How To Create A Lead Magnet With 6 Steps & Pro Tips To Boost Your Sales

how to create a lead magnet

A lead magnet will be the best you need to generate leads and boost your sales. It will build your email list and turn each contact into a potential customer.

But here comes a problem: How to create a lead magnet? The process is straightforward, but you have to find a way to pull it off.

This blog post will reveal everything needed during your lead magnet creation process. Let’s check the steps and be ready to welcome a lot of customers!

How To Create A Lead Magnet?

A lead magnet can be anything free, such as ebooks, templates, product samples, webinars, or videos. The idea is to give these materials to your prospects to get their contacts.

Lead magnets sound simple. However, to build a perfect lead magnet, you need to work on many things, from setting your target audience, preparing the sources, and building the page to testing what you have made.

We have split the process into five steps, each with pro tips to bring out the best effect. Please check and take note to build a successful campaign.

Step 1: Identify your audience

Determine target audience
1. Determine your target audience – Image Source

The most common mistake marketers make when using lead magnets is bringing in as many users as possible. Instead, you should do the opposite.

It’s crucial to target lead magnets to the audience you want to draw in. They won’t access your lead magnet if it doesn’t relate to their needs.

Even though most businesses have several buyer personas, just one of them should be the objective of a lead magnet. You can build more than one magnet.

Select the one to which you can now add the highest value to proceed to the following step. Ultimately, you should serve all of your audience segments.

Step 2: Outline your offer

You should be aware of what you intend to give your target audience, why it will attract them, how you want to offer it, and the accurate information it includes. Then, it is straightforward to build your lead magnet.

You need to outline what to give customers and mention a few features and hooks that would increase the lead magnet’s attraction.

For example, if you are working on a project about diets, the offer for your customers should have the following:

  • Easy-to-cook recipes
  • List of nutritious ingredients
  • Groups of Keto enthusiasts

You may not mention all the benefits you have outlined. Yet, the goal is to brainstorm as many ideas as possible and use them to make an attractive sales copy.

Step 3: Build a squeeze page

The squeeze page is where you place your lead magnet
2. The squeeze page is where you place your lead magnet – Image Source

A squeeze page is a type of landing page where you place your lead magnet. People will primarily use this page to access and download the lead magnet.

We suggest building the squeeze page before creating the lead magnet so you can decide the genuine appeal of your offer without having to invest time in developing it.

To increase conversions, your squeeze page should have the following components:

  • A catchy and relevant title
  • A brief text that conveys the value of your offer clearly
  • An image of the promotion’s offer
  • A form without any points of friction
  • A CTA button with creative copy that stands out against the layout of your website

Show the newly-built squeeze page to your most passionate subscribers or your most reliable friends. Try to find the people that belong to the audience segment you aim for, the lead magnet, and ask them for their opinions.

If you want to make it simple to gather feedback from your intended audience, you may even think about creating a small survey with Google Forms.

Doing so may evaluate your lead magnet’s potential efficacy before designing it.

If the feedback is positive, move on to step 4. If you receive negative comments, use what you’ve gained to keep trying until you succeed.

This video will show you how to build a squeeze page in just ten minutes. Please check to learn more:

YouTube video

Step 4: Create the lead magnet  

There are many types of lead magnets. Hence, you have different approaches to creating them. No matter which type you go for, make sure it has four components as follows:

  • The form will ask for your web visitor’s name, phone number, email address, and other contact data. 
  • The content is an attractive downloadable item for visitors to get their contacts. 
  • The delivery email is what you send your visitors after they fill out the form with a link. 
  • The Thank-you page shows your appreciation to your visitors for trying your service. It’s an important step to kickstart your relationship with them. 
There are many types of lead magnets
3. There are many types of lead magnets – Image Source

How to create a lead magnet?

Knowing its format isn’t enough, as an awesome lead magnet requires you to handle every element properly. There are three small steps to nail this job. 

Choose the type of lead magnet.

There are many lead magnet ideas to try with your campaign. You should often choose the type of lead magnet depending on the audience you are targeting. 

Here are some lead magnet examples for some audience segments:

  • Experts: Ebooks, white papers, mini-courses, video series, podcasts, webinars, assessments, and free courses. 
  • eCommerce: Free coupons, free shipping, educational content, membership, and a free gift for the first order. 
  • Software: Free trial, demo, and freemium account.
  • Service business: free coupons, education content, free online tools, and ebooks.

Build your lead magnet

After choosing the type of lead magnet, you will build it. Since there are many lead magnet ideas, you need to work on each to ensure a high-quality offer for your prospects. 

