Lead Magnets: Giving Customers What They Want, to Get What You Need

How long does your marketing message stick around when you’ve left the building? Oddly, not long at all. Today’s consumers are pretty savvy.

Unless they actually like you or are ready to do business with you, they won’t keep your business card. They’ll Google you, and then they’ll bookmark your website.

You’ll be forgotten unless you get in front of them again or unless they find they really need your service. With lead magnets, however, you can stay in front of them every day.

What Is A Lead Magnet?

A lead magnet is just a fancy way of saying “lead capture content.” It’s a piece of content that you use to generate leads. It’s marketing, really. Lead magnets consist of special types of content though. It’s not the usual stuff that you post on your blog, or the stuff that you upload to YouTube.

Lead magnets focus on connecting your customers with the type of content with a call to action that gets people motivated to do something. That’s the ultimate positive customer experience because it’s delivering the right sales information your customers are already looking for at the most opportune time that your customers need it.

Be Prepared With a Great Online Experience

When you have successfully pushed out a lead magnet, you’ll know it. You’ll get a firestorm of traffic to your site. Before that happens, you kind of want to have your ducks in a row.

First things first. Get your hosting plan set up to scale. There are lots of companies out there, many of which are reviewed by sites like VirtualHosting.com. Most of your service providers today have cloud-based systems that scale up and down nicely.

You only want to pay for the bandwidth you use, ideally, which is why VPS and cloud servers are so nice. You get to deploy and destroy servers at will.

What Marketing Content Doesn’t Work

Now for the bad news. There’s a lot of marketing out there that is terrible. If you’re looking to your competitors to see what works, stop. Most everyone is copying everyone else these days, and everyone is getting dumber.

A lot of new companies just don’t know where to start, so they look to those whom they want to be like. Sadly, many of the gurus out there are doing testing that doesn’t necessarily optimize returns, but does optimize for the types of clients they want.

When you’re first starting out, though, you don’t have the resources or the client list, to test and optimize. You just want to optimize for leads – lots of them. You’re not going to get that from the established boys in the industry.

Free content, like free PDFs, free ebooks, and free reports have been played to death. Inflation is a serious problem in marketing. Marketers know how to sell. They know how to market. They don’t always know how to deliver on a promise though. And, this is what you’re seeing in the marketplace right now. For years, consumers have been bombarded with “free” stuff.

Eventually marketers figured out that you didn’t need to offer anything of real value. You just had to offer something for free and people would sign up to an email list. Well, like all good exploited tactics, this one was eventually worn thin. People stopped responding to it, and for good reason.

There is now a glut of free and useless stuff out there in cyberspace. Poorly written, sloppily arranged, inaccurate, information – and it’s making your job hard. People just plain don’t trust “free” anymore.

What Marketing Content Works

Anything you have that’s valuable will work to draw in leads and get them to sign up to your email list. “Value” is the operative word here, you’re creating a great customer experience in your lead generation and prospect development.

If you can solve a problem for a client, give away information that you would normally charge money for, or get people to take a survey and get an immediate result, then you might have a chance to win that customer. The key is to craft an experience that creates a positive emotional connection with that potential customer.

For example, you could offer a “10 Point Checklist” for prospects. The more useful the content, the better customer experience. You could also offer a “1-Page Quick Start Guide” on how to solve a nagging problem you know every one of your target audience suffers from.

Whatever you offer, remember – value and immediacy are going to win you the email address and keep your prospect “hot” and engaged.

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