Lead magnet - what is it and why do you need it?

Key information:

• A lead magnet is a free product sample or discount designed to entice potential customers to leave their contact information.
• Lead magnet can help you build your brand image as an expert in the industry and you will gain the trust of your customers.
• Half of the marketers who use the tool believe that it has helped them record a higher ROI.
• An effective lead magnet must be tailored to the recipient and offer real value.
• Some of the most popular types of lead magnets include e-book, newsletter, webinar, free reports, whitepapers, discounts and free delivery.
• Before you start building a lead magnet, it's important to know your target audience.
• When creating a lead magnet, it is important to remember to prepare its rules and regulations, visuals, appropriate selection of content for the addressee, a catchy title and its good placement on the page.

Details below!

Difficulty in acquiring new customers, is one of the most common reasons for the failure of businesses. Companies try to reach new customers in various ways, and one of them is the use of a lead magnet. But what exactly is it and how can it help you find new customers?

What is a lead magnet?

A lead magnet, also known as a lead magnet, is a free sample of a product, service or discount designed to attract potential customers and encourage them to leave their contact information. Among the most common lead magnets are pop-ups when browsing online stores containing information about a discount or free delivery in exchange for an email address. Lead magnets are not used exclusively in online stores, and are applicable in every industry both B2B and B2C. Popular lead magnets also include free e-books, reports, or quizzes.

What is the function of a lead magnet?

Once a potential customer decides to take advantage of a free sample, discount or other type of lead magnet, marketers receive contact information, usually in the form of an email address, which are needed to create one of the most valuable assets in Internet marketing, which is the mailing base. It is a very useful tool for any company to build ongoing relationships with customers. An effective lead magnet will allow you to expand your subscriber list and reach a wider new audience. Thus, a good lead magnet represents the top of the sales funnel and is an ideal tool for generating leads.

Why create a lead magnet?

Very often, acquiring a new customer is a major challenge for companies and can cost 5 to 25 times more than retaining an existing one. For this reason, it is worthwhile to create an effective lead magnet on your company's website to help reach your target audience and acquire new customers. This is a very effective method, as as many as 50% marketers who use lead magnets say they report higher conversion rates. With lead magnet you will also build your brand image as an expert in the industry and gain trust among customers.

What should an effective lead magnet be?

Despite the relatively simple and intuitive form of this tool, capturing potential customers' contact information, such as email addresses, can prove challenging, as people are reluctant to share such information. For this reason, when creating a lead magnet, it is worth ensuring that it is highly effective and tailored to the recipient. An effective lead magnet must first and foremost provide real value to the addressee. Through the materials offered, the recipient should be able to expand their knowledge, improve their work, or find a clue to solving a problem they are struggling with. Of course, a lead magnet should only be the beginning of a relationship with a potential customer, and it is worth taking care to choose the right form to keep in touch with them for the long term.

Types of lead magnets

Keep in mind that not all lead magnets look the same and not all are equally effective, so it is worthwhile to analyze your target audience well for the type of lead magnet you choose. It usually takes the form of such incentives as:

• E-book
  It is one of the most frequently chosen types, with as many as 27.7% of all marketers using an e-book as a lead magnet. E-books can be a great lead magnet because they convey content value to customers and build your brand image as an expert. However, it is usually a long read that can take up to an hour to read, which few audiences may have time for. Adding to the popularity of this form of customer outreach, many people's email inboxes are filled with never-read e-books or guides.

• Newsletter
  An alternative to an e-book that, unread, will get lost in the inbox among other emails, can be an educational newsletter sent every given specified period. This will keep you in touch with potential customers and increase the likelihood that the content you create will be read and used. If you want the lead magnet to really work and increase your sales then be sure to deliver the value your potential customer expects. A user who was hoping for high-quality material, after receiving a lead magnet that superficially touches on a specific topic, may think that you don't have the necessary knowledge.
• Webinar
  An effective form of outreach that can replace the e-book are webinars, which are also among the popular lead magnets, as almost 25% marketers use them. Through its interactivity and condensed form, a webinar is an ideal lead magnet that will provide value to the recipient in the form of free knowledge and help build your reputation as an expert.
• Industry Report
  A form of lead magnet that is extremely respected by potential customers, yet sometimes difficult to create, is an industry report. Unlike an e-book, which often contains a subjective opinion, an industry report is based on solid data and market research. For this very reason, creating it can be a challenge. At ConQuest Consulting, we can help you create an effective lead magnet in the form of a promotional report.
• Quiz
  An interesting option for acquiring leads is to create a personalized quiz, where, in addition to the email address or other contact information of potential new customers, you can also acquire additional information about the state of knowledge or their preferences. It's important not to forget the value of a lead magnet from the recipient's side. Remember that excellent lead magnets must also provide value, so provide useful content in the form of trivia, explanations of questions or answers from other quiz participants, among other things.
• Calculator
  A calculator is an interesting type of lead magnet good for use in the financial industry, among others, but not only. Such a lead magnet will work great when your target audience faces the problem of working out a budget, calculating a premium, or planning a diet. Remember to ensure that the results are valuable and useful to the user.
• Challenge
  This type of lead magnet can be used by a company in the fitness industry, for example. By offering a 30-day daily workout challenge, you will provide an interactive experience that will keep you in constant contact with your customers. This type of lead magnet will provide insight into your product or service and can help customers make a buying decision.
• Free consultation
  In the service industry, lead magnets work perfectly in the form of free consultation, During which you can get to know your customer's exact needs and help them become more familiar with your company's offerings. When creating this type of lead magnet, remember to specify in advance the scope of the consultation and what topics it will cover.
• Community
  The last of the most popular forms of lead magnets is to offer access to a community made up of people in the same industry or with similar interests and passions. Creating a strong, close-knit community can benefit your brand in many ways. With a lead magnet, you will acquire not only leads, but also people who are actually interested in your product or service, who may become ambassadors for your brand in the future.