Although lead magnets come in different forms, they should follow some criteria to ensure they can work. A high-quality lead magnet must adapt to these requirements:

  • Valuable: Your customers are only willing to give you their contact if they receive useful things. 
  • Instant gratification: Your audience who access your lead magnets are seeking immediate solutions. Hence, the lead magnet should be simple to get, and your online business can deliver it quickly. 
  • Well-designed: The look affects how people evaluate your business. The design is a core element of building an asset that establishes trust with your prospects. 
  • Relevant: The lead magnet should represent the value of your business. For example, if you are a marketer, your offer will be anything about marketing. 
  • USP (Unique Selling Proposition): USP is what distinguishes your brand from your competitors. As a result, try to emphasize this feature in every lead magnet. 

Great lead magnets work to deliver the value you include in each offer. We will share some tips to achieve this goal when preparing your material:

PDF files

Ebooks lead magnets
4. Ebooks are very popular lead magnets – Image Source

PDF files are the most popular type of lead magnet. They can be ebooks about tips to develop in one niche. For example, if you are a marketer, you can share tricks and hacks on planning marketing campaigns. 

We recommend the PDF format because it remains unchanged when you download it. Many tools assist you in creating and formatting your files. 

The most important step of designing a PDF lead magnet is writing the content, as it will illustrate your level of expertise in your niche. 

Some tips below will help you compose high-valued PDF files:

  • Include benefits in the title. For example, if you are a wedding photographer, share ebooks with a title like “Stress-Free Wedding Day” or “Most Stunning Wedding Photos.”
  • Do not make your guides too long. Your potential customers may be excited to get downloadable lead magnets, but they won’t read every letter of a 400-page book. 
  • Provide informative content for your customers to highlight the value of your business. 
  • Avoid recycling other blog posts, even if the posts are on your site. Your audience would need something unique. 

You should design the content after you’ve written it. Lead magnet designs should be eye-catching but don’t have to be sophisticated.

There are tools to design PDF files. Whatever software you choose, make sure it’s simple to edit text, allows many pages, and lets you save your work as a PDF.

We advise against creating your PDF with Photoshop because it makes text modification on multiple pages cumbersome.

Videos

5 day lead challenge opt in
5. Videos can attract website visitors easily – Image Source

Compared to text-based lead magnets, videos can grab the audience’s attention. 

The effect will be much better if you add animation, humor, voice-over, music, and hosts to the videos. 

The script is important. After outlining the ideas, you have to put them together to write a clear and easy-to-understand script. With this tip, you can tell how long your video is and start recording it. 

When the content is ready, read the script and set a timer. Don’t forget to take some notes to read the script easier. 

Many video editors will help you have a winning lead magnet. We will cover them in the next section.

Product samples

Always keep in mind that the ultimate objective, whenever you publish a lead magnet to expand your email list, is to sell your product. 

Your lead magnet should theoretically serve as a pre-sell for whatever product and service you want to ask your subscribers to purchase.

For example, if you are an author, the irresistible lead magnet can be a chapter of your book. And if you are a consultant, offer your prospect a free consultation. 

By providing a sample of your full-access service to your audience, you encourage them to appreciate everything you offer truly.

This type of lead magnet doesn’t require much time to prepare. All you need to do is to design a catchy squeeze page and CTA to invite your audience to try your product.  

Step 5: Build gateways

Regardless of where your web visitors access the lead magnet, your website should always be generating leads.

As a result, you should develop several (at least three) gateways to download your lead magnet and subscribe to your email list. 

It would be perfect for displaying your gateways as a CTA in the footer, header, pop-up, or sidebar form. Then, your website will generate leads from not just one page or two.  

Step 6: Test

Audit website - A-B testing
6. Test what you have built so far

To determine if a lead magnet is effective for you or not, perform A/B testing

You never know whether that is the best you can do, even if your lead magnet brings you many leads.

Here are some ideas to test your lead magnet with this tool: 

  • Use a pop-up or a sidebar lead magnet to evaluate in-content magnets.
  • Test if adding a short description of the lead magnet can improve conversions in contrast to a form that only features a picture of the lead magnet. Then, you can identify the factors influencing the conversions.
  • Test whether a content package performs better as a lead magnet than a separate content supply.
  • Test the various lead magnet types to see what your prospects like most. 

In addition to these recommendations, you may test the lead magnet forms’ layout, accessibility, and effectiveness.

Best Tools To Create Lead Magnets 

Creating a good lead magnet is not easy. Hence, simplify the whole process using tools in every step. There are many options for you. 

For choosing the topic

You must first have a topic in mind to identify what you will do and how to do it. These tools can bring you unlimited ideas.

1. Answer the Public

answer the public
7. Answer the Public shows you the most frequently asked questions

Using this tool, you may enter a short keyword that interests you. Then, you will receive a list of questions that others have asked about it on the internet.

2. Google

Many overlook Google’s potential for quick insights into what our customers seek. Google, the most prevalent browser, provides a plethora of data that can assist you in making straightforward business decisions.

Simply search on the platform for several topics associated with your industry to see what comes up. Your audience must be seeking it.

3. Hubspot Blog Ideas Generator

hubspot ideas generator
8. Explore your ideas with Hubspot

This tool is perfect for those who write blog articles and need assistance when they run out of ideas. But it can also be a place to get your lead magnet idea.

