By now, you’re probably wondering what all the hype is around lead magnets.
Marketers keep talking about how awesome they are. Business owners keep claiming it’s brought their companies so much money.
Let’s see what all the hype is about.
A lead magnet is an incentive that’s offered to potential customers in exchange for their email addresses or other contact information. Your targets opt-in because you have what they want. That is a major key when it comes to the inception of your sales funnel. You have to provide something of value to your potential customers. You can’t expect to put out any old garbage and expect people to give you their contact information for your dumpster fire of a product. Value is the most important thing here. Customers love value and are willing to pay for it. (tips for a future post: don’t underprice your services, you’ll regret it, I promise)
When it comes to driving traffic and developing your sales funnel, having an effective lead magnet is crucial. If your lead magnet is weak, there’s a good chance your sales will be weak also.
Follow our advice and you’ll avoid the pitfalls of a struggling sales cycle. Your lead magnet is typically the first opportunity for potential customers to interact with your brand. First impressions last a lifetime. Give your potential clients something worth having.
Converting interest into sales isn’t as complicated as some gurus make it out to be.
For starters, your marketing funnel is the first step to acquiring new potential customers.
Before we go any further, let’s define a sales funnel.
According to our friends at Optimonk, a sales funnel can be described in four steps. First, there’s the contemplation of purchase. This is where the potential customers pin your product or service against other competitors.
The next step of the sales funnel is the narrowing. After your potential clients have been introduced to their choices, they begin to evaluate their options based on potential value received.
Following the narrowing, is the purchase. After customers have gathered enough information to make a choice, they usually do.
Again, this choice is based on value. Unfortunately, or fortunately, many business owners try to lower their prices instead of increasing their value to reel in customers.
BIG NO NO. If your product or service is good, it’s good.
Charge a reasonable price and beat your competitors on value, not price. Competing on terms of price is a sure fire way to get stuck with cheap clients you don’t want.
After your client has made their purchase, that’s where the real work begins: retention and the post-experience. Imagine if Walmart were only able to get shoppers to visit their store once. They would be out of business. If you can’t get your clients to order your products and services more than once, you’ll be out of business. Post-purchase service and customer experience make all the difference in the sales cycle.
Now that we understand what a sale cycle looks like, we’ll briefly touch on the marketing funnel and how that simply ties into your lead magnet.
If you can picture a literal funnel, imagine the top half of the funnel as the marketing portion and the bottom part as the sales portion.
Before thinking about your sale, you have to pique your clients’ interest. This is marketing. This will be your lead magnet.
Across the board, humans are fairly similar (debatable). Offer somebody something of value and you’ve captured their attention. In today’s digital age, we’re simply day trading attention – your pull does not last longer than for a few seconds or minutes if you’re lucky (thanks for that Gary Vee). If you’re skilled and creative enough (or hire a team that is), you can capture their attention. What you do next with their attention depends on your funnel.
When you’re marketing, you put out a series of advertisements meant to entice potential buyers to barter their information for your whatever you’re offering. When someone converts and opts-in to your lead magnet, they’ve now become a part of your sales funnel.
Because of this opt-in from your lead magnet, they’re now what we consider a “hot lead.” At this point, they’re much likelier to buy.
Good job.
Now that you’ve managed to to to push someone through your funnel, you have a much better indicator of what things attract your ideal client. You can now refine your process, strengthen your funnel and attract more of the right leads to it. Improving your funnel and continuously putting out lead magnets that entice potential leads to barter their contact information helps build your credibility. As a business owner, getting potential clients to know, like and trust your brand is the key to building authority and becoming the leader in your industry.
The point of your lead magnet is to introduce your potential clients to the solution you can offer to their problem without solving it completely. Your lead magnet and accompanying funnel primes your client to buy and literally funnels them into your sales pipeline so that you can close the lead and gain their business.
