The bottom line is if you do not know how to grow your audience and if you don’t get in front of enough people, you really don’t have a business because you don’t have enough people to sell to. Creating an irresistible lead magnet is one of the best ways to grow your audience and increase sales.
Did you know it takes 7- 10 touches before a customer is ready to buy?
This post may contain affiliate links which means I may receive a commission if you click a link and purchase something that I’ve recommended – at no extra cost to you, of course. As an Amazon Associate, I earn from qualifying purchases. You can check out my disclosures here.
Building and scaling your business is so much more than having a profitable lead magnet. There is an actual system that you need to create and implement in order for you to be able to grow your business the way you want. It’s about creating and implementing a system that helps automate and delegate the sales process.
Many of us have had to learn the hard way (which takes a lot of time). This is super frustrating and something you want to prevent as a new entrepreneur if you can.
This is a step-by-step guide that’ll give you 5 steps on how to create an irresistible lead magnet!
What is a lead magnet?
A lead magnet is valuable content that you give away for free in order to get the email address of your ideal target audience.
A crucial part of any marketing strategy—from social media to email blasts and landing pages—is offering value upfront with the hope that people will turn into customers.
A lead magnet helps do this by giving something away free, so potential buyers feel more inclined to buy from you later on after getting your decoy product for nothing initially.
A lead magnet, or “freebie,” attracts your ideal audience and shows them you offer what they want and need. A good quality lead magnet will make it much easier for you to convert ideal customers into customers.
How can my small business make money?
3 Elements of Profitable Business
- Your skills, experience & knowledge
- A profitable problem
- People that are willing and able to pay you to solve it
Step 1 - Choose a Profitable Problem
Ask yourself . . . What are people willing to pay for?
If you give something away that your target audience doesn’t need, it’ll be useless. The best way to get people interested in your product is by giving them a solution to their problems. You can build your audience with lead magnets that solve a problem and/or answer a question they have about that problem.
What is the problem your content, product, and/or service actually solves?
This is important because this can make or break your lead magnet. Remember that you have to focus on the actual problem and not what you are gonna do.
These are some things people will definitely pay someone to:
- Make money
- Save money
- Save time
- Look & feel better
- Not feel embarrassed or ashamed
- To level up their life/business
- For status
Now, ask yourself . . . Who is willing and able to pay you to solve that problem?
This goes back to knowing your ideal customer avatar. If you have already completed the ideal customer avatar worksheet, great! If you have NOT, I highly recommend you go here and do that before going any further.
Step 2 - Create a Highly Profitable Lead Magnet
A profitable lead magnet is the best way to grow your email list. The lead magnet you offer significantly impacts your sales or lead generation funnel. It should always be relevant to where the subscriber is in the buying cycle. If it addresses where your audience is in the buying cycle, then they’re more likely to buy from you.
3 Goals of an Effective Lead Magnet
Your lead magnets should:
- Deliver valve (based on where they are in the buyer’s cycle)
- Increase the know, like, and trust factor
- Get them to take the next step
Most lead magnets don’t work because . . .
- They don’t solve a problem
- Doesn’t connect to your offer
- Not enough people see it
5 Lead Magnet Models
5 different perspectives of an effective lead magnet:
Awareness – Does your ideal avatar know what problem they have? It might be that you need to make it clear to them.
Educate – What it is and what the benefits are. (ex., a mini-course, cheatsheet, or webinar)
Evaluation – How are they going to be evaluated? (ex. a checklist or quiz)
Decision Making – Are you showing any results? Social proof? Call to Action? If you don’t have social proof, you can tell your story and how your offer has worked for you. If you haven’t done it for yourself, find someone fast and do it for them.
Conversion – Getting people to take the next extra step. (ex., webinar, masterclass, or live challenge).
Other posts that may be helpful:
Step 3 - Design an Effective Sales Funnel
What is a sales funnel?
A sales funnel is basically the buyer’s journey. When a consumer goes through the purchasing process, beginning with an interest in something you’re offering.
Without a sales funnel, you won’t see the conversion rate you deserve.
Your sales funnel is a system that allows you to increase the number of leads for your business. It’s basically a series of steps that guide customers through the process of purchasing from you – it’s the actual process of getting your prospects to buy from you.
What are the two types of a marketing funnel?
There’s a sales funnel and a lead generation funnel.
When creating a marketing strategy for your business, you have to determine the purpose of your funnel and which type of funnel you’re gonna be using. For example . . .
- Is your sales funnel gonna grow your email list?
- Is your sales funnel gonna sale a product or service?