For designing

As aforementioned, the design is the core value that attracts your prospects at first sight. You can utilize numerous great tools to make designing lead magnets straightforward. Here are our favorite options: 

4. Canva

Canva is a user-friendly tool
9. Canva is a user-friendly tool

Canva has earned a lot of recognition in the industry because of its enormous source of pre-built templates. It’s also among the most reasonably priced and user-friendly choices available. 

You can create simple images using Canva that you can download in a variety of formats, such as .gif or.mp4. 

Additionally, you may create your own infographics and single- or multi-page documents (such as checklists and information downloads).

5. Piktochart

Piktochart is an excellent choice if you want to improve your design abilities and produce lengthy documents (such as white papers and ebooks) or presentations.

Piktochart is an easy-to-use application that provides a ton of elegant infographic, document, and presentation templates. Then you may add your material and modify your template as required.

6. Pixabay

Another kind of visual content that you can use to break up long passages of text and highlight your story is a picture. You may use a free web tool like Pixabay to select the right images that match your content.

You don’t want to pass up the opportunity to support your potent lead magnet content with high-resolution pictures. More than 40% of marketers consider visualizations to be the most important type of material employed in marketing.

7. Loom

Creating training or education lead magnets requires you to use high-resolution videos. So how to create a lead magnet to serve this purpose? Loom can help.

Loom helps you capture instructional pictures and videos directly from the browser window. You can decide to share the screen or add yourself to the capture for personalized content. 

8. Wistia

wistia video platform
10. An excellent tool to create videos

Wistia is an excellent alternative if you need a tool to assist you in making instructional video material or simply want an easy way to archive your videos off-site.

Regardless of the sort of lead magnet you build, landing pages with videos may attract up to 86% more website visitors than those without them.

This tool has many interesting features, such as adding a call-to-action and collecting viewer information directly in the clip.

For promotion

When you’ve designed a great lead magnet for converting more leads, you need to know how to promote it. The following resources might help you advertise your lead magnet offer on your webpage and social media platforms. 

9. WishPond

A terrific all-in-one solution for building your landing page, pop-ups, marketing automation, and handling promotions is WishPond.

To collect all of your prospects and develop them into loyal customers, you can embed the landing page into your site and connect it with some of the most popular email marketing and CRM solutions. 

10. OptinMonster

With OptinMonster, you can target the right audience with attractive lead magnet pop-ups and messaging on your website, unlike a landing page where the audience requires a direct link to access. 

You may more easily convert visitors using the tool’s built-in email subscription forms and marketing pop-up templates.

11. ActiveCampaign

activeCampaign homepage
11. Promotion is important to expand your subscription base

When you do expand your subscription base, you need a marketing platform to collect, monitor, and interact with your audience properly. We recommend ActiveCampaign for these tasks. 

ActiveCampaign, a well-respected tool, offers all the features you want to gather and then convert your prospects into loyal customers.

Frequently Asked Questions

  1. How long does it take to create a lead magnet?

    It depends on which type of lead magnets you want to create. Often, you need 10 to 30 minutes to create a lead magnet. Then, spend several hours building a complete campaign for it.
     
    There are many types of lead magnets to choose from. Each has different characteristics, so the preparation time varies.

    PDF files: 10 minutes
    Transcripts: 30 minutes
    Podcasts: 15 minutes
    Checklists: 30 minutes
    Swipe files: 30 minutes 
    Analytics: 30 minutes
    Product samples: 10 minutes
    How-tos: 10 to 30 minutes
    Infographics: 30 minutes
    Presentations: 20 minutes

  2. How many pages should a lead magnet be?

    Although a 200-page free ebook sounds good and can offer a higher value, a 40-page material could work better as a lead magnet since users won’t find it overwhelming to read.

  3. Why do you need a lead magnet?

    Lead magnets are powerful tools that assist you in boosting your business growth. Its benefits include:
    – Extending your email list significantly
    – Adding value to your brand
    – Building trust in your customers
    – Educating your customers about your product and relevant knowledge
    – Helping with higher-quality content

  4. How do you post a lead magnet?

    Your website’s pages, especially the Home page, might have an opt-in. You can post your lead magnet on the home page after designing it. 

    As an alternative, include a Pop-up sign-up window on your website that only shows up after a certain amount of time has passed for visitors to explore.

Conclusion

The best lead magnets can help you improve your lead generation rate dramatically. More leads, more sales. So, do not mind spending time and effort creating a good one. 

Not all lead magnets can perform well. It will help if you experiment to know what your customers need. Success will follow the people who put their heart into everything they do. 

Hopefully, our shared guide can help with your marketing and sales campaigns.

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Author

Key Nguyen

Key is the brainchild behind Funnelsecrets.us. You’ll often find him analyzing conversion rates, tweaking landing pages, and exploring new marketing automation software. He loves to write about sales funnel building and is always tinkering with the latest conversion optimization techniques!