Let’s start with an explanation on what is a lead, and what lead generation is all about.
A lead is someone who has indicated interest in your company’s product, or service, in some way, shape or form; and lead generation is simply a process of creating the streams of leads for your business, to eventually convert them into profitable customers!
So, how does one naturally and strategically attract leads to their business? Lead Generation Magnets are the most important first step. Often in the form of a free offer, in exchange for a prospect’s personal details, Lead Generation Magnets allow you to collect prospects’ details.
For example, if you are a Registered Training Organisation wanting to generate prospects for your Aged Care courses, you can offer a free download of your careers eBook, educating people on what they need to consider if they want to enter the industry. Once you have their details you can send them a few more emails to gauge their interest levels. At the same time, you measure their email behaviour by analysing the links clicked and if they visit/return to a certain webpage upon receiving the email.
A great lead magnet should have these five characteristics.
1 – It must relate to the knowledge your prospects lack
This seems to be the most obvious. Your prospects wouldn’t want to download an eBook, or claim an offer about something common sense, or something they already know well about.
2 – It must relate to their intent in the purchase cycle: intent to learn, intent to buy, intent to try
By understanding those intentions, you can come up with the most effective lead magnets to capture your hottest leads. Think about using different offers within the same campaigns, to match your prospects’ different intentions, or needs.
3 – It must provide instant gratification
It shouldn’t take long to consume the content you provide, plus easy access to the content. Make sure your emails don’t get delivered to your prospects’ spam mailbox, which is sometimes the case for Gmail and Hotmail. Select an email marketing automation platform that provides email deliverability service to maximise your email reach, such as SharpSpring, InfusionSoft, Marketo, etc…
4 – It must solve a problem
Your prospects must find value in the offer you provide. The fact is some of the leads simply sign up for the freebies, and we can’t unfortunately tell from the beginning. This is when marketing automation comes in to help you qualify, or screen those leads to identify which leads you should spend most of your effort on, and which leads you should ignore since they have no interaction with your brand over a predefined period of time!
5 – It doesn’t take too long to create!
Normally the turnaround time for a landing page design is very quick, therefore it’s highly recommended that you, or your automation agency, bring the campaign into life as early as possible. Of course, this should happen after a careful planning stage, and your team is creating killer content for your lead generation magnet.
An Extra Top Tip:
The earlier you start building campaigns, tracking behaviour and giving users the opportunity to connect, the sooner you can start collecting insights for building and optimising future campaigns. You may be surprised by how a quick change to your call to action label, a button redesign or a tweak in the copy, may increase the results in an instant. And only by testing, doing, and learning do we get to know what works best.