If you’re a business owner, marketer or sales person, you need to generate leads in order to make sales. To state the obvious, the more sales you need to make, the more leads you need. Preferably high quality leads. In order to generate leads using Inbound Marketing, you need high quality content typically designed by an inbound marketing expert and built using the top content creation tools.
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Content comes in many forms, but in the ever more competitive world of digital marketing, content must be both high quality and educational, while at the same time, serving as an effective Lead Magnet. The best lead magnets work both on your website and with your email marketing campaigns.
Before diving further into our expert’s guide to inbound marketing content creation techniques, entitled "How to Create Killer Marketing Content", of which developing lead magnets are a key output, we first need to understand what a lead magnet is.
In its most basic form, it’s a form on a website page, normally called a landing page, where you get someone to give you their email and other relevant contact information in exchange for something valuable like a free ebook or checklist.
This is especially useful in early-stage content, which is usually less 'meaty' and for which people may not be willing to exchange much beyond their email in exchange for your content offer. Higher up the funnel, you may find greater success with visual content creation tools, such as video. In the direct-to-consumer (DTC) space, instagram video editing tools have proven to be especially useful in creating lead generating magnets.
By giving you their contact information, they become a lead in your marketing system. Once they become a lead, you then use additional pieces of content to ‘pull’ them through your system, ultimately handing them off to sales to be closed or in the case of e-commerce, getting them to buy from you directly on your website.
As opposed to creating a lead in your system that has not yet converted into a customer, such as what a lead magnet does, a Tripwire is designed to get that lead to make that first purchase, thus becoming a paying customer.
A Tripwire is typically a low value item, with the key characteristic that it can be used to both Upsell and Cross-Sell.
A lead magnet can be embedded on a landing page, for example a BMI calculator or can be behind an optimized form on a landing page. A landing page is just another ‘flavor’ of a web page, but it is a web page. Within Hubspot, the primary difference is what you measure.
For example, your lead magnet conversion rate may or may not be equal to your landing page conversion rate (which uses lead magnet forms), though in most circumstances, they should be close. Where you may see significant deviation is where you provide an online calculator, see examples, here, here and here that can be run many times by the same user without requiring the user to provide his contact information. Some calculators can be ungated whiles others are not. They both have a role to play.
Though you could probably debate the differences, in order to provide a clear example, let’s work with shoes to get to an agreed upon understanding about the difference between an Upsell and a Cross-Sell.
If I was going to upsell a shoe customer, I might offer a BOGO (an intermediate lead magnet example), or Buy One Get One type of offer of the same shoe. This is a fairly easy sell and is one of the best lead magnet examples out there. But if I wanted to Cross-Sell, I might offer someone who just bought a pair of weight lifter shoes some athletic socks, since they are closely related products.
All I would really need are the services of a good graphic designer and the ability to create the offer in my system, i.e., coupon, and I would have very a strong offer. I would also want to make sure my graphic designer created social media channel specific graphics and imagery that met all technical and aesthetic requirements of the company.
The reason for keeping this in mind is that most companies are operating on multiple social media platforms. Though there may be marketing campaigns where distinct marketing agencies are managing social media posts on each individual platform, I typically see where one person or agency handles them all for consistent brand awareness purposes.
While beauty may be in the eye of the beholder, your 'brand voice' should be in your content style guide and it should be included with every content brief you send to your digital content creation team. Your content style guide should explain to your content marketers:
When you create content with these content style guidelines in mind, and if you have done the proper keyword research by, for example, knowing how to find keywords for Google adwords using the free Google Keyword Planner tool, you should be able create highly effective content that resonates well with your target audience. This will go a long way toward making your lead magnets outperform the competition.
If you’re going to develop a lead magnet, the first, most important thing to know is what you’re selling. This seems like something that should be obvious, but a surprising number of our clients struggle to define what they sell. Ultimately, this makes it difficult to develop a lead magnet using our lead magnet creation service.
Even using the best lead magnet creator software on the market, the first prerequisite is to have a thorough understanding of what you sell and how your customer benefits from using your product or service.
If you’re in marketing, you should already know that you need to know who your buyer persona is. What’s a buyer persona? It’s a fictional representation of your ideal buyer. If you’re lucky enough to be able to speak directly to a real buyer, then you should. If you’re not, then you will have to rely on a variety of other means, such as market studies.
If you have the budget, one of the most data driven ways to discover your audience is to run some Google Ads. This can get expensive, but since Google has about 90% of the search audience, if you know how to use their Adwords Keyword Planner Tools and Google Analytics, you can discover a lot about who is responding to your ads, including age, gender, income, interest, and preferred device type. For example, in the image below, you can see site visitors clustered by age groups, which can greatly assist in targeting your advertising and content production. This is a key piece of informance you can use to improve your Google Ads performance. In fact, for our Google Ads clients, we monitor several KPIs from this chart to achieve ever Lower Cost per Acquisition.