- Are you trying to generate leads?
10 components an effective sales funnel must have
1 - The Purpose of Your Funnel
What is it that you want them to do?
A sales funnel is one way to streamline your marketing efforts leading up to closing deals. It starts with the initial contact, like offering a lead magnet, sending emails, and/or attending an event.
This sets everything off on the right foot because it’s all about building relationships before selling, so both parties know exactly what they’re getting into from day one. Next comes lead nurturing, which focuses on giving customers who have expressed interest and continued attention by improving the know, like, and trust factor.
2 - Target Audience
Who are you targeting for this funnel? When offering content, products, and/or services, you have to understand your ideal target audience. You need to know who the individuals are and what they’re looking for to design something that will meet their needs.
3 - Opt-in Offer
To understand an opt-in offer, we first need to define some critical related terms. An “opt-in” means you’re agreeing to something. This agreement is between two parties. One side is giving up personal information so they may receive offers from the other party.
4 - One Time Offer [aka Tripwire]
A tripwire is a product offered to your potential customers at an extremely low price. It usually costs less than $20 and is used as an upsell. The idea behind this tactic is simple. . . If people are already buying from you, why not get them to spend more?
5 - High Ticket Upsells
A high ticket upsell is a sales technique that offers an expensive product or service to the customer after they have already made several small purchases. It’s called “upselling” because it moves customers from one stage of their buying cycle into another.
6 - Down Sells
A down sell, or cross-sell as it’s sometimes called, involves offering different products and services alongside your main selling point rather than just focusing on that single item.
7 - Additional Products and Offers
There are many ways to increase revenue and/or brand awareness, but one way is through additional products or offers. These could be something offered by a different business (i.e. an affiliate offer), or it could be something you own.
8 - Traffic Sources
A traffic source is a marketing channel that sends individuals to your website. Effective traffic sources include search engines [ie. Pinterest, Google], social media platforms, and content sites like blogs or news outlets.
A good traffic source is “gold” to any business. It mainly allows companies to reach their target audience for their business goals, like increasing sales conversions.
9 - Strategic Partners
Strategic partners are essential because they allow companies to share resources and achieve their goals more effectively.
The reason why strategic partnerships work is that both parties can pool together the necessary resources needed for them to accomplish a goal or task more effectively.
10 - Tracking
Tracking the performance of a sales funnel (for everything, to be honest) allows you to determine if your marketing strategies are effective. The more conversions in each step, the better you can increase revenue and reach other business growth goals.
With this data, you can adjust your approach by focusing on particular parts of the process where you may lose potential customers.
Step 4 - Drive Traffic to Your Sales Funnel with Qualified Leads
You can’t just create a great lead magnet and expect people to come in droves. If you want your lead magnet to succeed, you have to invest something into driving traffic to it. Whether it’s time, money, and/or energy – without much effort, you won’t reach enough people to get enough sales.
3 Types of Traffic for Effectively Marketing Content, Products and/or Services
1 . Organic Traffic – is basically the number of people who visit your website [or 3rd party platform] without help from paid ads. This is usually done with content marketing.
- Pros: Make a close connection, very personable.
- Cons: Slow. Takes a long time. Requires a lot of work.
2. Leverage or Borrowed Traffic (OPP) – this is an extremely effective method. You will need to reach out to sources that already have established a target audience (that’s aligned with your ideal target audience). This could be a guest on a podcast, guest blogging, being featured via HARO, etc. Just be sure to direct them to one of your landing pages – not your homepage.
- Pros: Just show up, easy to do
- Cons: You have to make sure you build relationships and choose the right audience
3. Paid Traffic – there are many options to pay for traffic. [ie. Pay to be introduced to someone’s email list, Google Ads, TikTok, Pinterest, LinkedIn, YouTube Ads, Facebook & Instagram, etc]
- Pros: Faster results. Once set up correctly, the algorithm works for you.
- Cons: Takes skill & some patience & time. There’s a learning curve. You need to learn how to do it or paid someone to do it.
Step 5 - Convert Leads Into Paying Clients
Your marketing goal is to get them from interested to I’m in!
This is where it all comes together. A lucrative lead magnet initiates the journey and interests your ideal client avatar. The system you have in place after that lead magnet is what gets them to say, “I’m in and wanna buy.”
Next Steps for Creating an Irresistible Lead Magnet
Creating a profitable lead magnet can be a game-changer for your business; however, it’s only a piece of the puzzle. If you need help brainstorming or looking for someone to create one for you, schedule a free 15-minute discovery call.