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Lead Magnets You Can Create With Minimum to No Investment

Over the years consumer behavior has undergone a drastic change. According to a study by Google and CEB, titled The Digital Evolution in B2B Marketing “customers reported to being nearly 60 percent through the sales process before engaging a sales rep, regardless of price point. More accurately, 57 percent of the sales process just disappeared.” This means that customers are making informed choices to identify a trustworthy solution provider. They also interact with their peers on social media, forums, and groups and pay close attention to their experiences and advice before spending money. So, what’s the solution? Ever heard of lead magnets?

As it turns out this shift in consumer behavior has been a turning point in every inbound marketer’s journey. There’s no longer one tried-and-tested formula to generate quality leads and sales. In a HubSpot study, State of Inbound Marketing, 63% of marketers said that their top challenge is generating traffic and leads. If you too are running out of quality leads and unable to increase sales then you certainly need an ally called a lead magnet. The good news is that you can create these without spending a fortune!

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Let’s take a look at the kinds of lead magnets you can plug in your purchase funnel.

1. Quizzes and Calculators

As a lead magnet, quizzes and calculators are perfect to get your prospects interested. They can generate 2x more conversion than passive content and also open the prospects’ eyes to solutions for their problems. They also help you to profile your prospects. In addition, since quizzes and calculators provide an enjoyable experience for the user and require minimum effort, visitors are less likely to leave mid-way which improves completion rate up to 80%.

Let’s first talk about calculators. They are more about your prospect than you. For example, with an ROI calculator, you help your prospects calculate ROI of using your product/service to ensure there is a chance to increase ROI. Vindicia, for example, built an ROI calculator on the Outgrow platform to help prospects ‘find hidden treasure in subscriber data’. The calculator got them a 70% conversion rate!

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Quizzes, on the other hand, are even easier to create than calculators and serve the purpose of making the user interested in your business. TAG Livros, for instance, created an interactive quiz on the Outgrow platform. Within a month it generated more than 72K visits, 23K leads, and 5K engagements! Wondering how they managed such results? Well, quizzes work on the ‘instant gratification’ principle. Keeping that in mind the TAG Livros team kept it simple: one question and people could access results once they shared their email ids.

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2. Checklists

Checklists are ubiquitous and extremely easy to make. They are to-the-point and actionable. You can quite easily simplify blog posts into checklists by arranging key information in bullet points. Essentially, it should be brief and have actionable advice, free of fluff. It’s a bonus if you make these checklists downloadable and printable. Check out HubSpot’s ‘Ultimate Webinar Checklist’; it’s crisp and pinnable.

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Even marketing guru, Neil Patel uses checklists as lead magnets. After all, this type of content is extremely easy-to-understand and prospects wouldn’t mind sharing their email to gain access.

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Venture Harbour too offers a checklist to prospects. The sub-text on the landing page as you will notice is quite persuasive.

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3. Webinars

Webinars are audio-visual as well as interactive and hence immersive. Since webinars are about certain topics you wish to educate your leads about it delivers high value and so becomes an excellent MOFU lead magnet. You can demonstrate your expertise in the industry as well as demonstrate your products and services.

According to the Content Marketing Institute, “over 60% of B2B marketers are using webinars as part of their content marketing programs.” Clearly, they are effective because they happen in real-time. Neither you nor your leads need to be together at one spot as is in the case of live events and conferences. And, since you host it online you end up expanding your customer base by overcoming geographical boundaries.

Kissmetrics is doing an excellent job. They don’t just promote their upcoming webinars, but also recordings of past webinars. The latter helps them capture additional leads and convey that they care for those who couldn’t make it to the LIVE webinar. One look at their landing page and you will realize that it’s a lead magnet vault!

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InstaPage does the same.

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4. E-courses

Prospects in the middle-of-the-funnel qualify to be called good leads as they are merely one step away from making a purchase. According to the HubSpot blog, “ the content you offer them at this stage will determine whether it is worth having a salesperson contact them directly.” Which is why e-courses make for an excellent lead magnet at this stage. You don’t just educate them but through your subject matter expertise also tell them why they should choose you over your competitors. Take a look at an example of an e-course offered by Autopilot, an email marketing, and marketing automation platform.

