Lead Magnet Ideas You Can Use
By: Jackie Schwabe, Mba
Tags: Internet Marketing, Email Marketing, Professional Development, Email Marketing Tips, Lead Magnet

Practical Business

Lead Magnet Ideas You Can Use

The first experience your future customer has with you is possibly your lead magnet. I would like you to think about that for a few moments.

If the first time your prospect meets you is via your lead magnet, then how do you want to be seen?

Do you want to be seen a sloppy?

Do you want to be seen as lazy?

Perhaps you want to be seen as an expert in your field or maybe even a trusted advisor.

I think we forget that the lead magnet isn’t just the way you get folks on your list. It is the way you start your relationship. So, let’s be sure that we make a good first impression.

How can you make a great first impression? Well, don’t waste your prospects' time. Make sure that you are actually solving a real problem quickly for your ideal customer.

An effective lead magnet will usually solve a real problem, quickly and be very specific, easy to digest, and considered to be high value. We want to ensure that you demonstrate your expertise exceptionally well. An effective lead magnet will allow you to do this without your ideal customer feeling any risk.

Here are a few lead magnet ideas that work pretty well in most niches.

Teach Your Audience Something

If you are trying to build credibility in the market as an expert, one way to do that is to teach something you know for free to your audience. One of the simplest ways to come up with a lead magnet if you sell a service vs. a product is to teach your audience something.

Interestingly, teaching about a product is also a great way to build credibility for you and your brand. Making this method effective for nearly all niches.

You can set up an email course that walks your ideal customer through education about their problem and the solutions that exist. Since we are talking about autoresponders in this series, you can literally set this us as an email sequence. You could also set up a video course on Teachable, Kajabi, or Podia. Heck, you can even create a series of videos that you mark as unlisted and then send the link to the video over a period of time to deliver this to your audience. You can even turn your notes into a single PDF and load it to WordPress or any other file share location and just share the link with them.

The overall point is to provide education that is worthy of selling to your ideal client in the format that is simplest to you. Just ensure that it is the quality you want to portray in your brand.

Provide Your Audience a Useful Tool

Perhaps you want to offer something less extensive than a mini-course. You could deliver a really fun freebie to your audience in the form of a tool that helps them solve their problem. The classes I facilitate at eCornell share these types of tools. One example is a persona builder tool. My clients at Torch can download a professional development plan template.

Technical folks can create an app that provides support to their clients. For example, at coach.me coaches provide one on one chat services to their clients to build habits. As a coach, I use their product and offer a free week of coaching as my free tool that I share.

Use PRESSPLAY_LIFESTYLEWEEK to get a free week of any of my habit coaching offers: https://www.coach.me/PressPlay_Lifestyle?ref=135Kp

Build Your Community

You can provide a community for your audience. This freebie idea is a big winner for socially based businesses. If you set up a free group on a platform like Facebook Groups, Mighty Networks, or Delphi Forums and only invite people to the group who ask after they download one of your other freebies.

You can also add this at a later time. If you start building a nice list and you think they would benefit from interacting with one another, then by all means set up a community for them.

Inspire and Entertain Your Audience

Consider that your lead magnet could also be something that might inspire or entertain your audience. You want to get them to take the next step in the customer journey with you. So, if you have an old task that you gave to a group or a workshop in the past, you can share that as your freebie. Or you can give priority access

A perfect freebie excites your audience and makes them want to take the next step. It can be entertaining. For example, why not use an old talk you gave to a group or workshop as your freebie? Or give priority access to some users to private information that only they get to see? Patreon is a great platform to do something like this, you can give access based on sponsorship levels.

Re-segment Your Current List Members

What if your list is dead? You know … one that you haven’t given much attention and now you are pretty sure they are not a buyers list. Well, you could send them a freebie offer via email.

If the freebie is a little bit different than your old niche, this might be a great way to segment your list further and reactive the list members — or at least the list members interested in your freebie. Or if someone joined your list due to a previous freebie, but they have not moved along the journey to a customer, try sending them a new more targeted lead magnet.

Cause Prospects to Become Customers

To move your audience from leads to prospects to customers, you need to provide the right content that captures their attention continually. Knowing where they are in their buying journey can inform the type of freebie you make for them. You should definitely consider making more than one freebie so that you can offer one to people at every stage of their buying journey.

Lead magnets can be PDFs, videos, webinars, reports, software, apps, transcripts, and more. You can use any of the content that you’ve already created to develop a lead magnet. As long as the freebie addresses the targeted person and solves a problem for them quickly and efficiently, you will build your list better.