Most B2B strategists tell you nowadays that you need to push on using content.
What does it mean though?
Why is this such an urgent need and how to build the King of content, namely the lead magnet, in such a way that it will help your business grow?
Let us take you through the common, yet often missed secrets of a successful Lead Magnet.
To grow a brand in the most sustainable way, you need to realistically understand two very simple things:
With a painful health pandemic and a falling global economy, most businesses had to adapt their marketing tactics fast in order to survive. Channelling the marketing investments to online, made this the most crowded and competitive environment as ever before.
For many business owners, the act of deciding which strategic steps to save or abandon in the upcoming months was at times striking like a thunder.
For those who are still at this point, we have a shortcut key to offer: a guide on how to wisely build an excellent lead magnet and help your sales team boost their results.
According to DemandMetric, content marketing generates over three times as many leads as outbound marketing and costs 62 % less.
This number explains why 90 % of all organizations use content in their marketing efforts.
Is yours one of them?
Following the customer behavior on his online path and anticipating what he’s looking for in his researches, it comes naturally to see that any user will firstly try getting an opinion and identify the best options before buying any product or service. If you just say to your potential customers things like ”Buy my products”, “Here’s what people think about me” or“Here are some of my clients”, you’ll have some conversions.
But if you build a content piece (a lead magnet, for example), that will provide a more exhaustive explanation of how the user should identify his real needs, the bigger perspective of the acquisition and why this product/service you’re offering is the best to take, you’ll thus manage to position your company as a helpful resource during a buying decision. Redundant to mention that it will be translated into higher conversions, higher ROI, more loyal clients, more efficient tactics, long-term results and many more.
Transform your brand from an invisible one to an interesting one
The difference comes from a simple psychological insight: a helpful, useful, educative story nicely presented to the user will transform you from an invisible brand, to an interesting one. Such a prospect is becoming automatically a clear target, a person that’s already in a sort of relationship with your brand, and who, over time, might place your brand at the top of his/her trusted source chain.
As 80 % of business leaders and decision-makers choose to get company information through a series of articles instead of advertisement (source: Marketing Insider Group), it’s up to you now to become one of them and use your lead magnets wisely in order to grow your inbound marketing rates as best as possible.
So, let’s better understand why and how you should use a lead magnet in order to nurture all the qualified pre-leads you ever wanted!
What’s a lead magnet?
On a practical level, the lead magnet is a FREE piece of content that you can offer to your audience as an incentive in exchange for their contact details. Thus, the user comes to your website organically and downloads the item, in a win-win situation: he wins knowledge and information, finding something very helpful to him, and your company wins a potential customer, one that is already interested and a good fit for what you have to sell. and the best part - you get the chance to a second date, meaning the right to contact him again.
On a metaphorical level, we may say it’s like a magic door that opens in front of your eyes and allows you to connect with prospects who would have otherwise remained unknown.
Under the agreement you have with your contact that voluntarily gave you his email and other info, the lead magnet is the key that opens up the possibility to engage them in a personalized sales pitch, as you know precisely what is the pain they are trying to solve.
This is a brilliant tactic and if you know how to play the game, you quickly realize it’s your biggest win!
These clients are already one step closer to your company than to others and, for this only, they are the right people, the ones likelier to spend more money with you.
1. They pre-qualify.
They bring already interested people to you. Unlike cold leads, about these users you already know they’re interested in what you have to offer. It creates a relationship and allows you to initiate conversation, in order to convince.
2. Make a difference.
In such a crowded environment like the Internet, how do you stand out? How do you manage to make your brand visible and spreadable as a recommendation? Lead magnets have this “ability” of building trust and authority in your industry, by waving the flag of knowledge and performance in front of those who’re looking for help.
3. Offer a fair trade.
Free value in exchange for both sides. The Demand Gen Report observes the following: “Roughly 84% said that they either frequently or occasionally access business-related content on their smartphone, and 66% of B2B buyers strongly agree that companies should make it easier to access their content — from fewer form fields to even single-click content.
The question is not even “do users consume B2B content?”, but “how do we offer them a relevant experience with a piece of owned content?”.
On average, content marketing costs 41 % less than paid search. (Kapost/Eloqua)
4. Grow your owned data.
Lead magnets help you grow your database, especially emails, being a gold mine when it comes to owned data. Building Drip emails is one of the most performative tactics in B2B, as they deliver valuable content in a struggling and overcrowded online environment.
5. Help with decluttering and data segmentation.
Any free content that asks your users to provide data will help you organize and segment your database, according to the users’ interests. Thus, you may identify and grow verticals that will help you in defining or redefining your personas, understand how to personalize your future messages in order to attract even more relevant traffic to your platforms.
