What is a lead magnet and how can it help you attract clients? In this episode, Tami and Joe explain in depth what a lead magnet is and how it can help your business. They discuss the importance of having lead magnets, different types of lead magnets, examples of successful lead magnets, and more.
Episode 15 Transcript:
Tami: Welcome to High Energy Marketing a podcast with us the digital marketing agency Ajax Union, where we interview our CEO, Joe Apfelbaum, on key marketing topics and we share everything you need to know to properly grow your business online. This is a Q&A podcast, where I ask Joe questions about different topics and trends in marketing, based on his book, High Energy Marketing, you can get the book at ajaxunion.com/book to follow along with us.
This is the 15th official episode of our podcast about High Energy Marketing and today we’re going to discuss lead magnets. But first, a little housekeeping. If you could find us on Apple Podcasts, rate us, give us a five-star rating, leave a review that would be amazing and very helpful. And now let’s jump into our inspiration of the day. Joe, do you want to hit us with a quick inspiration minute before we get started?
Joe Apfelbaum: Yes, I’d love to share inspiration. For today, I want to talk about leveraging your associations with other people. When you have a relationship, you can add value to that relationship by creating space for the person. You can also leverage your association with people by having them support your purpose.
For example, I want 100 hungry entrepreneurs to help me find and support my mission, which is I want to help 1000 hungry entrepreneurs go from frustration to mojovation. So I leveraged my associations with people when I meet you, I tell you my vision. And you think to yourself, how can I get Joe in front of people who are hungry? That might help me get another speaking engagement, and it might help me get my books out there to more people, maybe get featured on a podcast.
If you don’t communicate to your relationship, who can assist you, they’re not going to automatically know what they can do to serve you. You might be thinking, well, people that really care about me would’ve asked me, or they should already know, wrong. That’s your ego now wanting to be rejected, or wanting to feel special.
Let go of worrying about having other people support you and let people in your life know how they can help you get to the next level. The whole notion of being self-made is really the ego manifesting itself to show how great and important it is. No one is self-made. We all need help from other people, especially when you least expect it. When you take the leap of faith with someone and it works out it’s because you leverage your association with that person by communicating to them how they could be of service to you by sharing your purpose with the right people. That’s how you’re gonna get to your goal.
Tami: Amazing, Joe, thank you so much. Now let’s jump right into our topic of the day about lead magnets. So first, what is a lead magnet?
Joe Apfelbaum: A lead magnet is a marketing asset that compels a lead to give you their contact information in exchange for value. Depending on your current problems, your lead might be going through different stages. And within a marketing funnel, you really want to think about creating a lead magnet that corresponds to their particular needs.
Tami: Okay, so can you share a few examples of a lead magnet? Maybe some that you’ve made for clients?
Joe Apfelbaum: Yeah, for example, we have a client who has a dog chain training Company. They do dog training and dog sitting and they have a whole chain of locations, and they were sending traffic to their website, but the traffic wasn’t converting me.
Can you guess why? Yes, of course, he can. They had bottom-of-the-funnel messaging going to top-of-the-funnel traffic. That’s never going to work. In our Strategy Workshop, our experts identified that the most lucrative clients were the ones that had puppies because they needed the most support. And guess what, Tami? They also had the longest lifespan as a dedicated client.
So our team created a puppy training guide. I know it sounds so cute. It was an instant hit. It started converting leads at record low costs and getting people into the marketing funnel at the right time created the ability for us to convert them into paying clients with a positive return on investment.
A logistics company that provides overseas shipping support for manufacturing companies needed to get more leads at the top of their funnel. So we created a guide. ‘Seven things shipping managers need to know to stop overpaying for overseas shipping.’ We were able to get 300 targeted shipping managers to download that lead magnet and over four months that campaign generated $2 million in revenue. Talk about ROI!
Tami: Those are amazing examples of lead magnets. But I’m still kind of unclear on the importance of lead magnets. How do you use them through the funnel?
Joe Apfelbaum: If somebody just comes to your website, and they want to buy something, then they’ll buy it. But most of the time, when people are coming to your website, I would say 90% of the time, they’re not ready to buy right now. So if they’re not ready to buy, then they have to download something. Right? What are they going to download, give them something to download. So you can get their contact information, otherwise, they come and then they leave, you don’t want people to leave, you want to give them value right away. And if you’re given the value right away, whether it’s the top of the funnel, and it’s like the seven thing shipping managers need to know, or the middle of the funnel is where your lead needs to see trust, because they already know you but now they need to trust you, maybe you’ll create a valuable case study to help your ideal clients understand how you can help them.
They’re gonna want to download the case study and read it, watch it, engage with it. And if they do that, now you know that they’re actually interested. And so a lead magnet is the type of thing that will help you understand if someone’s even interested and who they’re interested in and where they are in terms of their interest. And if you don’t do that, you’re going to actually miss out on a valuable qualified lead that came to you but didn’t actually buy from you yet.
Tami: Okay, so we know why lead magnets are important, and how you use them throughout the funnel. But I’m still kind of unclear on what a lead magnet is, I mean, you described in theory what it is, but what are some different types of lead magnets?
