Building a list of qualified leads is one of the most important things you can do as a business owner.
After all, the majority of the customers who visit your website or social media pages won’t be ready to convert from the moment they first see your product or service.
Most consumers need time to develop trust for your company, as well as to find enough information about your product or service.
That’s why adding your customers to an email list gives you a chance to connect with them consistently over a period of time.
The more meaningful content you deliver to your audience, the more their relationship with your company deepens.
Of course, before you can start discovering all the benefits of connecting with your list, you’re going to need to convince your customers to sign up for your emails.
So, how do you get people to sign up for your list? You need a lead magnet.
The Best Lead Magnets for Qualified Leads
A lead magnet is essentially a gift or incentive you offer to potential customers in exchange for email addresses or contact details.
Lead magnets typically offer digital content because it’s easier to access than physical items, so your customers get value straight away.
Lead magnets are important because your customers already have cluttered inboxes.
They need a lot of convincing before they’re going to hand their contact details over to anyone.
A lead magnet is also an excellent way to demonstrate how valuable your business is to a potential customer.
There are tons of different kinds of lead magnets, from eBooks and webinars to event tickets, reports, and case studies.
The key to success is finding the magnet most likely to convert your target customer. Today, we’re going to be looking at some of the best ways to earn qualified leads.
1. Checklists
Checklists are handy lead magnet options for companies looking to provide customers with easily accessible and consumable information.
They are fantastic for earning conversions.
In addition to being useful, they also require little effort from your customers.
Everything your clients need is condensed into a simple list. They can even print that list and share it with others.
Another great thing about checklists is how easy they are for companies to create.
You can take information from many of your favorite blog posts and online articles and convert that into an actionable list.
Alternatively, you could turn audio and video content into a checklist for people who want to be able to access insights on the move.
The key to creating a successful checklist is making sure that it’s packed full of usable information, but also easy to read and follow.
Make your checklist downloadable in a PDF format, so that users don’t have to log into your site or access their email to use it again in the future.
You could even give your customers a mobile version they can access on their phones.
2. Gated Content
With a little luck, you’re already using content marketing as a valuable part of your strategy for business growth.
Content helps you to rank higher with Google, but it also proves to your audience that you understand your industry and have valuable insights to offer.
If you have a particularly fantastic piece of content on your website, you could even turn it into a lead magnet by using gated content.
Essentially, this means that you give people a taster of your content with an intro to your blog post.
After that, you can ask them to give you their email address or contact details if they want to continue reading.
Gated content is an excellent way to earn leads and long-term customers.
However, it’s important to ensure that people actually want your content badly enough to sign up.
Work on developing your position as a thought leader, so customers know they’ll get value from you.
If you’re not sure what kind of gated content will get the most attention from your audience, run a survey or poll on social media to see what your clients are most interested in.
3. How-to Guides
How-to guides are some of the most popular kinds of content available today.
Whether you’re trying to earn attention on Instagram, or building a name for yourself online, how-to guides are effective and brimming with value.
Similar to some other kinds of lead magnets, how-to-guides require a little more time and focus than things like checklists.
However, it’s definitely worth the effort if you want to build an identity for yourself as a thought leader or industry expert.
Guides can even work as a valuable part of your sales funnel, showing customers what your products or services can do.
For instance, if you’re a company selling social media marketing support, your how-to guides could show customers how they can choose the best social media platform for their company, or make good Facebook posts.
This is your opportunity to demonstrate your skills.
How-to guides are also great if you want to go beyond written content for your lead magnets.
You can deliver these solutions in the form of videos and podcasts, too.
Why not deliver various versions of your how-to guide, so you can appeal to a range of customers?
4. Reports and Studies
Some lead magnets are better for attracting certain kinds of customers. For instance, if you want to speak specifically to B2B companies, then reports and studies are a great choice.
Businesses search for plenty of statistics and research to prove that they’re spending their money on the right solutions to their problems.
If you’ve recently finished working with a brand on a project and they don’t mind you sharing details about how things went, consider using that as part of a statistic-filled way to reach your audience.