These are just a few of the most popular types of lead magnets. They usually only appear in one form on a given website, but it is worth experimenting and creating a sett consisting of different types of lead magnets. Don't forget, however, that the ideal lead magnet must be tailored to your company's target audience and offer the most value to your customers. The more your lead magnet matches the needs and interests of your customers, the more new valuable contacts can be generated.

How to create a good lead magnet step by step?

1st Step Find out what exactly a lead magnet is
When starting to work on creating a lead magnet, you first need to learn exactly what it is, what its function is and what forms it can take. To better define what a lead magnet is, you also need to understand, How the lead generation process works and what a lead itself is. If you read this article from the beginning, you can consider this step completed and move on to the next one.

2nd Step Know your target audience
Even before you start creating a lead magnet, you need to know your target audience in depth. To find out what kind of lead magnets to create, conduct research on your audience - you can do this in the form of surveys, phone calls or by implementing A/B testing. Correctly identifying your potential consumer can be a challenge, so at ConQuest Consulting we can help you answer this question and we will conduct qualitative and quantitative research About your customers. Remember that when creating a lead magnet, the target audience is a key factor.

3rd Step Prepare valuable content
Once you know who your potential recipient is and what problems or challenges they face, you can finally start preparing the content of the lead magnet. Remember that the purpose of a lead magnet is to also provide content value that the recipient can put into practice. In a situation where your lead magnet does not add value for your recipient, it will be ignored by them.

4th Step Optimize lead magnet for search
When creating a lead magnet, it is really important to choose the words so that it reaches the right audience. Remember to use keywords that people interested in your product or service can use. For better results, it's also a good idea to add meta tags that will help your website be indexed more effectively.

5th Step Plan how you want the lead magnet to look
Once you've prepared the right content, you also need to make sure the lead magnet is aesthetically pleasing, in line with the entire website, and consider what kind of data you want to acquire. Depending on what industry you operate in and what type of results you expect, you need to adjust the number of fields to be filled in. If you want to get as many responses as possible then you should limit yourself to 3 fields, such as first name, last name and email address. However, sometimes such basic data is not enough and you will benefit much more from a smaller number, but more qualitative contacts. In this situation, it is worthwhile to increase the number of fields and acquire more information about the potential customer. It is also worth taking care of a catchy title that will encourage recipients to read the lead magnet.

6th Step Prepare regulations of lead magnet
In the digital age, personal data is a kind of currency and is an extremely valuable asset, so legally it must be protected. For legal use of a lead magnet, it is crucial to prepare its rules and regulations. When creating a set of lead magnet rules, you can include them in the general terms and conditions of the entire website, but it will be more convenient for the user to accept separate terms and conditions.

7th Step Ensure proper placement on the site
After creating the most important part, you also need to take care of the proper placement of the lead magnet on the page. Consider whether, in your case, a lead magnet offered in the form of a pop-up at the bottom of the page or perhaps visible in the sidebar will be more effective. In a situation where you plan to include a form in an article, it is not worth leaving it at the very end, as not all readers will reach the place where you place it.

8 Step Test your lead magnet
Before you proceed to share the lead magnet on your website, we recommend testing it on aspects such as loading time, grammatical correctness, or its effectiveness. You can do this with tests on your friends or employees. It's also crucial to test that everything works technically and that the data you enter goes to the intended place.

9. step Promote lead magnet
When you have successfully implemented all the above points, it is finally time to publish the results of your work on the website. In order to reach a wider audience, you can also promote the prepared materials with marketing campaigns. At ConQuest Consulting, we can help you Prepare an effective marketing campaign using a lead magnet.

What should the regulations of a lead magnet contain?

Whenever we process someone's personal data we are required to comply with established rules, so it is an obligation to create lead magnet regulations. This compulsion arises, among other things, from the requirements of the Consumer Rights Act, or RODO. The regulations of a lead magnet should include the following information:

• Information about the site offering the materials,
• Lead Magnet Description,
• Terms of use,
• Privacy Policy,
• Users' rights.

These are just the basic information that should be included in the regulations. Before publishing a lead magnet, make sure it complies with the latest legal standards.

Get new customers with lead magnet

A lead magnet strategy will enable you to get contact information, like an email address, which is very helpful in creating a long-term relationship with your customers. Remember that the job of a lead magnet is to provide your audience with content that will help solve their real problem.

At ConQuest Consulting, we can help you identify the right target audience and prepare materials to create a lead magnet. Check out our offer and find out how we can help your business get new customers!