What is a lead magnet?

I remember when we went out at dawn with our nets to fish leads out to sea, we didn't come across almost any boat. Now there is more and more competition and capturing quality leads has become much more complicated. We have had to develop new techniques like Lead Magnets. 

A lead magnet is a valuable content that we offer visitors for free in exchange for their contact details, we give them attractive content that adds value and creates a relationship of trust.

In order to create good lead magnets it is very important to have well defined people buyers. Knowing the motivations of our target customer allows us to offer them exactly the type of content they are interested in.

Once the user has left his data and obtained the content, he is a person with whom we can communicate. In other words, a lead, a business opportunity.

Types of Lead Magnet

There are an infinity of formats to create a lead magnet. 
Here you have some of the more used examples

E-book
PDF guide
Template
Tutorial
Checklist
Report
Podcast
Online course
Webinar
Exclusive vídeo
Product demo
Access to a freemium account
Free trial of your product or service
Infographics
Discount
Whitepaper

Benefits of using lead magnets in our marketing strategy

- Increase in the number of leads in our list.
It`s a simple and efficient way to get new leads for our business.

- Getting qualified traffic to our website.
By offering attractive, specific and quality content, we attract a more specialised sector depending on the subject matter.

- Cost savings.
It is a downloadable content, relatively easy to create and cheap to implement, which means cost savings for the organization compared to other methods of obtaining leads.

- Better leads segmentation.
In function of the lead magnet we will know in which moment of the buyer's journey the users are and we will be able to define strategies ad-hoc.

Requirements to make an irresistible lead magnet

- It must be original and unique content.
- Must be concrete and specific content.
- It must solve a real problem.
- It must be related to the brand that offers it.
- It must be obtained immediately.
- Must have a good design.

Now that we know what this is all about, let's set an example to understand it better:

Let's suppose that we have a photography school that offers courses for all levels. To sell courses of initiation to the photography we can propose a lead magnet that is a pdf guide with advices to take better photos with your mobile and in exchange for the download, the user must leave us his email and his name.

Once we have the list of names and emails, we can send them an email and offer them the introductory photography course. Or better yet, we can send them another email with a second magnet, this time with more advanced tips that allow them to see the potential of learning the photographic technique.

With this second magnet we can trace the download and know which users have downloaded this second guide. 

These users are perfect candidates to buy the course as they have taken 2 steps towards the goal. We are teaching them to carry out small actions and get rewards for each one of them.

The objective is to bring the user closer to the final sale and can include as many steps or phases as appropriate by designing a DRIP campaign (link to the internal article.

Lead magnets are a fundamental tool for creating quality leads and loyalty to users and followers.

Analyzing the most visited posts or which have received more comments will help you focus content that interests your audience. If you give them what they want, they'll come back.

Main photo: Chester Wade