Here’s an example of how Tinypulse did it.
Alternatively, you could consider creating your own research by looking into questions and topics your customers are interested in.
For instance, if you sell email marketing solutions, try creating a report on the number of potential conversions a company can get by adding video to their welcome messages or something similar.
Make sure you have plenty of data to back up any claims you make.
If you’re using information from times you’ve worked with other companies, make sure you get permission to share their name and data before you create your lead magnet.
5. Infographics and Visuals
Notably, lead magnets don’t always have to be based around written content. Some people consume information more easily when it’s presented in a visual format.
If you’re running a particularly complicated business, for instance, you may find that it’s easier to showcase what you do and how you can help your audience through slideshows.
Slideshows, presentations, and infographics are all excellent ways of showing your audience behind the scenes of your business and helping them to understand more complex ideas.
You can release reports with their own graphs and charts or simply organize plenty of valuable information about your company or industry into an easy-to-follow infographic.
If you’re going to be using visual content, make sure that it’s eye-catching and attractive. Look at how Visual Capitalist made an infographic about Youtube.
It’s also worth looking for ways to add elements of your brand personality into your visual content. For instance, could you use your brand colors throughout the content in some way?
Adding your logo to the infographic is a great idea too. It creates brand recognition and helps to protect your assets from intellectual property infringement.
6. Webinars and Events
While you might not be able to invite everyone in your audience pool to a real-life event these days, virtual events and experiences are becoming increasingly popular.
If you have some useful information to share, and you can get a confident person to showcase that data online, then you have all the main prerequisites for a great event.
Online webinars and events are an immersive way to deliver information to your audience, and they can continue to generate value in the long run.
You can run the event live once and then make it available online to all subscribers who want to check back and re-watch the information later.
Depending on the nature of your business, you could even consider partnering with other companies in the same industry as you. This is a great way to get your brand name out there, as you’ll have more people advertising any upcoming events you may organize.
If the experience goes well, it’s also a good idea to introduce additional events in the future.
When trying to collect customers with event and webinar tickets, building initial hype is crucial.
Don’t just create a landing page where people can sign up. Advertise your upcoming experience wherever you can, including on social media.
Then, after the event is over, make sure that you continue to share snippets of what happened online. This will generate excitement for the next time.
7. Online Courses
Online courses or eCourses are the next step up from a one-time webinar, and they’re one of the best lead magnets any business owner can create.
What makes online courses so effective is their ability to give customers a tremendous amount of value, often with very little effort from you.
Many companies can build online courses simply by expanding on the content they’ve already created for their website.
There are different formats of online courses. But you can design your course however you choose, creating pre-recorded webinars and video sessions from experts throughout your business, or designing presentations and slideshows.
Often, the best online courses contain a range of different kinds of content, enabling you to reach every kind of learner.
Choose a topic that you know your audience is interested in, based on the questions your marketing and sales teams see most often and the blogs that get the most attention on your site.
Get guest educators to contribute to your courses, create quizzes so that users can test their knowledge, and even design downloadable certificates for people who pass.
Not only do online courses convince people to sign up for your newsletters and marketing campaigns, but they also showcase your knowledge in a very compelling way.
Magnetize Your Business with the Right Offers
Lead magnets are an excellent tool for any business trying to collect leads and build new business opportunities.
As your business grows, you may even create several different kinds of lead magnets to appeal to different segments of your target audience.
Don’t be afraid to experiment with different strategies to see which one works for your customer. Get inspiration by polling your audience or analyzing the competition.
Remember, whatever magnets you create for your business, always track the results of your campaign.
Examining your engagement and conversion levels will help you determine what kind of lead magnets are most likely to generate results in the years to come.
This is a guest post written by Heather Redding
Heather Redding is a part-time assistant manager and writer based in Aurora, Illinois. She is also an avid reader and a tech enthusiast. When Heather is not working or writing, she enjoys her Kindle library with a hot cup of coffee. Reach out to her on Twitter.
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