Lead Magnets – The WHAT
In plain English, a lead magnet is a thing you offer to your prospective client or customer in exchange for their contact information.
Lead magnets are also commonly referred to as…
- Freebies
- Value-adds
- Free downloads
- Opt-ins
- Whatever else Marie Forleo and/or Amy Porterfield decide to call them. (Those two have some serious pull when it comes to naming nuanced digital marketing items. Case in point: “Client Avatar”)
We often think of a lead magnet taking the form of a PDF download, but that’s not always the case. As we move through this month, focusing on lead magnets, try not to pigeonhole your mind on only PDF downloads. There are endless formats a lead magnet can take, so keep that mind of yours open here.
Take a look at this list of these 15 formats your lead magnet can take for some ideas (that doesn’t include a PDF download).
Lead Magnets – The WHY
As you can see from the in-plain-English description, the end goal of offering a lead magnet is to obtain your prospect’s contact information.
Typically, we prioritize obtaining their email address and their name, but depending on your industry and what you’re selling, you may want other bits of info like their phone number, geographical location, etc.
Ultimately, we aim to gather our prospects’ contact info so we can then have a bit more control of moving them through our sales process, making them warmer and warmer leads for us.
Notice I haven’t mentioned anything about “growing your email list” when speaking about offering a lead magnet. While growing your list might be a byproduct of offering a lead magnet, it’s not the priority.
The priority – the WHY – is to warm up a lead so they can, at some point in the future, like and trust you enough to do business with you. That’s the name of the game here.
Now that we have our minds set on what lead magnets are and why they actually matter to your business, next week I’ll bust some myths around them.
You know me – I’m all about finding feel-good ways to market our businesses, so next week we’ll essentially throw out the lead magnet rule book and create our own guidelines for what lead magnets we can and want to offer our prospects.
In the meantime, begin considering what format you would most like to offer as a lead magnet. And yes, think about that even if you already have a lead magnet available to your prospects! It might be time to tweak and update what you have already to produce better leads for your business.
Now find Lead Magnet Ideas based on YOUR Marketing Personality Type, here, on the Marketing Personalities Podcast.
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