What is a Lead Magnet? 10 Types and 5 Examples to Know
These days, there is no love at first sight in marketing.
It’s very difficult to win over a customer with just a brief promotion of a product or service—especially if your company is small or just starting out.
To win the heart of the consumer, you’re going to need to put in some effort.
Today, we’re going to talk about the lead magnet, also known as a digital bait or valuable content.
As the name suggests, the lead magnet is a lead magnet.
It grabs the attention of your prospect with an offer they can’t resist—it offers value to the reader, for their professional or personal life.
Ready to win over your customer in the best way? 🤔
Follow the article and start understanding what a lead magnet is!
What is a lead magnet?
A lead magnet—digital bait in Portuguese—is an inbound marketing strategy.
It uses materials and offers to capture the attention of your prospect or website visitor by offering something in exchange for their contact details.
These materials can be various things and vary depending on the strategy, segment, business model, etc.
To mention a few examples:
- Discount code;
- Webinar;
- White paper;
- E-book;
- Ready-made templates;
- Infographics;
- Basic free tools;
Among many other types of materials used, and even those that haven’t been created yet!
It’s much harder to generate leads without a material acting as a lead magnet.
Few people leave their contact information without anything in return, except in direct cases, like requesting a quote or contacting the company.
The point is that the number of people who leave their contact information in these situations is very low.
The lead magnet, within the inbound strategy, helps your company generate many more leads.
To learn more about what to do, let’s look at more types of valuable content and dive deeper into each one.
Checklist ready? ✅
🔎Also read: What is a Sales Funnel? Stages, Methods, and 9 Tools
What are the Types of Digital Bait/Lead Magnets?
As I mentioned above, any material available for free that captures information from your prospects and visitors is a lead magnet.
However, the concept of valuable content encompasses various types of formats.
Here in the article, I’ve selected the 10 most common ones.
See which one fits best with your strategy, okay?
🔎Also read: Marketing Techniques: The 20 Best to Attract Customers
E-books
Who here has never downloaded an e-book?
This format is very common, as well as versatile, objective, and educational.
That is, it’s ideal for the top of the funnel.
Typically, e-books are offered with banners throughout your company’s blog posts.
The idea is that they align with what the reader is researching, and the e-book is an opportunity to delve deeper into the subject.
By the way, this is just one of the techniques to generate more leads through a blog.
We have several others gathered in the link below, check it out:
Reports on your segment
Tell me, who hasn’t looked for data related to their work segment?
After all, it helps in content production, strategy planning, setting future goals, and objectives.
You can do like Leadster, in the Lead Generation Panorama, and offer the free material on your website, in your blogs, or go further: create exclusive paid media campaigns for them.
This type of material actually deserves a bigger investment.
The campaign in paid media is essential to generate more leads, especially if the chosen keyword has a reasonable price.
To learn more about this, I invite you to read our dedicated article on the topic: Paid Media: The Complete Guide.
Product offers
Who doesn’t like a good discount or special offers?
Create unique offers for those who fill in their contact information, or for those who answer questions on your contact channels, for example.
In addition to discounts, you can also give coupons for other companies that are partners with your business.
Free tools
You know those link shorteners, character counters, and specific metric calculators?
Well, these are some examples of great free tools for capturing leads, as they make your job easier.
Leadster itself has a digital bait like this; we’re talking about the Lead Calculator!
With it, you compare your website’s conversion rate with your competitors, and you also discover how your performance is doing.
Infographics
Many times, the user is looking for specific information but doesn’t want to go through long and complex articles.
That’s where infographics come in.
This type of lead magnet gathers important information in an objective way, with good design that makes it easier to visualize and understand the data.
Free trial
The lead might not always be ready to make a purchase; they might have doubts and also that curiosity to know how your product or service works in practice.
That’s why you should invest in free trials!
These lead magnets capture the necessary user information and also serve as a great lead qualifier.
Usually, the goal of a middle-of-the-funnel lead nurturing flow is to guide them towards the free trial.
Every lead you get through this type of lead magnet has already advanced considerably in the sales funnel, reducing your cost and increasing the chances of a sale.
Telegram or WhatsApp Groups
Groups on social networks are a great digital bait, especially to strengthen and make your relationship with users more direct.
I’m not talking about communities just for questions but also to share news, promote discussions, offer unique promotions to participants, etc.
Webinars
Webinars are great for educating your audience, capturing their information, and also showing that your brand has authority on the topic discussed.
This type of material can be done live—and then shared—featuring guests, answering audience questions, sharing knowledge, and the best part: all for free!
Free classes
Sharing knowledge is always a good technique to surprise and win over your audience, especially if you do it for free.
Your free classes and courses are also ways to strengthen your authority, in addition to proving that you understand the subject.
Template or framework
Why not make your audience’s life easier?
That’s what templates and frameworks do: they eliminate manual and repetitive work, delivering a ready-made model to be followed, just needing to fill in the necessary information.
Leadster has several types of frameworks and templates, one of them being the Ideal Customer, Persona, and Target Audience Framework.
In it, you understand each of the concepts, differentiate them, and also check out practical examples, so don’t miss it!
How to create a High Conversion Lead Magnet?
It may not seem difficult to create a lead magnet, but for it to have a high conversion rate, you need to pay attention to some points we’ve listed here.
The truth is that executing a lead magnet isn’t that difficult.
A one-week sprint can already deliver great material.
What differentiates a good lead magnet is the preparation that goes into it. I have some more tips about that, follow along:
Your Lead Magnet Needs to Be Useful
Your lead magnet needs to offer real value and solve a problem for your prospect; otherwise, it serves no purpose.
Make sure your lead magnet addresses the needs of your users.
A tip is to think about two things when creating the material: Is it interesting? And how does it help my reader in their daily life?
It Needs to Have Credibility
Don’t become just another ebook, another infographic, webinar, etc.
Invest in unique, reliable, personalized, precise, and up-to-date information so that the user has confidence in accessing it.
🤿 Dive Deeper: AI content creation: how to do it?
It Needs to Be Shareable
Always include social media sharing buttons, email options, and allow link copying so that your leads can continue spreading the article.
This is because the internet is full of materials like this.
Every day, regular users encounter at least one offer of rich material for download.
When your lead magnet has authority and credibility, sharing will help you reach even more people.
And by helping these people, they will also share it.
A great example is HubSpot’s State of Marketing.
More than just a simple ebook, it has become an authority in the digital marketing segment.
So many people shared the first editions that today it even appears on news sites!
It Needs to Be Well-Made
Create a lead magnet that you would personally want to access.
In other words, ensure that your lead magnet is well-designed and easy to read.
Use clear and concise language, avoiding technical jargon—unless necessary.
Also, invest in images and graphics to make the article even more attractive.
It Needs to Meet the Lead’s Expectations
Don’t mislead your audience!
If you promised a solution to a specific problem when offering your material, make sure you deliver what is expected.
Otherwise, you will frustrate your lead, and they will no longer trust your company.
To avoid this type of situation, be realistic: don’t make promises that can’t be kept or offer materials that are beyond your reach.
Do you know which lead magnets you’ll create for your company?
It’s also very important to have a functional strategy to convert people on your materials. And the best today is for sure conversational marketing.
Test Leadster today and give chatbots a shot! They will automatically qualify any lead you generate through Lead Magnets – way better than forms.
Just click on the link and start your free trial today.
Thanks for reading, and if you have any questions, leave a comment—we answer them all!