1. A penny for an insight
Your lead magnet needs to be very relevant. The way you choose your subject or theme of the content item will direct you towards good or bad results. Before anything, therefore, you need to tirelessly work on identifying and understanding what’s the pain your lead magnet will solve. When doing so, ideal is to switch your perspective from what you want your users to know to what they want to know. The more you manage to transform this experience into something that addresses an issue they need help with, the more chances to get them closer to your brand you’ll have.
2. Follow the Customer Journey path
Another very important characteristic when building your lead magnet strategy is mapping your content strategy according to Customer Journey’s steps. Your content piece needs to have a clear objective and purpose, go straight through the subject and helping your customer with clear and specific solutions. Establish the most important touch points of the consumer journey and for each one of them decide an action the user needs to do: download your content, end on a landing page, direct him to your videos on your Social Media channels. If there’s a touchpoint there, consider it the winning touchpoint, meaning the moment when you may very fast become relevant and visible for a potential client.
3. Choose the lead magnet type
Having at hand multiple types of lead magnets, here are the most representative: PDF guides, eBooks, video, email courses, reports, case studies, white papers, tips & tricks, “how-to” info sheets, toolkits, resources, analysis, training, etc.
In B2B, the ones that we recommend as bringing the best results, according to the owned information, of course, are the following:
a) Downloadable guides, video content, eBooks and white papers – this kind of B2B lead magnet is best for customers that want to be educated about a certain topic or service, or who need to have all of the details at once. There are even users that don’t know they have an issue to solve until they find out from your lead magnet. Either way, what matters the most is to build easy-to-access items, niched on specific business painful subjects and relevant to your main targeting;
“58 % of marketers said their short-form written content (newsletters, check lists or eBook samples) had the highest conversion rates.”(Getresponse.com)
b) Templates, checklists, email courses & how-to guides – create B2B lead magnets that provide specific information to your industry. Paying attention to not giving away proprietary information about your company and providing insights into those arguments and proofs that will separate you from your competitors. Your objective here shall be to provide service and insights to your customers that also proves the value of working with your directly. If you manage to help your potential clients with important, recurring issues, a template or a how-to video guide will help them move forward on the issue, this will make the lead magnet attractive and also your company input valuable.
a) Context and timing are essential
If it’s a time-sensitive lead magnet, pay attention to the releasing date: if your services talk about office redecoration during a pandemic time, for example, no one will pay attention to it, as most of them will try saving money and keep the deco investments low or have the offices closed. You need to release a lead magnet at the right moment, on the right subject. What you can do, instead, is to teach companies how to help their employees with their home offices: maybe a better pair of headphones, ora discount for buying a new better chair. Meaning, you need to focus on building an evergreen material from the beginning.
b) Leave space for future advice
Keep in mind from the beginning of your lead magnet creation that your content won’t and doesn’t have to solve all the problems six months down the line. You need to allow other actions to be generated from your side. The advices you’re giving through your content piece must be short-term actionable, to give the user real satisfaction for taking your advice. If it takes too long and there’s too much room for error from his side, your leads won’t have the feeling of a quick and simple win.
c) Establish your lead’s goal before releasing it
It’s important to know what you want to achieve with your content. Aside from growing your email database, what action is the prospect expected to take and where should a well-placed CTA take him to?Many companies do the mistake of trying to catch too many rabbits from one shot and ending up with reduced actions and confused users.
d) Smart Design
The best practice says to keep your lead magnet simple and smart. It’s better to say less and create more opportunity instead of giving to the users too much information and “allow” them to decide if they’re interested or not in it. The content should be concise and straightforward, letting them know what they’ll get, how they’ll benefit and how to get it. And that’s it!
e) Variety is key
One lead magnet won’t make all the difference, we hope you know that. Lead magnets work a lot with the user’s curiosity. It needs to be interesting to them, useful and make them click and open every time they see one. But for this, over time it is likely that you’ll need to develop different kinds of lead magnets that will offer more opportunities to engage your target.
Now that you know how to build a lead magnet, the easiest part is done!
The hard part is to get people to opt-in. Making people sign up is difficult, especially if it’s a B2B audience more difficult to target.
Here is some brief advice to follow in order to help spread the content:
When talking about the success rate of the lead magnet, Neil Patel was mentioning: “The big clue is in the reception. If your digital copies aren’t flying off the shelf when it goes live, your issue typically comes back to a mismatch with your audience”.
Our goal is to help you avoid this type of failure and use the content area as a growing asset for your business. Need a helping hand with building a powerful lead magnet or content strategy for your company? Use the form below to get in touch and let us help you with a plan to win the battle!
