Creating a lead magnet and using it to attract more leads

It’s so busy online that it can be hard to stand out and get people to find you and actually entice them to interact with you. Generating leads is an important aspect of building a customer base and driving growth. That’s where a lead magnet comes in – when done well, it can be a very powerful tool and has somewhat revolutionised the way businesses attract and engage potential customers online.

In this week's episode I'm talking about lead magnets, what they are and how you can use them in your business to attract leads and grow your business.

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The link mentioned in this podcast episode is for my free masterclass where I teach you my 4-ad stack method to sell more of your online course with Facebook & Instagram ads. You can sign up here: https://www.biancamckenzie.com/masterclass

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Transcript

Welcome to the new School of Marketing podcast, the place for smart, simple strategies that will amplify your business results. Sharing practical tips, insider knowledge, and actionable advice. Because marketing is something that every business owner can do. Now let's get started. Introducing your host, Bianca Mackenzie. Mum, lover of snow sports, camping, horse riding and in demand launch strategist at Facebook advertising Knowledge bank.

Hey, welcome to the new School of Marketing podcast. Or if you've tuned in before, welcome back. It's so good to connect, even though I feel like know a one way street sometimes. But you can always connect with me on Instagram or on Facebook. Or you can send me an email. Hello@biancamckenzie.com. Anyway, I am so grateful to you for tuning in. And before we dive in, I would love to pay respect and acknowledgement to the Palawa people of Lutruwita who are the traditional owners of the land on which my business operates. I pay my respect to their eldest past, present and emerging. Yeah, welcome. I have to say I'm slightly behind on a lot of things and I'm madly trying to catch up. It's been an interesting week, really, and I don't know where you are and this is kind of a bit weird because I'm going to talk about the weather, but that's the thing. In Tasmania we talk about the weather. We've had such a long stretch of no rain, which is quite unusual for Tasmania. We're quite a wet state and I think it's been like two months where we hadn't had any rain and we finally got some rain the other day and then this morning it was actually really cold. So, yeah, I think summer is on its way out and I think we'll be actually lighting the fire sooner than we might think. So, yeah, I hope where you are, it's great as well. Otherwise we're just in full swing. We're in the middle of school and daycare and we've kind of just gotten over some illnesses. So I don't know if it's coming through, but I still sound a little bit croaky. So my apologies for that. I want to talk to you about creating a lead magnet and using it to attract leads because it's so busy online that it can really be hard to stand out and it can be hard to get people to find you and then actually entice them to interact with you and to hang out with you and follow you. And generating leads, we all know is an important aspect of building a business. You need leads to have a business and to grow you need customers, and you need leads to get customers. So that's where a lead magnet comes in. And when done well, it can be very powerful. And I feel like it's somewhat revolutionized the way that businesses attract and engage with potential customers online. If you think about back in the day, there was things that you would do to entice people to sort of come into the shop, but it's so busy online. So how do you actually attract customers and leads anyway? Let's talk about lead magnets. Let's first look at what a lead magnet is, because you might be going, what are you talking about? So basically, a lead magnet is a valuable piece of content or incentive offered to potential customers. And in exchange, you get their contact information, and that typically is an email address. And the goal of the lead magnet is to entice a potential customer to take an action. And that action could be signing up for a newsletter, downloading a resource, requesting a demo. And sometimes in ecommerce, you might be giving away discounts, getting people to shop with you for the first time so that they are then in your space. And once they do this, they're essentially a lead. And that's the start of the lead generation process. So let's talk about using lead magnets for lead generation. So the effectiveness of lead magnets really is in the ability to offer something of value to potential customers while also capturing their contact information. So you might be producing a lot of content, for example, on social media, which is super valuable, but you're missing out on capturing someone's contact information, which means that you have no ability to contact them and you basically will be at the mercy of the algorithm if you wanted to communicate with them. So in short, if you don't have their contact details, they are not really a lead. They could be a potential customer, but you need their contact details for them to be a lead. Okay, so let's look at how to leverage lead magnets for successful lead generation. The first step is to identify what your audience needs. So start by understanding the pain points, the challenges. Or maybe they don't have pain points or the challenges. Maybe they're desire. So think about pain points, challenges and desires of your target audience. And your lead magnet should offer a solution to a problem or in a way, fulfill a need that is relevant to your audience, but at the same time, you don't want to give it all away. And the best and the most effective lead magnets are those that solve an immediate problem and in a way, gives your audience a quick win. But it also shows them that they need more. And that is then what you offer as a paid option. The next step is to create compelling content so you want to develop high quality content that literally provides genuine value for your audience. And it could come in a lot of different formats. It could be ebooks, guides, templates, checklists, webinars, video series challenges, private podcasts, or exclusive offers that address a specific pain point or something that offers like actionable insights. So it needs to be valuable. And generally we provide content. And I'm talking to the service providers and the course creators here. The next step is to craft a clear call to action, or we call that a CTA. And you need to clearly communicate the benefit of your lead magnet. And then you need to get people to take action with your really well crafted call to action. So use persuasive language, use design elements to encourage conversions and capture those leads effectively. And then the next step is to strategically place your lead magnets, and you need to place them all across your digital platforms. So your website, your blog post, your landing pages, your social media profiles, your email newsletters, like anywhere where