Things To Consider Before Starting a Lead Magnet Challenge

Thinking about launching a lead magnet challenge, but want to make sure you’re actually doing it correctly? You’re in the right place.

Lead magnet challenges are incredibly powerful when it comes to converting warm leads into high-quality clients that stick.

From allowing your audience to learn about your business in a non-salesy way and showcasing the value of your services to increasing client trust and brand awareness, the possibilities of lead magnet challenges are endless.

Major bonus: once you have it all set up on ScoreApp, you can let the automated emails do the work for you.

Here’s how it goes:

Create a branded landing page to catch your target audience’s attention
Ask them a series of questions to gauge whether they’re the right fit
Integrate with your existing email platform to send daily challenge modules

Of course, before going ahead and starting your challenge, there are a few questions you’ll want to ask yourself first. Think of this as a fail-safe ‘checklist’ to ensure you’re going to get the most out of any time, energy, and resources you put into the process.

Read on to understand everything you need to consider before launching a successful lead magnet challenge that delivers real results.

1. What’s your objective?

Having a clear objective in mind is key when it comes to creating your challenge. Just like how you need scaffolding to build a strong house, your challenge needs to be built around an objective to become a robust lead generation tool.

For example, if you’re a food content creator launching a book, you’ll want to create an email list to keep people in the know and encourage book sales. Your challenge will then include tasters of the recipes along with your specialist culinary tips to give participants a taste of the pie.

Ask yourself: What do I want to achieve with this challenge? Am I aiming to build an email list, nurture leads, or establish authority?

This will give you the vital information for staying on track with the challenge ahead.

2. Who is your target audience?

Knowing your target audience is the second crucial stage of building a lead generation challenge. It actually ties in nicely with the above point, as it fills in the gaps between your starting point and your final objective with content that cuts through.

For example, if you’re a life coach and your target audience is people wanting to improve their self-development, you’ll be able to create content based around how they can maximise their potential – plus, what’s holding them back.

Ask yourself: Who is my ideal participant? What are their biggest pain points, and how will this challenge address them?

Once you’ve got a clear picture of who they are, you can get started on planning the topics your challenge will cover.

3. Is your content compelling and actionable?

By this point, you might have some idea of what content you’d like to include. Perhaps you have a few downloadable templates in mind, and a video introduction to show your participants what to expect. These modules touch on your audience’s pain points. This is all great!

However, it’s important to make sure the content is enough for your audience to stay engaged. Participation drop-offs are one of the most common problems with lead generation challenges – and not enough actional content is often the culprit.

Prioritise including a variety of content to keep things fresh and making sure your audience have plenty to crack on with during each day of the challenge. You can do this through worksheets, quizzes, and virtual breakout rooms, where your participants can share their thoughts.

Ask yourself: Does my content provide clear, actionable steps that solve a specific problem?

4. What’s the optimal duration and structure?

Defining a clear time frame from the get-go is essential for keeping people on track. This also avoids lack of engagement – after all, many of us work better when we know there’s a deadline to hit.

Consider the number of days you want your challenge to run for, for optimum participant engagement. This will depend on how much content you want to include. If your topic is complex and requires more days to break everything down into digestible modules, aim for 10 days. This would work great if you own accountancy software and want to walk small business owners through the ins and outs of managing finance in business.

Or, if you’d rather keep it short and sweet, opt for a five-day challenge. This will give your audience a strong feel for your expertise without demanding too much of their time.

Your best bet? Nail down the first three questions, and let that inform your challenge time frame and structure.

Ask yourself: How many days should this challenge run to keep engagement high? What’s the best structure for delivering the content?

5. How will you draw people in?

Of course, giving your audience a reason (or multiple reasons!) to join will significantly help increase sign-ups. You can do this through both landing pages and quizzes using ScoreApp.

When building your landing page, be sure to include:

A relevant hero image that represents your services
A catchy headline and subheading
Simple bullet pointed text for quicker reading
A clear call to action (CTA) that prompts people to sign up

This is the first thing your audience will see, so be sure to use it wisely! Looking for some landing page inspiration? Head here.

You can also set up a quiz that asks your audience a series of questions to help them understand what their biggest challenge is – and how you can help. Keep them short and easy to complete (to prevent people from getting bored early on).

Before building a landing page or quiz, think about how you can make them as appealing to your target audience as possible – both in design and content.

Ask yourself: How can I make the entry points to my challenge (like the landing page or quiz) engaging and enticing?

6. How can you add even more value?

You’re already giving your audience a ton of value by offering your expertise on their biggest pain points, but why stop there?

The more you give your participants, the more likely they are to take things further by investing in your services.

Assessments and scorecards are highly effective for letting participants reflect on where they’re at. And they show you’re there to help them. So, don’t hold back on adding that extra touch of personalisation!

Ask yourself: Could I include an assessment or scorecard that provides additional insights for participants and boosts engagement?

7. What is your follow-up strategy?

It’s not uncommon for business owners to experience the highs of a great challenge, just to feel disappointed when they see their clients have lost interest.

Poor follow-up after a challenge can lead to a lack of connection and conversation between you and your audience. That’s why it’s important to include a strong follow-up strategy, ready to roll out as soon as your challenge ends.

While this might sound like *another* task to add to your never-ending list, the pay-off makes that extra planning so worth it. Plus, once you’ve set it all up with ScoreApp’s automated emails, you won’t need to think about it again.

Ask yourself: What follow-up sequence will nurture the participants after the challenge ends? How will I continue the conversation with them?

8. How will you measure success?

Once you’ve created your challenge (especially if it’s your first one), you’ll want to continue refining and tweaking to give your participants the best possible experience.

This is the perfect time to consider the metrics for figuring out how effective your challenge is. If you’re an analytics fiend, you can dig into the insights to see which type of content performs the best, and where people’s engagement tends to be the highest/lowest.

Alternatively, you may prefer to create a short survey for your participants to complete once they’ve finished the challenge. This will give them the opportunity to be honest, so be sure to emphasise how important their feedback is to you.

From there, you can go ahead and make any improvements as and when you feel it’s right.

Ask yourself: What metrics should I track to evaluate how effective the challenge is? How will I gather and analyse feedback?

9. What’s the call to action?

Looping back to question one, the call to action at the end of your challenge is like a ‘golden buzzer’ ready for your participants to hit. (Just make sure it leads people to your final objective!)

Ask yourself: What’s the main action I want participants to take after the challenge? How can I encourage them to take this next step?

For example, if you’re wanting to increase brand awareness and gain trust with your audience, you may want to send people to your private Slack or Facebook page, where people can join your community and talk to both you and other participants.

Or, if you want to nurture leads, you could direct them to a calendar, where they can book a free 30-minute call to discuss their needs and how you can support them.

A results page is a perfect way to do this. Here, instead of pushing the CTA straight at your leads, you can display their results and scores in an engaging way before leading them to the next steps. Find out more about results pages with ScoreApp here!

Create your lead generation challenge with ScoreApp

We created ScoreApp to support entrepreneurs and business owners to unlock their lead generation potential.

Our tools include:

Landing page templates ready for you to customise
Pre-qualifying quizzes so you can identify which visitors are right for your brand
Results pages that offer true value to your audience
Automated email marketing so you can sit back and relax