How To Create a Lead Magnet for Your First Funnel

Quick Navigation:

• What is a Lead Magnet?
  • Should My Lead Generation Start with a Free Offer?
  • What is the Purpose of your Lead Generation?
• How to make your Lead Generation work for your business
• What makes a good Lead Magnet?
• Choose the right Web Designers for your Landing Pages
• How to create a Lead Magnet in 8 Steps
• How to create a Lead Magnet for List Building: The best types of Free Content for High Conversion
• The Average Conversion Rates of Lead Magnets
• How we create a Lead Magnet: Funnel Examples

If your business is at all concerned about lead generation, you will need to find a way to add people to your funnel. You will have to know everything about your target audience, their priorities, their pain points, and answer the questions they haven’t yet asked. That’s how to create a lead magnet that converts well.

There are different types of lead funnels that you can use, based on your industry, goals, USP, and marketing strategy. Learning how to create a lead magnet for your business is an essential skill. We will give you a full overview of the best ways of creating a marketing automation system to help you put your lead generation on autopilot.

What Is a Lead Magnet?

Simply put, a lead magnet or landing page offer is the first step of your funnel. It takes care of the awareness and interest stages, and creates a buy-in from the person visiting the site. You will need to offer something valuable for less than people would expect to pay (often for free) to gain the trust of your audience or create reciprocity. 

Should My Lead Generation Start with a Free Offer?

Normally, when people don’t know you, they would be skeptical and not willing to pay you money for your product or service. While most lead magnets start with a free offer, there are some high value offers that are simply “no brainers” for the visitor, and they will convert well. However, for list building purposes, most clients and marketing agencies start with a free offer. 

What Is The Purpose of Your Lead Generation?

You need to remember that in the end you want to generate leads that will be qualified and ready to take your relationship further. In simple terms: you will need to make sales. Without sales and customers, you might have a list and fans, but no business. 

Of course, without a list of people interested in your products or services, you will not have a chance to show your offer to them. Therefore, lead magnets will help you build your list to market to. The exchange takes place where you are exchanging valuable information or resources for the prospect’s email address.

How To Make Your Lead Generation Work for Your Business

The most important thing you have to do to ensure that your lead magnets convert is to choose the right offer to make to your site visitors. A good lead capture page has a high perceived value and a low cost, so the barriers to entry are low. Offering a general newsletter simply doesn’t cut it in 2021. But promising the world doesn’t take you too far; you will also have to offer something called instant gratification. 

Further, your landing page has to promise a solution to your audience’s most urgent problems. This is where knowing your ideal clients and creating a buyer persona comes handy. 

Finally, the landing page has to demonstrate your unique selling proposition and your brand persona. Most buyer decisions and commitments are made based on emotional connections you build with the prospect.

Choose The Right Web Designers for Your Landing Pages 

The design of your landing page will make or break your conversions. Make sure that you use either a good template or a good designer. However, the layout and the look of the page is not the only thing that matters: you will also have to get the copy right. 

While web designers are essential for designing a lead page, you will need to know who you are talking to and what the trigger words of your audience are. The headlines need to be written (or crafted) by professional marketing copywriters, and featured prominently by the design team. 

If you work with a sales funnel agency, it might be a good idea to ask for sample landing pages, and make sure that they have copywriting experts on board. With the blend of snappy headlines and call to actions and a punchy design, you will be able to achieve high conversion rates on your lead magnets. 

How To Create a Lead Magnet in 8 Steps

There is a specific process we use to build lead generation automation here, at LMNts Marketing that guarantees our clients a high return on marketing investment. Here are the main stages of building the beginning of a lead generation funnel. 

1. Know Your Ideal Clients

The first thing you have to be really clear about is knowing who your products or services are going to help. Creating an ideal client persona is a great way of getting started with designing your lead magnet. Apart from the basic demographics, you will have to know the pain points and buying triggers of your audience. Our ideal client sheet we use every day in our business to generate results for our clients covers all the main elements of audience research. You can download it free here. 

2. Craft your offer

Once you know who you are trying to please and connect with, you will have to brainstorm various ways of helping them out with their most important problems. As an example; if you are a business coach, you might want to provide solutions that will help your potential clients improve their productivity or profits. If you are a massage therapist, your audience’s main problem might be mobility or pain. 

Think about different ways you can help them out: through an eBook, video, guide, checklist, or even a calculator they use to get clarity. We will be talking about the different types of lead magnets further down in this blog post.

3. Choose the design

Once you know what you want to offer to address the most urgent need and want of your market, you will have to work with a designer or a sales funnel agency to make the offer appear both straightforward and appealing. Of course, there are sales funnel templates that you can have a look at, and WordPress is really good at customisation, but you need a creative professional to make your landing page work for you. 

4. Create a lead magnet simulation for predicted conversion rates

The next step we complete when we design funnels is simulating the conversion rates. We have designed a couple of calculators that can predict your potential conversions in the beginning, middle, and the end of the funnel. This will also give you a good idea of how much your return on marketing investment will be and how you can improve your offer long term. 

5. Craft the copy

When you have an offer and the design, you might want to engage with a copywriter or a marketing agency to make your message come across the right way. You will want to get a minimum of two variations of text, images, headline, and call to action. 