someone might come across you, that's where you want to be putting your lead magnets. And another way to get your lead magnet in front of your audience is to use Facebook and Instagram advertising, which is mainly how I use them. And it's kind of the type of work that I do for clients and with students. And I'll add a link to my free masterclass in the show notes so that you can learn how to attract more leads with paid ads. Because yes, you do need to put it all over your digital platforms, like everywhere. But then you need to drive traffic to that as well. So you'll be doing that organically through social media, hopefully also through things like networking, potentially summits, being in groups like anywhere where you can kind of share your lead magnet and get more traffic to your platforms and your website and your landing pages. But sometimes that can be quite tricky. And this is where Facebook ads and Instagram ads can come in. Really. They can do that really well and much faster. So I'll link that in the show notes as well. And then you need to optimize for conversion. So you need to continuously test and optimize your lead magnets and your landing pages to improve the conversion rates. So experiment with different formats, different messaging, different placement strategies to really look at what resonates best with your audience. You need to give it enough time and you need to give it enough traffic before you make changes. But don't just go, okay, it's up now. I'm never going to look at it again because you need leads. So yeah, optimize it for conversions and creating your lead magnet mostly depends on what format you decide to offer and which really comes from knowing who your audience is, how they would like to consume content. So you really need to know who they are. And I have to say, not all lead magnets are equal, and the ones that have a higher commitment from your audience usually have a better conversion to sale as well. And what I mean by that is that a checklist doesn't create as much trust. It doesn't ask a lot of commitment from your audience versus getting them to turn up for a live webinar. Can you see how the input from the audience is very different? They would be able to just download a checklist and whether they look at it or not, you can't really gauge that. And then reading a PDF or like a checklist, they won't instantly have that connection with you like they would watching you live or even in a pre recorded video. It's different levels. So not all lead magnets are create eagle equal videos and webinars often increase the trust factor because people get to hear you and sometimes they get to see you, which really helps them determine if you're the right person to learn from or to work with. And it's entirely up to you what you create, as long as it is what your audience needs and it kind of leads into what you offer as the next option. Okay, let's also chat about strategies for lead generation because, yeah, I know one of them is to just put it everywhere, but there are so many ways to get leads and there are so many ways to use lead magnets. And like I said, I would put it in as many places as possible, but there are other options too. So try some of these, see how they go. Like I said, you just need to put it out there. Try to maximize your lead generation efforts. Really. So one of them is content marketing. So you can create valuable and relevant content that attracts and engages your audience. And by that I mean not just creating that lead magnet, which is content, but also create long form content like blog posts, videos, like you might have a YouTube channel, podcast, or maybe you create infographics and you pin that on Pinterest or something like that, but also have that other type of content. So content marketing, of course, SEO. So search engine optimization, really you need to optimize your website and your content for search engines because they will help you increase your visibility and they will help you drive more traffic organically. So do your keyword research, optimize your meta tags, and just create really good, high quality, shareable content that will do well in the search engines. And I'm not an SEO strategist or person, I don't really know enough to be able to advise on that. But you want people to be able to find your content through search engines and of course, social media marketing. I've mentioned that already. So engage with your audience on social media, share valuable content, really participate in groups and in conversations and building relationships. Because there's no point in just kind of like doing a dump and run. Like as in dump your content and then don't show up. You need to really build relationships. Like social media is there for a reason. It's social media. And you can use targeted advertising, you can use retargeting. There's lots of places where you can do that. Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Pinterest, there's lots of different options. And the one and only thing where your leads should kind of go is email marketing. So once you have your leads, you need to nurture them. So nurture them. Build relationships through email marketing campaigns. You need to send personalized, relevant content to the people that become your leads. As in aka that join your list. You might want to segment your list based on certain interests, behaviors. Or if that is too complicated at the start, just have them all in the one list, that is fine. And really utilize things like automation so that when someone actually signs up to get your lead magnet, that it automatically gets delivered when they type in their email address. And then you can get more complicated and have someone go through a nurture funnel, a sales funnel. The main thing is that you've got your lead magnets. Someone signs up, they get that straight away. You don't want them to wait and those leads will go to your email marketing list. All right, well, that is it for this week's episode. Lead magnets are a super powerful tool for a digital business. To attract leads, to engage with your audience and also to convert your potential customers online. And by creating valuable content and then strategically placing your lead magnets and implementing effective lead generation strategies, you can really attract high quality leads and grow your business. This is what a lot of my customers do that sell online courses and memberships. You would need a lot of like, you need volume of leads. And this is why people do webinars. And this is why people have lead magnets, because you need to attract that volume. All right, I hope it was helpful thank you so much for joining me on this episode. I can't wait to share more marketing tips with you next week. And as always, if you are ready to take your business to the next level with Facebook and Instagram advertising, make sure that you visit newschoolofmarketing.com where you can download practical free resources. Plus, remember to subscribe to the podcast so that you never miss an episode. Awesome. Have an amazing day. I can't wait to go on this journey with you. And until next time, take care and market your business every day.