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So does Rick Mulready. His is a four-part email series about the biggest mistakes businesses are making with Facebook ads and how they can avoid them.

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5. Free Demo

With your prospects past the MOFU and closer to making the purchasing decision, it only makes sense to offer a demo of your products and services. It works as an exceptional sales assistant tool. The point is that if they have come this far in the sales journey they must be genuinely interested in knowing what you have in offer. So, allow the visitors to either watch the demo the way PiktoChart does or let them schedule a demo with your team. Make sure that the landing page CTAs are easy to spot.

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Here’s how Kissmetrics use the free demo lead magnet. Interested leads can request for a demo quite seamlessly. It’s a brilliant opportunity for a one-to-one discussion and allows you to use your persuasive skills. They’ve in fact clearly mentioned what to expect from the demo.

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6. Case Studies

Once your prospects enter the bottom of the funnel and are considering your brand as a solution provider, an excellent way of winning them over is through case studies. They work as a gentle reminder of how other brands have benefitted from choosing your products and services. It helps establish a bond of trust between you and your potential customers.

Here’s an example of how a case study works as a lead magnet for SUMO. It’s written by food blog owners who were getting a lot of traffic on their blog, but nothing consequential in their sales funnel. In this study-cum-testimonial, the couple blogger talks about stages when Sumo came to their rescue. Naturally, if someone from the food blogging community would read about the bloggers’ positive experience, they are likely to look up to Sumo for help too.

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Brian Dean also uses case studies as lead magnets. His case study is about how he boosts traffic on his website by 110%!

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7. E-books

E-books are comprehensive and have more in-depth content. They help brands establish themselves as thought leaders by demonstrating that they understand how their industry functions. In this regard, it isn’t surprising why Neil Patel roots for them too.

Generally, people tend to download them because they are detailed and informative as compared to let’s say a cheat sheet or a checklist. So, if you are writing one then it is important you focus on one SPECIFIC problem and provide an answer to readers who are still at the top-of-the-funnel. Moreover, keep it interactive by using images, graphics and using a more engaging tone of voice. Wondering where to begin? Recycle your best content and blogs. You will be ready with an e-book in no time!

Here’s an example of how Jeff Bullas makes a strong case for his ebook by telling people that this ebook has the “exact tactics” he used to attract 5 million visitors a year! The value proposition is quite clear, supported by numbers.

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8. Guides

Guides are similar to e-books except they are lengthier. But, as of now, there’s no fixed formula to its size because we’ve seen “ultimate guides” which are quite detailed and include explanations with screenshots and step-by-step instruction and also mini-guides that are concise. According to Hubspot, “an Ultimate Guide is a comprehensive collection of the best articles about a particular subject. The main difference between this and a mini ebook is that you are not recycling posts from your own blog but rather linking directly to other sites. In any case, their purpose remains the same i.e. serve as a TOFU lead magnet and educate users.

Here’s an example of a guide from HubSpot. The copy on the landing page says that it has been downloaded by over 54,000 marketers and that it has free and invaluable advice from best-selling author David Meerman Scott! Enough social proof to make people download the guide anyway!

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Another example of a guide on Lithium’s website. It clearly states what the user will learn from this guide. Also, the copy addresses the prospects directly by using pronouns like “you” and “yours”, hence persuasive.

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So, there you go. Nine lead magnet examples that will surely help you learn how to keep your sales funnel full. Use these lead magnets in combination. This way your funnel will be full of quality leads and you will eventually succeed in making them the customers as well as brand evangelists!

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2 Comments

  1. I’m loving these posts, keep them coming! Getting really into interactive content for scalable links and virality. I don’t know why more people don’t create them!

    By the way, I’m already a subscriber, but haven’t logged in to the site in awhile. Couldn’t remember Outgrow’s name for the life of me. Took like 10 minutes of Googling and found nothing – you may want to work on that! I’m not seeing you on many lists on 3rd party sites.

    Had to dig into my old Appsumo email to find your name!

  2. Hi Joe, thank you for your kind words.

    Also, really appreciate your feedback on not being able to find us on Google. We’re working on improving that 🙂

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