How To Create A Lead Magnet That Works – Actionable Guide for 2024

As a business owner, you know the struggle of getting new leads for your business. A well-planned lead magnet will attract the attention of your target audiences and help you generate leads on a regular basis.

But the main challenge is to decide what you should offer as a lead magnet.

The success rate of your lead generation campaign with depends largely on what you offer as value in exchange for information from your prospects.

Today, you will learn how you can plan and create a lead magnet that is aligned with your business and will help you target the right prospects to generate leads actively.

After reading this article, you will learn

• Why lead magnets are crucial to generate leads
• How to choose the right resource to offer as a lead magnet
• How to create a lead magnet easily

And eventually, get an idea of how you may use your lead magnets to start generating leads.

So let’s begin.

Why Is It Crucial To Use Lead Magnets In Your Funnel?

The idea behind using a lead magnet is simple – you offer value to get some value in return.

So, the concept is,

• You offer a free piece of content or resource that your target audience can use to get some desirable outcome or a solution to a certain pain point.
• Interested prospects have to provide their email address and consent to get future promotional emails from you to collect this free resource.

But you have to make sure it is something that people will really want to get their hands on. Don’t expect people to sign-up for anything just because it’s free.

Let us look at an example.

The main reason here is people want real value that is not easy to access. It’s even better if what you are offering is unique. And if you can show stats on its past success rate, that will make it even more attractive.

Eventually, if you can offer the right lead magnet, your leads will be highly qualified, and your conversion rates in your future promotional campaigns will be much higher. It’s a proven fact.

50% of marketers claim, lead magnet increased their conversion rates.

The fact is, if your lead magnet can deliver results, people will start trusting your expertise. Then, you may nurture them with more useful tips and case studies and eventually make an offer. This approach will deliver high conversion rates more often than not.

Let us look at a quick example of a good lead magnet and how it helps to create a smooth sales funnel journey.

Let us look at how you can plan and craft a good lead magnet for your next marketing campaign.

How To Create A Lead Magnet For Maximum Lead Generation

Creating a lead magnet really involves two steps:

• Step 1 – Planning & Creating The Right Lead Magnet
• Step 2 – Having a clear plan of how to use it to collect leads

In the next few sections, you will learn how you can carry these out.

Step 1 – Planning & Creating The Right Lead Magnet

Depending on your niche, you have to find out what may work as a lead magnet. Let us look at how you can identify possible resources that you can offer as lead magnets.

Follow the instructions below.

1. Indentify Your Business Niche And Note Down “What Problems You traditionally Solve?”

Write down how you identify your business in terms of niche.

Overall, you should know what niche your business is part of. Then list down the services you provide, and the pain points each of them solves.

2. Define who you serve and what pain points you solve for them

List down the possible type of customers that you serve to offer your solution.

Then list down all the pain points these customers usually face while trying to achieve desirable results. (These results would be what you normally help to achieve via your solutions or services).

Now, for each of these pain points, note down which service of yours will solve them.

It’s best to craft complete customer personas that will help you in all your marketing activities.

3. Identify what resources you may offer as lead magnets

This part is a bit tricky.

You have aligned what pain points you solve with your services and which customer personas need what service to get the desired outcome.

From this, first, decide which persona you want to target for lead generation next.

The main goal here is to plan out what this lead magnet should be:

• Topic(s) you will cover.
• Pain points it will solve.
• End result people may expect.
• The solution and value it will hold.

Once you have identified your lead magnet, it’s time to decide what type of lead magnet it should be. There are several types of lead magnets to create. In the next section, let us look at a few examples of lead magnets that you may consider replicating.

6 Proven Lead Magnet Ideas for Your Business

Follow the most common types of lead magnets that most businesses have used to collect leads successfully.

1. Solution-Focused Template or Handbook
2. Limited-time Membership Access
3. Free Consultation Booking
4. Pre-recorded Video Guide
5. Free eBook or PDF With Valuable Guides
6. Partial Free Access To Content

1. Solution-Focused Template or Handbook

A solution-focused template or handbook usually offers a practical approach to addressing common problems within your audience’s sphere of interest, maybe using step-by-step guides or pre-built formats. The ultimate goal is to collect targeted leads while showcasing your expertise.

For example, suppose you’re in the home improvement industry. You may offer a lead magnet, “Ultimate Home Renovation Handbook,” where you may guide homeowners through a DIY renovation process from initial planning to selecting materials and managing budgets.

So if you are targeting homeowners that require home improvements, this would be a great lead magnet to address their pain points and highlight your expertise.

Eventually, you may nurture them and make them realize why taking your service would be the best option to solve other major pain points.

This type of lead magnet will work well for niches such as business consultation, digital marketing, health or fitness, career or personal development, financial advisor, etc.

If you have the resource outline planned, you may easily create this using Canva, LibreOffice, etc.

2. Limited-time Membership Access

This is a type of lead magnet or, rather, a hook offer that works quite well for course creators, online course hubs, and skill development communities.

Suppose you own an online cooking community where people can interact with various chefs and cooks to learn cooking interactively. So, your community may have courses, private live sessions, and even personal coaching services tied to a membership subscription.

In this case, you may offer a 30-day free membership as a lead magnet. If you target the right audience, then this will lead to tons of new members. And after the free period, many will go for your subscription plan (if it’s affordable).

How you manage this will depend on where you maintain this community. If it’s a WordPress site, then MemberPress would be a great option to handle this.

3. Free Consultation Book

Sometimes, people just want to talk with someone before even considering taking paid services.

For example, if you are a legal advisor for businesses, people would rather want to get on a call with you, share their situation, and find out what you can do to help them.

In this case, you may offer a free 30-minute consultation as a lead magnet.

People will naturally want to join here if they have any possible need.