You can also do amazing things with Facebook, as it has hundreds of audience attributes you can use for targeting. Find which one converts and you'll have a good idea of who your buyer persona is. But nothing beats face-to-face conversations and observations. Facebook also conveniently offers a whole library of content creation templates.
Problem, Agitation, Solution, or P.A.S is a popular lead magnet copywriting model. What does it mean when it comes to developing a lead magnet? First, find the problem your audience is having, then agitate the problem and then provide the solution to the problem, preferably your solution.
One great way for content creators to find these problems is by using the Google trends tool to search for Topics versus Keywords. For example, perhaps your prospects are looking for ways to improve their customer service, and that's what you solve. Create a beautifully designed lead magnet that explains how you can help your prospects improve their customer service with your solution.
Though there are many lead magnet best practices, the top three to keep in mind, derived from our experience with generating over three million leads across a wide variety of industries, are:
Follow these three inbound content creation tips to complete your lead magnet checklist.
In an ideal world, a prospect (someone who has visited your website but not converted or become a contact in your marketing platform, such as Hubspot) would complete your lead magnet, go immediately to a Buy Now button, and make a purchase.
That rarely happens. What happens instead is that they consume many of your pieces of marketing content, which are either gated (behind a form) or ungated (not behind a form). They probably spend a great deal of time reading your blogs, slowly becoming more and more educated about your product or service.
That’s why the challenge for marketers is to design marketing content for each stage of your marketing funnel. Within the Hubspot Inbound Marketing world, those stages are typically defined as Attract, Convert, Close, Delight.
When you have an Inbound Marketing platform, like Hubspot, you use email lead nurturing to ‘pull’ leads through each stage of your marketing funnel. If all leads did exactly what you expected of them, then this approach would work fine, without a lot of effort.
Unfortunately, your leads, who can and do use search engines, can and will enter your marketing funnel at any point of your funnel, and behave much more like kids riding a merry go around. Your marketing and sales funnel then starts to resemble a flywheel. The faster it spins, and the closer your leads are to the edge, the easier they will fall off your flywheel.
However, the closer they are to the center, the easier it is for them to hold on, though there is always somebody’s else’s flywheel trying to call or pull them off your flywheel.
It should be obvious by now that you’re going to need more than one lead magnet and probably many sources of traffic. That’s why it's absolutely imperative to develop a content plan that is aligned with each stage of your marketing funnel. Each requires a different kind of lead magnet. For example, if you're a thought leader (or aspire to be perceived as one), your lead magnet may be a book, while if you run an ecommerce webstore, and no one else offers a special sizing tool for shoes, like you do, that's going to be your best lead magnet option.
There’s one characteristic about funnels that should be very obvious, they’re bigger at the top than at the bottom. This implies you will need more content, i.e., lead magnets, at the top of the funnel than at the bottom of the funnel.
You should also know that when it comes to building a lead magnet, Hubspot provides a powerful platform to help you with website content creation so you can build out your lead magnet based marketing funnel.
Now that you have built out your content strategy, you should have a map of the content, i.e., lead magnets, you’re going to need to create for each stage of your funnel. Though there is no ‘law’ that says what the best lead magnet ideas are, however, for each stage, broadly speaking, the best examples of lead magnets map out like this:
These are just some of the great lead magnet examples you may want to consider when developing your marketing funnel using lead magnets and content marketing.
There’s no limit to the number of lead magnet ideas you can come up with when you put your mind to it. Lead magnet design is both an art and science as well as software engineering problem.
Now that you know what a lead magnet is and what type is needed for which stage of your marketing funnel, let me give you some expert inbound marketing content marketing development tips:
Once you’ve built your beautifully designed lead magnet, you’ve only begun the process of lead magnet marketing. You need to have already decided, using the available lead magnet statistics available to you, for instance, from within Hubspot and potentially Google Analytics and Facebook Analytics, what an acceptable lead magnet conversion rate will be for you.
Though just about any business can use a lead magnet, when it comes to using a lead magnet within a business that is using Inbound Marketing, there’s a few key customer characteristics that work well:
To provide a concrete example a smart lead magnet, I've included a working Mortgage Loan Calculator with the twist that it is designed to collect a lead. It could just as easily be designed to simply output the answer, which many do. The final design depends on what you want it to do as far as feeding your funnel.
Creating content doesn’t have to be hard. But it does have to be done correctly. That’s why we’ve developed an ebook to “Developing Killer Marketing Content” which you can get by clicking the button. How’s that for a lead magnet😎
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