6. Complete the AB test

Once you have the offer, the design, the copy, and the audience nailed, you will need to create an AB test on the campaign. Your web designer or marketing agency can take care of this, and you can measure the conversion over a week or two, so you can – as we usually tell our customers – “pick the winners and lose the losers”. It doesn’t get easier than that. 

7. Scale 

With the AB test completed, you can start scaling your campaign. You will need to know how many people you want to have on your list and start preparing your follow up sequence and retargeting ads. People on your list need to be educated, engaged, and convinced that you are the answer to their problems.  

8. Rinse and Repeat 

By the end of the process of creating your lead magnet, you will have a good understanding of your market; their needs, and their wants. So you can start experimenting with different giveaways and landing pages, offers, and creatives to keep your list growing. 

How To Create a Lead Magnet for List Building: The Best Types of Free Content for High Conversion

Back in 2005, you only needed an “ugly form” on your site, and you had people on your newsletter. Today, customers are expecting much more. Here are the best types of lead magnets based on our experience working with businesses all over the UK and the world.

1. Checklist

When your audience is confused, they will need reassurance. This is a great way of building reciprocity and positioning yourself as an expert. A checklist can be anything; a housekeeping or budgeting tick box, or a spreadsheet that people can fill out when completing an activity. This type of lead magnet works well for personal trainers, people in nutrition, and life coaches.  

2. Calendar

There are different calendars and planners you can design on Canva or even Word and give away for free. These popular printables will not cost you a lot to design, and you can get your brand and logo out there. Blogs often use calendars to help people out with parenting, housekeeping, or planning business activities. We have a social media calendar download that is popular among our clients and subscribers. 

3. Cheat sheet

This free item sits well with people with limited knowledge, skills, and understanding on a specific area. As an expert, you can give them the lowdown on what they need to do; step-by-step. This could potentially save them hours browsing YouTube and websites for explainer videos. A cheat sheet is a lead magnet that can provide your audience with an easy shortcut. 

4. Report

When you are trying to target higher end clients, who are interested in more details, not just the “how-to” aspect of the area you are an expert at, you can give away a free report, too. This will feature some stats, findings, and recommendations they can implement straight away. 

5. eBook

An eBook is a great way of building your authority and positioning yourself as an expert in the marketplace. Generally, it doesn’t have to be longer than 15-20 pages. Remember that Millennials’ attention span is very short, so you have to be straight to the point. Be sure to follow up by email and give them tips on how to make the most out of the content. This will help you build great relationships with people on your list. 

6. Free training (video)

In the past few years, free training videos have been dominating the coaching and consulting industry. People are more attentive when they watch you talk to them directly through the screen, and they are more likely to feel like they already know you when your follow up email hits them. 

7. Free trial

If you are a software developer, you will need to get people to trust you to deliver what they are expecting from you. That’s why free trials work well. Bear in mind that you will have to be transparent. Give people clear instructions on how to stop the trial and cancel the payments. This will build trust and increase your conversion rates, too. 

8. Quiz or survey

The winner of our 2020 survey is a quiz funnel. We have seen conversion rates significantly higher using this lead magnet than any other type. The psychology behind quiz funnels is that people hate being sold, but they love to buy. If you design your quiz well, your prospect will qualify themselves and buy into the solution before you have to send out a sales letter. If you are wondering how to create a lead magnet without an information product, this is the right path for you. 

Which lead magnet type to choose will depend on your industry and goals, but all of them can work for any business, when designed right. Learn more about setting up a quiz funnel in another post.

The Average Conversion Rates of Lead Magnets

According to a study completed in 2017, the average conversion rate for eCommerce was only 1.6 percent. However, for lead generation, it can be as high as 20 percent. The lower the price tag is on your offer, the better your conversion rate is, provided that what you offer has a high perceived value for your website visitor. 

According to ImpactPlus, the top 25 percent of lead pages convert at 5.1 percent, and the lower tier has only 1-2 percent of the visitors completing the signup process. The highest converting lead magnets across all industries are quizzes. 

Your lead magnet conversion rate depends on various aspect of your funnel and infrastructure, such as:

• Web design
• The perceived value of the offer
• The targeting 
• The traffic source
• The website copy
• Your reputation and brand strength

How We Create a Lead Magnet: Funnel Examples 

In the past few years, we have created a couple of lead capture pages that have converted well. From business coaches to driver training companies, we have covered it all. Here are some of the examples we are especially proud of. 

Driver training landing page with funnel:

In this funnel, we focused on communicating the value of the company’s services for their clients. The free checklist has a high perceived value for company directors and fleet managers. 

Life coach lead capture page:

Working with a life coach is a decision many make based on trust. In this landing page, we are giving away a great resource for self-help, and offer further support via email that leads to consultations and bookings. 

Property investment quiz funnel

This funnel was created for lead generation purposes; basically to fill the client’s ActiveCampaign account with qualified leads. We created different tags for each personality and made them a unique offer based on their results. 

Our own cheat sheet

Of course, we have a popular free offer on our website, too. It is a cheat sheet that helps people identify their ideal clients. After you download the tool, you will know a bit more about how we work and why knowing your buyers is essential for marketing success.  

Having a business with a constant flow of leads makes business owners’ life much easier. You now know what you need to do to make your offer convert and build your list. Are you ready to learn how to create a lead magnet? Get in touch with us to arrange a free consultation.