In 2022, Digital marketing is evolving, some businesses have been using digital marketing strategies which have been working for decades, some have been using digital marketing strategies which came into play not long ago, and some businesses try out new digital marketing strategies which have been hardly applied by others.
No matter how old, young, or new your digital marketing strategy is, there will always be a chance that you can end up wasting your time entirely, or there could have been a more efficient way of doing this.
Since most of the time, your purpose for trying out digital will be to convert the visitors which land on your website or on your landing page into sales, or at least get something from them which can be later on used to completely convert them into your loyal customers.
There are endless strategies that you can execute in order to fulfill your purpose of converting your visitors into leads, but not all of the are efficient nor all of them will at least guarantee you results and not an entire failure or a waste of time.
But then you might ask, which strategy should I use to convert visitors into customers, and also which can be efficient enough to save your time, and not just use more time than the value it provides?
Well then using Lead magnets is your answer.
It has been used by businesses as a way of converting visitors into businesses for a long time now, and even after years and decades of this strategy being executed commonly among businesses, it is still ever more efficient and ever more guaranteeing for producing results.
Lead magnets will be something valuable that will provide you the route to the email address or any other contact information of your visitor which you will be able to later use to convert them into customers.
What is a lead magnet?
Before I start talking about other benefits of a lead magnet, how to make them, or how to use them, I will first talk about what a lead magnet is, and its definition.
A lead magnet can be basically described as a piece of content that exists digitally, and which can also be accessed or a lot of times downloadable, that is offered to a target audience, usually, the visitors which land on a landing page or a website in exchange for their email.
Lead magnets can be present in various forms, most of the time the Lead magnets are some courses, an ebook, maybe even a checklist, an online tool that can be used by a specific audience, or anything which can be valuable enough that it can convince the visitor for providing his email in the return for the content of the lead magnet.
Making a lead magnet does not only involve one step, rather it involves multiple steps.
Basically, there are only three steps that take place while a visitor is in the process of exchanging his email for the lead magnet.
1 = The first step or I should say the first component which you will need when making a lead magnet will be a sign-up form, usually, it only consists of two lines, in the first field, a visitor will need to enter his first name, and in the second field, the visitor will need to enter his email. The first field is optional but the second is obligatory.
2 = The 2nd component will be the content of your lead magnet, this will actually be the main part of your lead magnet and it will also be the reason for which the visitor will be signing up and giving your email. This is usually downloadable if it is a course or an Ebook.
3 = The 3rd step, or the third part of executing this process will be to send the content of the lead magnet by email to the email address of the visitor that he has provided.
4 = this last step is not necessary, it is optional and it depends o you whether you want to show it or not, but it has a nice effect on the customer and this is a thank you page where basically you will be thanking the visitor who gave you his email and signed up.
Why use Leadmagnets and do they work?
The biggest advantage and the reason for using a lead magnet are that they will provide you with an easy opportunity to make your email list or to have a list of other contact information of your target audience.
If you do not know what will be the use of having an email list of a target audience, well then you can send out marketing emails to that email list which is called email marketing, and email marketing is one of the biggest platforms for reaching out to your customers through the internet and also a platform which will provide you a direct route for communication with your target audience and a way of selling them your products.
With other marketing platforms such as social media in digital marketing, you do not have direct communication with your audience, there are certain factors that will affect your marketing strategies, the biggest of which is the algorithm of those social media platforms like Facebook which will decide by itself whether to show your content to your target audience or not.
Not only that but with the help of an email list, you can keep selling new products to the same customers over and over again and since more than 90% of the revenue of most businesses comes from only 8% of their customers who keep buying new products from them, you can expect how big of results you can get with an email list.
And lead magnets work incredibly well for building an email list.
Things you will need to keep in mind when making a lead magnet
Since the entire purpose of a lead magnet is to exchange valuable information and content between an audience and a business, you should keep in mind this point and not lose the actual purpose of making a lead magnet.
There will be many different aspects that you will need to focus on when you will be in the process of forming a lead magnet.
Value
First of all, it should be valuable, everything in this world is valuable, and we exchange value all the time.
From the most basic things that we in our life to the ones which are a little complicated, the aspect of value is always there.
Money is just a piece of paper if it loses its value, and we are the ones who give it value because in return we can exchange other valuable products, thus we are exchanging value.
Go to a grocery store, and you will need to exchange value, we exchange value all the time.
The same will go for your Lead magnet, eventually, you will be exchanging value here as well.
The only difference here will be that the values that will be exchanged will be the contact information and a lead magnet.
This means that if your lead magnet does not has value and thus cannot be exchanged in return for the value of contact information, it will be basically useless.
