suitably. It’s vital that you don’t copy other people’s work on the Internet, rather add a link to the sources instead.
- Instead of directing traffic to other websites, you can choose to align with competing websites which belong to people who can be potential partners.
You can then start to build relationships while enlisting their help on promoting your guide.
One of the main objectives of creating the ultimate guide on your website is to help save your audience valuable time by curating many links to different sources in a convenient and organized way that is easy to navigate.
This means that your job here is to assess all the challenges that your audience faces on a daily basis then help them to find all the best resources and tips around the Internet so they can overcome those challenges in the quickest, easiest, most effective way possible.
One such example is ‘The Ultimate Guide to Digital Marketing’ from GrowthLab.com
3. Surveys and Quizzes
These days a lot of popular websites have tons of surveys and quizzes on their pages.
This is because these types of content have been proven to make great lead magnets. If you want an effective way of gathering your audience’s contact information, this is one that’s definitely worth trying on your website.
Quizzes and surveys are probably the only two forms of content lead magnets that have the opportunity to go viral without any additional effort from you.
Once users have taken the quiz, they are more likely to give you the email address. According to some studies, over 80% of users who start a quiz part with the email address without hesitation in order to receive results.
Listed below are some of the tips you need to keep in mind when developing quizzes and surveys to generate leads on your website:
Take the time to brainstorm a quiz outcome that is exciting
If people don’t really feel like they need to know how it ends, they won’t be compelled to part with their email addresses. So if you want your quiz or survey to become an effective lead magnet, make sure it stirs up enough excitement and curiosity to warrant your prospects’ emails.
You can either ask for an email address so you can reveal how correct the participant’s responses were, or you can categorize all the people that took the quiz based on the pattern formed by their answers.
Don’t make your quizzes generic
If you do, you’ll end up with a lot of leads that are not relevant to your business. And these are the types of leads that you won’t be able to convert into sales no matter how hard you try.
Make sure that you focus on your ideal audience when creating your quiz or survey. This is the best way to attract the right type of audience members who will become paying customers down the line.
Make your quiz direct and short
Don’t get carried away and don’t be tempted to add more questions than you know you should.
Remember, people’s attention spans online are very short and if your quiz or survey is too long, they are more likely to lose interest before they get to the end.
A great example of an effective quiz lead magnet is “What Type of House Are You?” which is a quiz offered by a real estate agent to match people’s personalities to different types of homes.
4. Reports
A report is an exceptionally effective type of lead magnet if you’re in the B2B business, but reports can also work in absolutely any industry where statistics and data are important.
As an online marketer, you have has the option to either conduct studies yourself or to pull data from other existing studies that are relevant to your particular audience.
Some things to keep in mind to help you create effective reports for generating leads on your website are:
Use Real Data:
People online have learned to be skeptical of any information that is presented to them. They will forever be searching for trends they can trust – and these are trends supported by data.
In much the same way, businesses are also always searching for data to help them make better decisions for improvement and growth.
Depending on your target audience, you can design a report that shares valuable insights that are drawn from actual data.
Quell Fears:
Create a report to address the fears that your audience has with respect to your type of business.
This can help you build trust as well as make it easier for the people in your target audience to make the decision to invest in your business.
If you are a B2B business, you can create a report that helps to make life easier for the people in your targeted audience.
Anything you can do to ease any aspect of their pain will help you gain those people’s trust.
Make sure that your report is well articulated and professionally written.
Add graphs to help simplify reading wherever necessary and if you’re not very confident in your own ability to write a report or to create graphics, then simply higher someone else to do it.
A good example of a good lead magnet report is a ‘Free YouTube Traffic Report’ that is easily generated using information that’s openly available online.
5. Case Studies
A case study is essentially a more in-depth guide which includes specific examples for illustrating valuable or useful insights.
Any real-life examples that you can use in your case studies will be a lot more powerful in helping to convince your audience that they, too, have the ability to achieve those goals.
This is an aspect which makes case studies particularly potent in helping you attract high-potential leads.
Some of the things you need to keep in mind when developing a case study to aid your content marketing include the following:
- A case study can double up as valuable pre-sales material. This gives you the chance to weave the story of your brand into that material. When choosing the central idea for your case study, make sure that you place your business, products, or service in that story line.
- A common way of creating an effective case study includes featuring one or more of your clients who found success by using your product or services. Just remember that you need to first get their permission and cooperation before creating a case study using their information.
- Have important takeaways and compelling calls to action within the case study. This makes your work unique and helps to ensure the effectiveness of the content.
A great example of using a case study for effective lead generation is Timothy Sykes’ ‘How I Grew My Business From $500,000 Per Year To $15 Million’
6. E-books
E-books are among the first types of content that Internet marketers used to collect leads from their visitors from the very beginning.
Although the perceived value of an e-book has fallen over recent years when compared to videos, courses, and so on, many businesses still use them together with all the other different, more complex types of lead magnets in their content marketing arsenal.
Here are a few essential things to bear in mind when using e-books as lead generation tools:
- The topic you choose should be one that’s interesting and not talked about enough. If a topic is already been covered in every way by many other people, then you really have nothing else to add to that conversation, and the chances of your e-book being successful are very slim.
- Your e-book needs to have a compelling title clearly describing its value proposition. As with every other type of content you create, if the title doesn’t sell, your lead magnet won’t perform well.
- Make sure the content of your e-book offers real unique value so that those people who do download your book will start to trust you enough to do business with you.
Keep in mind that the ultimate goal of any lead magnet is to eventually convert those leads into actual paying customers – and the customer is unlikely to trust your brand if you create crappy content.
As with all other types of content, if you are not confident in your skills to create a high-quality e-book for your website, simply hire e-book writing services that will create one for you.
After your lead magnet is done, you need to create a landing page that is conversion-optimized to host that lead magnet on so that you maximize your potential for generating leads to your website.
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PlanetBizOp.com
->Steven
Updated: Originally published May 31st 2019