Joe Apfelbaum: A lead magnet doesn’t have to be magnetic. It doesn’t actually have to attract metal, it needs to attract the desires and the dreams of your leads. And the way that it does that is either through an infographic, a checklist, a cheat sheet, a template, or a dashboard. Some examples are scripts, process overviews, ebooks, webinars, and presentations.
Tami, a lead magnet doesn’t have to be complicated. As a matter of fact, it needs to be uncomplicated. It needs to be simple, but it has to be an asset that people want. The reason we call it a lead magnet is because we’re trying to attract leads.
So we created, for example, a case study for a consulting company that creates custom trade show exhibits with examples of the most profitable exhibits, guess what? We were able to help them close a $6 million deal with just one case study that we created. Because people were downloading it, we knew who was downloading it, we sent those people to their sales reps, and their sales reps proactively reached out to them.
If you have a book, you can also mail them your book. As a lead magnet, we recommend that you make sure that people pay for the shipping, even if you’re giving the book for free to qualify themselves. If you don’t have a book, I’ve seen people use popular books as lead magnets. So you don’t have to actually use your own book.
So my recommendation is to give things to people that they actually need. That’s the best type of lead magnet that will help you be more successful.
Tami: Okay, great. So what makes sense speaking of success, what makes a lead magnet successful?
Joe Apfelbaum: A lead magnet is only successful if somebody actually wants the lead magnet. So you have to test the lead magnet to see if people are actually going to want to download it.
For example, we have a hashtag spreadsheet, which is the 100 most popular hashtags for LinkedIn. So if you go to the landing page, hashtagspreadsheet.com, you can get that hashtag spreadsheet. Now the reason I know it’s valuable is because hundreds of people have downloaded that hashtag spreadsheet and I know it’s a valuable spreadsheet that I’m giving as a landing page to people that are interested in learning how to use hashtags on LinkedIn.
So I really want you to get to know your target market and if you understand your target market, then you’ll understand what they value. That’s why we do a workshop when we start working with companies to really understand what does your ideal client really want? What do they really value?
Sometimes we create special live webinars and exclusive networking events, at the bottom of the funnel for people that know us and trust us but don’t like us yet. Remember people will buy from you if they know you trust you and like you. And these lead magnets will help them really be able to get to know you better and understand your expertise in your industry.
Tami: So what should the end goal of a lead magnet be? Is it just to get someone’s email address?
Joe Apfelbaum: The end goal for a lead magnet is to help you solve a problem quickly for a client and help them potentially uncover another problem they have that you can solve which means they need to invest in you.
So the lead magnet is, hey, you have this problem, you’re having a puppy, download this guide. Well, they download the guide and now they know that they need to get shots for the puppy. Now they need to know that they gotta get the puppies’ nails clean. Now that you know all this stuff, well, who can do that, we can do that. So the end goal is obviously to get a client, but you have to educate them. And it has to be a strategic lead magnet, you don’t want to just give things to people that are not valuable. You want to make sure that you’re giving people things that they actually value with the end goal to drive revenue to your business, not just get their contact info because if you tell somebody win the lottery, put in your email, and you could win the lottery that’s not going to help you be able to get a client that will just give you contact info.
So you want to make sure that it’s actually going to drive revenue to your bottom line. And that’s where we come in as an agency, we really learn about your business to make sure that your lead magnet is in line with your target market and your business goals.
Tami: So how does someone come up with lead magnet ideas?
Joe Apfelbaum: If you need more specific lead magnet ideas, remember me, Joe Apfelbaum. I’m an ideator. That means I get really energized when I come up with ideas so you can work with me to help you come up with lots of ideas or another marketing consultant.
If you do want to reach out to me, I’m always happy to give you ideas. Email amazing@ajaxunion.com. If you go to ajaxunion.com, we do have a 20-minute presentation on the homepage. There’s a funnel webinar and we do give examples of lead magnets there. And you can see our lead magnets scattered throughout our website, whether it’s a testimonial and case study lead magnet, whether it’s our web design lead magnet, you’re going to see lots of our lead magnets and if you go into any of our funnels, whether it’s our Evyrgreen networking funnel or Ajax Union funnel, you’re going to be able to get those lead magnets from us and you’re going to get lots of ideas of lead magnets.
Another way to get lead magnet ideas is to look at your competitors to see if they have lead magnets or look at big companies and see what lead magnets they have because they’re all using that. But again, I’m always happy to give you lots of ideas. Ideas, don’t cost money, executing on ideas costs money, so hit me up at amazing@ajaxunion.com.
Tami: Thank you so much, Joe, that was amazing information. We hope everyone listening got as much out of that as we did.
On next week’s episode we will be talking about using webinars to promote your business, so make sure to hit that subscribe button to catch the next episode.
You can follow us on Instagram @AjaxUnion. Follow Joe on all social media platforms @JoeApfelbaum and follow him on LinkedIn at joelinkedin.com. If you didn’t catch that, you can check the description of this podcast for our social media links and go to ajaxunion.com/podcast to learn more as well.
If you have questions, you can shoot us an email at amazing@ajaxunion.com. Our music is by Michael Suarez.
This podcast is produced by Sarah and Shannon and edited by Sami Mititelu. Thank you so much.