You, however, should be completely prepared with what you want to offer or how you want to handle the session.

So, when you offer such free consultations, write down a script that you will follow. Define what topics you will discuss in proper order. Do not consider going for an open conversation without a plan – in most cases, open discussions will exceed your allotted time. In fact, without a plan in place, you won’t have much chance of making an offer or giving enough value to gain the prospect’s trust.

This plan will limit the call to 30 minutes, give you a chance to prove your expertise, and make them join a self-nurturing community where you upload videos on useful legal advice.

The main idea is to be prepared for the call even before you start collecting leads.

You may embed Calendly’s booking form on the landing page to get the bookings.

But we would rather insist you use an opt-in form on your landing page to collect the names and emails. Upon submission, you may send out an automated email with the link to Calendly’s booking form. This automation can easily be done using Mail Mint.

4. Pre-recorded Video Guide

Another great lead magnet would be a video guide that offers useful solutions.

Once people sign up via your opt-in form, you may set automation to send an email with a private link (preferably password protected) to a video you recorded to offer a guide to a particular pain point.

So, as a lead magnet, you have to record a video, embed it on a webpage, and password-protect it.

You may use Flixier, InVideo, Visla, etc., to create and edit the videos.

5. Free eBook or PDF with valuable guides

You could create an ebook or a pdf book where you may share a certain tactic or process along with implementation guides.

As an industry expert, you may easily write down an ebook with a guide to a DIY process for the prospects.

For example, as a business coach, you may offer an ebook on implementing OKR and Agile for faster business growth. Any business that wants rapid growth and is interested in using the agile methodology will want to collect this ebook. You may then plan the next funnel steps to offer your coaching service.

eBooks give you the added benefit of promoting your brand throughout the book. You also get to include case studies or strategies where people may have to contact you for help. So this usually gives you more value than other forms of lead magnets.

You may try Visme to create ebooks when you have the content ready.

6. Partial Free Access To Content

Often when you create courses or write books, it’s difficult to find a targeted audience with just paid Ads. In this case, you may create a funnel and offer the 1st few lessons of the course or the 1st couple of chapters of your book as a lead magnet.

Later, you may run email automation to offer them a chance to purchase the whole thing.

This works quite well for actionable courses and business or self-improvement books.

Teachable or LearnDash allows you to offer a few lessons of a course for free. In the case of a book, you may simply generate PDFs of the free chapters to send them the copies via email.

Now that we have explored some of the best lead magnet ideas let us look at how you may plan to use it actively to collect leads.

Step 2 – Having A Clear Plan For Using Your Lead Magnets To Collect Leads

The hard part is over. You have identified what you want to offer as a lead magnet, and you know who you are targeting. But that’s only 60% of the work.

The next part is planning how you want your audience to know about it.

Following are a couple of ways you may do this.

1. Use Facebook Lead Ads + Lead Magnet To Collect Leads

You use the Lead Ads feature to attract potential leads during this process.

1. Carefully create Ad sets to promote your lead magnet.
   The images or the video you use should focus on highlighting the benefits people will get from your lead magnet. There should be no mention of your services or any payments.

2. Use a strong CTA, such as “Get The Free eBook,” to trigger action.

3. Create a Lead Ad on Facebook to collect leads via Facebook’s opt-in form.
   This means people may click on the CTA of the Ad and get a form to submit their email addresses.

4. Use Zapier to send the data from Facebook leads to any preferred CRM or email automation tool.

5. Set an automated email to send access to the lead magnet.
   Create automation to send an email with a link to access the lead magnet whenever someone submits the lead form on Facebook.

That’s it. You will then have to set the right target audience to display these Ads and you will start seeing qualified leads.

From there, you may plan your next promotional campaign.

2. Collect Leads Using A Lead Generation Funnel

You may create a dedicated lead funnel for your lead magnet to capture leads.

1. Create a lead generation funnel.
   You may use WPFunnels to create a lead gen funnel with two steps – A landing page and a thank you page.

2. Optimize the landing page to promote the lead magnet.
   Write a compelling copy and design the landing page to promote your lead magnet solely. It should only highlight the benefits and use cases of your free resource, and there should be no trace of the paid services you plan to offer later.

3. Include an opt-in form with minimal data required.
   Here, you may add an opt-in form to collect the free lead magnet in exchange for their names, email addresses, and sometimes some additional questions related to the prospects’ business or needs.

4. Design a Thank you page for confirmation.
   Upon form submission, take the user to a confirmation page and give instructions on how to access the lead magnet. In most cases, you refer them to check the email addresses. While in other scenarios, you may embed the lead magnet directly on the thank you page.

5. Set automation to add the leads to a list & send access to the lead magnet.
   Create an automation event to add the leads to your preferred CRM. And then send an automation email with a link to access the lead magnet. You may use Mail Mint, which integrates with WPFunnels, to set up automation flows along with the funnel steps on a visual canvas.

6. Promote your lead magnet funnel to drive relevant traffic.
   You may then share this funnel on social media pages & social communities and run paid Ads to drive traffic into this funnel.

This approach will increase the success rate because you have a chance to provide more data on the benefits of getting your lead magnet on your landing page compared to a Paid Ad.

Even if you run Paid video Ads, the average view duration for B2B services is usually low on Facebook and Twitter. So those will still not get you enough results as using a lead generation funnel.

Summary

Now that you have learned how to create a lead magnet and the proper steps to planning its content & usage, it’s time to create your next lead magnet the right way.

The examples of lead magnets provided here are not the only ways to go by. You only need to find a way to give value to the prospect so that you may gain trust and authority.

And then, you may plan a whole promotional campaign to convert your leads into paying customers.

So go ahead and plan your next lead generation campaign now.

---