In this post, you will learn the basics to create a lead magnet or freebie that will help you generate leads and make your sales funnel more effective.
What is a lead magnet?
A lead magnet is a valuable product or offer that you give to your audience for free in exchange for their email address.
In this blog, I give you the basics to create a product-based lead magnet or freebie that will help you generate leads and make your sales funnel more effective.
Do lead magnets work?
Yes, they work. But only if you have a proper sales funnel strategy set in place.
The goal of your lead magnet (or freebie) is to grow your email list so you can sell your product or service through these emails. In order for it to work, you must have a proper email drip-campaign to follow up after a prospective client signs up for it.
For example, a typical lead magnet for online shops is to offer a discount on your first purchase if you sign up for their newsletter. They offer you this discount because they want you to buy something. If you sign up but don’t use this discount, they will place you into a specific drip-campaign email list that aims to convince you to buy one of their products.
3 steps to finding the right topic for your freebie.
Don’t forget that your lead magnet is the beginning of your customer’s journey through your sales funnel. So you must keep in mind what product you want to sell when choosing a topic for your freebie or lead magnet. Here are three ideas to help you choose the right topic.
1. Get to know your audience first
You want to give your audience what they need. Ideally, your lead magnet should solve a problem your target audience has. So before you spend time creating a freebie, make sure that the freebie and paid product that you are offering are going to catch the interest of your audience.
You can do this by analyzing what pages on your website people spend the most time on, you can ask your social media community what they expect to get from you, and you can always see which one of your competitor’s products are more successful.
2. Create content upgrades.
If you already have a blog, it is a good idea to go through your audience’s favorite blogs and see if you can create a content upgrade for one of them.
Take this blog post as an example: I am writing about how to create a lead magnet, so a good content upgrade for this post could be a “Step by Step Guide for Crafting Your First Lead Magnet.”
3. Using your knowledge and experience
If you want to create valuable and unique content, you should base it on your own experience and knowledge. And then support it with research.
Once you choose a topic for your lead magnet, get a blank document and start writing down the main points you want to cover. Have you implemented a system on your business that could be helpful for other people? Could this system be a good lead magnet?.
For example, imagine you created an Instagram strategy that increased your followers by 20% in a month. You have a list of all the steps you took to make this happen, and it worked for you. It could be a great lead magnet!
This content is coming from your own experience, and if it worked for you, the chances are that it will work for someone else. After you finish with your ideas, do some research to double-check that you are not missing anything. But first, use what you already know.
Creating your freebie.
Choose a title that grabs people’s attention.
When choosing a lead magnet’s title, make sure it is accurate and people can tell what value it offers right away. If your magnet title is too vague, it won’t pique your prospect subscriber’s interest.
For example, imagine you are a copywriter. Someone is on your site reading a good blog post about how to write SEO-friendly copy, when suddenly a pop-up appears offering them an ebook called “Be a Better Writer” Mmmm… I am not sure what type of value this ebook will deliver. How can a free ebook teach me how to be a better writer?
Now imagine the lead magnet is something like “10 tools I use to write better SEO-friendly blogs”. We both know which lead magnet can get more people to give your their email address.
Write actionable and valuable content.
To give value to a lead magnet, it is essential that the users feel they learned something useful from it. That is why I always make my freebies actionable.
Your freebie should not be a document that you read and put down, and that’s the end of it. But something that the user can go back to for checking information or working on it.
That is why I personally prefer checklists, step-by-step guides, or worksheets over other types of content that are not actionable.
Deliver a quality product.
You don’t need to be a designer to create a beautiful document. There are free tools like Canva that can help you and give you ideas.
Remember that people are giving you their personal information in exchange for your lead magnet, so deliver a quality product to them, or they might unsubscribe from your list. Here are the very basics:
– A clean design. If you are not a designer or don’t have the help of one, it is better to have a clean, black and white design.
– High-quality photos. Can you imagine you give someone your email address, and they deliver a freebie to you with blurry, low-quality images? It wouldn’t give a good first impression.
– Typo-free copy. Always remember to proof-read your writing before you publish it. You can use an app like Grammarly to help you, but still, make sure you proof-read it. It is going to take you a few minutes and could save you from looking unprofessional.
How to deliver your lead magnet?
The point of your lead magnet is to generate leads. The more eyes you have on your lead magnet, the more leads you will generate.
It is essential that you not only offer your lead magnet on your website, but also on your social media. These are the places where I recommend you to place your sign-up form:
– Your home page, above the fold. That is, where it is visible at the top of the page without scrolling.
– Your about us page.
– A topic-related blog posts as a content update.
– Your IG profile bio: make sure you plug it in so your followers can enjoy the piece of knowledge you offer them for free!
– Many websites have their opt-in forms as a pop-up. I find them very annoying, and most of the time, bounce off the site as soon as I get one. But some statistics prove that they work, so do your research and see if this is an option that works for you.
A lead magnet is linked to your email marketing, one doesn’t work without the other.
As I mentioned before, a lead magnet is part of your sales funnel and doesn’t work without an email campaign to follow up with it.
When writing these emails, it is crucial to keep in mind that your customer might be in different stages of the buying process, so you need to approach all of these stages through your words.