Lead magnets are one of the best strategies you can use in content marketing to improve your conversation rates—they often become the deciding factor on whether your new leads will actually become subscribing customers. 

A lead magnet can take on many forms. The common thing that binds the different lead magnets together is their objective. Lead magnets are meant to promote your business, are delivered for free to high quality leads, and offer a lot of value to your target audience.  

Now, how effective these magnets are in generating leads are will ultimately depend on the following factors:

1. They have to be targeted and specific

For lead magnets to be effective, they have to be directed to a very specific niche. If you’re offering a generic freebie, chances are, you won’t reach a high quality audience. Targeting, therefore, is necessary to make your lead magnet work. 

Consider who you’re speaking to and make sure your lead magnet is tailored to what they want in terms of how you deliver it to them and how it’s formatted. For example, if you’re a fashion brand that caters to a widely female core audience, there is no sense in investing time and effort in a generic styling guide for women and men and running ads on Facebook to promote your lead magnet. You could be more purposeful and create a styling guide for women on a platform like Pinterest, which has a largely female demographic.

2. Divide your lead magnets to address individual funnel stages

Lead magnets can help you attract exactly the kind of audience you want, especially if you take the time to cater content to prospects at different stages of the conversion funnel. 

For example, for prospects still in the early stages of conversion, something more specific about the topic at hand would probably be effective, such as a trend forecast infographic or an infographic featuring industry statistics. Further down the lead magnet, where a lead has already closely reviewed and learned more about what you have to offer but has yet to make a real purchase, you can offer a whitepaper that provides more details about a product or service, a free trial, or a sample of your product.

3. Give them a glimpse of your content

Lead magnets are meant to be exclusive, gated content, but you have to give prospects a peek into what they can look forward to. Tease them with a glimpse of what they have access to once they sign up. A snippet of the content and some choice bullet points can make a great lead magnet cover to help tip the scales towards a sign-up. 

One Final Tip…

If you don’t have time to write new material from scratch, go through your content library and identify which posts got the most engagement. Which one received the most views? Which one had the most shares? Take them and repurpose them into a Slideshare, convert it into a podcast, turn it into an infographic, or use it as material for a webinar.  

Hope my answer helps! If you have any questions, feel free to head over to the comment section below or join the conversation on our Twitter or LinkedIn.