It is a necessity that your lead magnet should have enough value and it can be equal to the values that the user will provide by giving you his contact information.
Instant delivery
After a visitor has signed up for your email list and now he or she will explain an instant delivery of the lead magnet for which he or had signed up.
Now this will mean that you should also deliver the lead magnet instantly so that you can reach the expectations of the user who signed up
Also instant delivery of the lead magnet will not only build some trust between you and the email subscriber but it also means that you will make a good image in the mind of the visitor and the visitor will be more likely to buy further products from you since you reached their expectations.
it should represent your brand
Your lead magnet should not be very different from what your brand represents, otherwise, you will fail to get the interest of the user in your brand.
so that is why you should also be considering your brand and what it represents and try to align your lead magnet with it.
it should be well organized
Having value in your Lead magnet is one thing, but how well the customer can consume that value and properly use the value and the lead magnet is a different thing which depends on the design of your lead magnet, how well it is designed, and how good its optimization is.
If your lead magnet is not well designed, it is not responsive, it is not smooth, it feels laggy well all the value that you had worked hard on will be kind of useless.
It will be terrible for the trust between you and your customer and will create problems related to brand image, sales, and other things.
1 = Creating a checklist
is there any better way other than starting out with one of the easiest lead magnets that you can make even if you are a beginner?
Not only does making a checklist takes a very little amount of time, but also the material that you will need or the value that you will need to put in the checklist will be easy to find and provide.
When creating a checklist as a lead magnet, you have multiple options for making a checklist.
You can just take out a blog that is based on a how-to topic, and then you can make a checklist of all the steps which were in that how-to article.
It is not the only idea that you can implement on a Checklist lead magnet, you can also make a checklist of Must have items or products needed for something, for example for making a website, you can make a checklist that will include a management software like WordPress, a hosting, and a domain.
Another idea for making a checklist can be to make a checklist of all the steps that will be needed for making a project.
But you might think about how you will be able to use the checklist in the form of a lead magnet which can also be downloadable.
Well that is easy, just finish your checklist, at that time it will be in the form of a document but then you can easily convert it into a PDF, then you can just save the document in the form of a document.
For doing that, there are a ton of software that you can use, the most common ones which are being used by most people are Microsoft word, Google docs, etc and they work really well.
Then, add pop-ups on your website through which users will be able to sign up for the lead magnet, and also make a landing page for the lead magnet as well if you want, you can do both of these things with leadpages.
Such type of lead magnet is by most considered to easiest to make, and since they are easiest to make they also take very little time to make them.
You can expect to spend half an hour on making checklists and then properly putting the as a lead magnet but with time you will become more and more efficient with it.
2 = Make an audio form of your content
If you have a blog, you will be obviously constantly posting blogs on it.
Blogs are written and text and they are readable content, but you can use the same content as a lead magnet by just making an audio version of it.
All that you will need to do is just record your voice reading your content, and then upload the file as a lead magnet and use it for collecting emails or other contact information.
If you do not want to do it yourself, you can hire another person to do it, it is a very simple thing to do so better if you do it by yourself.
There are a lot of services that you can use such as audacity which will not cost you any money for making an audio version.
An audio version of your content can hold value to a lot of people especially those who like to keep consuming content in the audio format when they are walking or they are doing actions.
What is great about this idea of a lead magnet is that you will not need to come up with any new ideas, you will just be recreating an audio version of the ideas that you had already worked on.
Since you can already imagine how simple and easy it will be to create an audio of your blog content, you can also calculate that it will not be taking that much time to create, probably around 10-20 minutes.
A lot of websites like for example Medium already provide this option to their users where they can just simply listen to any article but the audio is created by the medium itself, which is kind of robotic and not by the person itself who wrote that article.
3 = Make transcription of your audio and video content
A lot of people use the blog as a content marketing strategy but it does not mean that blog is their only source for doing content marketing, they might also be doing video content as well, and there are also those people who instead of writing blogs just do videos.
In this step, you will be kind of doing the opposite of what I mentioned in the above step.
Earlier, I mentioned making the audio version of your text content and then using it as a lead magnet since there are a lot of people who will prefer to just listen to the content instead of reading it, but here it is the opposite.
While there are people who will prefer audio content instead of Text content, then there are also people who will be willing to prefer text and readable content over audio content.
If you do podcasts or even videos then you can simply just make a transcript of that video content and then use it as a lead magnet and it can work very effectively as well.
IF YOU DO NOT know what transcript means, well the meaning that I am taking of it here is translating or converting the audio of your video into text and then using it as a lead magnet.
Just like making the audio of your article is simple and easy to make, and yet it is effective, the same goes for a transcript.
