Being a Marketing Consultant and working with small business owners, I try to help clients make the most of any free marketing options, before exploring paid ones. In this blog I go into depth on what a lead magnet is, and why it might be relevant to your business.
Lead magnets are a great low cost marketing activity that you can build into your strategy for attracting clients. It is a great incentive to encourage someone to give you their email address.
I recently gave a talk in a Facebook Group to other small business owners wanting to improve their marketing.
Here are the main three things I covered in more detail.
What a lead magnet is
How to find ideas your clients will love
What you need to have in place to host your lead magnet
What is a lead magnet?
To survive and thrive in business you need to attract enquiries or leads. The marketing model that most people will talk about is the funnel.
The idea being it is wide at the top end, and narrow at the bottom. You have lots of people at the top, who are potentially aware of you, but few will make it through to becoming a customer.
You need to move people from being aware of your company to interested in it, then wanting to buy from it, and finally taking action, and becoming a customer.
By designing something that your ideal customer wants you will have something to offer them that encourages them to take a step towards you to receive.
Simply put it is something that attracts people. The people you want to reach.
A lead magnet is an email marketing tool that allows you to gather an email address in exchange for information.
Even when someone is quite interested in your offering you still have to work to remind them of why you are the best for them, and also just to remind them about you.
The lead magnet is great for both of these.
In terms of what they actually are Lead magnets usually offer a piece of digital, downloadable content, such as a free PDF checklist, report, eBook, whitepaper, video or maybe a webinar.
So next, how to find ideas for your lead magnet
When you set up your business hopefully you did it because you saw a need that existed for your service or product.
Your business hopefully answers a question for your customer.
One of the best ways to find topics for a lead magnet is to think about the questions you receive from customers or to spend some time on Google looking at the questions that people ask in relation to your business.
For example if I look up marketing I can see people asking
“ Is it expensive to hire a marketeer”
“ What is marketing”
“ What kinds of marketing activities work best?
I could now take this information and build a useful lead magnet for people.
Mine could be “ 10 ways a small business can market” or “ 5 different marketing tools for you”
3. What you need to have in place to host your lead magnet
To use a traditional lead magnet all you need is an email list provider like mailchimp. Its important to ensure any emails you collect are GDPR compliant.
You can put a mailing list sign up anywhere you like. In your social media profile headers.
On your website.
On your Facebook Page
Once you have a list to mail out to you can go ahead and send out your lead magnet.
It is possible to build automations that will send as many emails as you like to the person after they sign up.
In conclusion I hope that helps you to understand lead magnets, how to research topics to create them and how to implement them.
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Thanks for reading!
Shona
Looking for more help? My new book is out now
If you would like a book of 100 Marketing Tips written just for small business owners then do have a look here. I wrote this book to be easy to read cover to cover or to be kept as a reference to dip in and out of!
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About Me
Shona Chambers Marketing is a Marketing Agency based in SE London. Specialising in helping Small Business Owners and Freelancers with their Marketing.