It will make a very small amount of your time, and anyone can make them, hence there is even easier than making the audio of your article since while making the audio of your content, you might not feel comfortable recording your own voice, or just think that it is not well recorded but with a text, it will be way easier for you since you will be writing the text of your audio.
You might think that it will be a hard process to write a transcript of a video, but that is the thing that you do not have to do yourself, in fact, you can use some online tools to do it for you which will make it even easier for you. If you are wondering where you can find these tools, well you can use Rev or Trint, they both work really well.
After your transcript is ready, read it again so that you should be sure it matches with the audio.
Also add some little more information like the heading just like you would do in an article because when watching a video, a user can just understand the whole topic by expressions and how the people are talking but in a text, it can be confusing so add a little bit of more information as well.
Then convert the file into pdf and then you are ready to go.
Might take you somewhere between 15 to 30 minutes to complete it.
4 = Use your most popular blog as a pdf
If you have a blog, it will be obvious that most probably you would have written multiple blogs on your blog.
Since you would have written multiple blogs, not all those blogs will be equal in quality nor all of them would have gotten the same amount of attention.
There will be some blogs that would have gotten more visits and attention than the other blogs, and the ones that have gotten the most amount of visits and engagements, you need to use that as your lead magnet.
Imagine if you are reading a blog on your favorite website, and then a pop appears offering you the best blog on that website in a pdf format, would you sign up to get the best content from your favorite website? absolutely yes I guess.
That is what you also need to do.
Go onto google analytics, or if you are using any other analytical tool, just open that and then see how many visitors each of your blogs are getting.
Take the blog which has gotten the most amount of visits and attention, and then copy-pastes all the content into a document, also add a little bit more content to lighten the quality of content even more and to really make it the best content available on your website, also put some more time adding some more infographics and images and the n convert the document into pdf and then your lead magnet will be ready.
Now just make a pop-up on our website which will be offering the led magnet or either make a landing page for the lead magnet and you will be ready to go.
This type of lead magnet might even take you less than just 10 minutes, which is amazing especially if we compare it with the quality of the lead magnet that you will be offering to your audience for making an email list.
5 = Infographic
Some people just love analyzing data, they just love to see amazing stats in the form of graphs, they are addicted to it, and they cannot put themself away from analyzing stats.
Such people can do anything to get some stats to please their inner peace, even sign up for an email list.
Suc graphs which show data, stats and other things can come from anything, they can come from a case study of your own that you have done regarding an aspect or from anyone else, they can from the general results that one can expect from his campaigns, they can be anything as long as it is capable of being presented int he form of stats and graphics.
Also making infographics will provide your audience with a new theme of content aside from that traditional text content that they might have enough of.
For making such infographics of stats, data and graphs there are a lot of tools that you can use, some are free and some paid, and both can work pretty well for you.
Personally, I use Canva, it works pretty well there is also a free version that you can use, other than that you can also use Infogram and some other tools.
If you want to create an infographic on some stats that you do not he, you can just search on the internet and you will find many of them, make sure that the source is trusted and you do not just input the wrong data.
After your infographic is ready, make a pdf file of it and then start using it as a lead magnet.
also do not just present the downloadable file like it is, without any description of the file.
Add some paragraphs like 1 or 2 about what the downloadable file is about, which type of stats it covers and about which topic etc.
You are ready to go.
It should not take you much time, maybe like 25 minutes.
6 = A free version of your product
The whole purpose of making a lead magnet will be to at end sell your main product to the user who signed up to your email list in return for a lead magnet.
This will also mean that your lead magnet should be relatable to the main product that you will be looking to sell in the future, there are a lot of lead magnets that you will be able to create which will be very closely relatable to your main product but nothing can come closer to providing a sneak peek of your product as a lead magnet.
Providing a free version of your main product a lead magnet will not only make selling the premium version of your product easier but it will also be an easy way of making an effective lead magnet.
Not only will you get the email address in the return for the lead magnet but you will also get another benefit in the bonus and that will be that the user will start getting more and more familiar with your product.
If you are afraid that you will end up providing all the features of your product and then the user will not feel the need to buy your actual product, well then this is not that big a problem you can only include a fraction of all the features that your product has in the lead magnet and yu will be good to go, you will not be providing enough features in the lead magnet that user will not need to buy the main product, neither will there be nothing in the lead magnet that the user will not even sign up.
This only seems to be possible if your product is digital, I do not think that you can utilize this strategy if your product is not digital or you are not providing a service digitally.
7 = Make a list
First of all, do not confuse it with a checklist as it is a totally different thing, For those getting confused because a list and a checklist, you should know that it is a different thing than the former one.
You can create a list of anything, literally a thing if it is relatable to your business and the user can relate it with your brand.
To give you an example for better understanding, if your niche is email marketing, then you can make an email list of the best email templates, maybe of the best email subject lines, maybe the best platform for building an email list, it can be anything until it is related with your niche.
I will write some topics on which you can write a list and then use it as a lead magnet if your niche is a digital marketing
- best ways to make an audience on digital platforms
- best ways for making sales
- different types of business models in digital marketing
- top social media platforms to market on
- benefits of digital marketing
These are some of the examples that you can take an idea from when you will be making a list and then using it as a lead magnet.
After you have written down all the elements of the list, then as a usual convert, it into pdf form to be able to use it as a lead magnet.
It might take you anywhere from 20-25 minutes depending on which topic you make the list on, for some popular topics it will be easy to make but for some small narrow downed topics, it will be a little hard and will take a little more time.
Another thing that will affect the time that it will take you to make the list will be how long or how short the list is that you made.
You can use Canva to make the final form of the list.
8 = Free tools
Giving away a sneak peek of your product for free as a lead magnet is one thing, but there is another thing that you can do, which is a little bit similar to giving away a part of your product for free but at the same time it is very different.
These days, in 2022 even for the simplest tasks, people use tools to do digital marketing because they are supper sufficient, they do most of the work for them and also they are a great way to save time.
If someone buys your product, it does not mean that they will not be using other products and tools at the same time, they will be.
What you can do is you can give digital marketing tools which are related to your main product as a lead magnet.
Not only will you be able o make a great lead magnet will this but also the leads that you will collect will be targeted and will be much more likely to buy your main product since they are already using a tool that is similar to your main product.
The only problem which can come to your mind that this type of lead magnet is how do you make these tools and then giveaway them as a lead magnet?
Special if you do not know to code nor can you afford to hire a web developer to make a tool for you.
Well, you do not need to worry since you can just visit Codecanyon and there you can buy any tool and then use it as a lead magnet.
Most of the tools will be under 50$, and there you go your tool will be ready, you can also customize those tools to make awareness about your brand with your lead magnet.
One more thing that you will need to do will be to host those tools o your private server as well, which you can buy from Contabo, and it won’t cost you that much.
After that, anybody can come to your tools website, sign up for your email list and then start using the tool.
Might take you anywhere around half an hour to properly set up the tool and all that stuff.
9 = Ebook
People love reading Ebooks.
And what makes them even better is that they are easy to make as well.
by using any tool just like Canva, you can make your own Ebook ad and then use it as a lead magnet.
If you are wondering about what topic will you write in your ebook, then just discuss any important topic in your ebook related to your niche, and maybe give them some tips around a topic.
What you can do to make your Ebook even faster and in less time is to also use your previous content on your blog, and then add that old content to the content that you have written in your ebook.
With Canva, you can easily make your ebook, just add as many pages as you want, add text, images, etc and your ebook will be ready to go then you can download your ebook in PDF form directly from Canva and start using it as a lead magnet.
Since making an Ebook will be a little bit more complex and more time-consuming task than the other lead magnet ideas that I have mentioned earlier in this article, it can take you around an hour to make an ebook
10 = Free course
Free courses just like Lead magnets are another great way to collect emails by using them as a lead magnet.
In digital marketing, people like to learn about new things, and understanding new things overall increase their knowledge, and courses are one of the best ways when you are new to a topic.
You can make a course and take advantage of it by giving it for free in return for an email.
There are a lot of tools that you can use for creating courses such as Thinkific which is already being used by a huge number of people for making courses.
However making courses is one of the most difficult tasks that I mentioned in this article but also they prove to be a very valuable asset for making lead magnets as well, so it is a good trade.
It can take you some hours for making it depending on how big your course is and how complex tasks you are covering in your course.
11 = video clips from podcasts or live streams
If you do podcasts, webinars, live streams, or anything like that, it can be a great way for making valuable lead magnets.
Live streams and podcasts are a great way to bring in more audiences to your brand but that is not our topic hear, our topic is how to use those podcasts as your lead magnet.
Not everyone has that much tie to watch the entire live stream or the entire podcast just to get some valuable information that you will share or some valuable share, what you can do is cut a part of some of the most valuable phrases out of those live streams or podcasts.
It works really well and those short parts containing some valuable clips engage many people, and you can use them as lead magnets.
What all you will need to do will be to cut and edit your live stream file and then extract those short clips for using them as lead magnets.
Conclusion
Out of all the strategies used widely for making an email list, lead magnet proves to be one of the most efficient, and also one of the easiest strategies for collecting email or contact information.
But what is the difficult thing is making the lead magnet itself.
But in this article, I also solved that problem by giving you an idea of some of the easiest lead magnets and also some of the most valuable lead magnets that you can make and which will work really well for you.