Most businesses have a range of products and services, all for different people… so the way you attract leads has to adapt for each.
Have you tried a few lead magnets in the past and found that none have given you that perfect balance across all your customer levels?
If you’re looking to find a magic answer to how many lead magnets you need, then you might be disappointed. It’s not that simple – as it entirely depends on your business, your audience, and your offers.
But the good news is that we’re giving you a detailed guide on how to decide which lead magnets are best for your business – including the right volume. Let’s get started.
What makes a great lead magnet?
Just like everything else, the quality of your lead magnet is the key.
Great lead magnets:
- Focus on one offer – for maximum clarity and impact
- Are relevant to your target audience. You need to know the answers to key customer persona questions like: Who are they? What’s important to them about this purchase? Why are they buying – specifically? Where are they in their customer journey?
- Perfectly represent your brand, specific offer, and its USP
- Are where your target audience can find them: you need to choose the right lead generation channels. There’s no point promoting it on Facebook if everyone’s on LinkedIn.
- Are in your audience’s preferred format: eBook, video course, whitepaper, scored quiz – whichever they’re most likely to click on
- Are the ignition for a fully planned lead generation campaign
- Are consistently optimised using customer data to tweak the details and find new opportunities to scale it
- Demonstrates your expert knowledge by solving their problem with immediately actionable advice
What true value does your lead magnet give your audience?
This is the question you need to start with. What is your audience getting out of sharing their personal details and opinions?
You must know which pain points your offering soothes and what awareness level you’re meeting them at with each lead magnet. It’s the only way to make signing up irresistible.
Lead magnets for different services or products
Part of the guidance around the actual number of lead magnets is based on your offering.
You need a different lead magnet for each product or service because they attract different customers.
What’s fascinating to one audience segment will be ‘meh’ to another.
Using your deep understanding of different brand personas, you can create super-personalised lead magnets for each one.
Example lead magnet: You have a SaaS business
You’re selling accounting software, wrapped up into 2 distinct packages for your 2 main audience segments: individual freelancers and SMEs.
Chosen lead magnet: A scored quiz
For each customer, a quiz might look like this:
- Freelancer package: ‘Are your books self-assessment ready?’
Questions to identify what gaps they have in their financial records, their understanding of self-assessment requirements and tax rebate potential.
In their results, you give them an action plan for what to do in their lowest-scoring area. You also include information about how your software removes the time and hassle from most of these steps, maybe with a ‘first month free subscription’ appetiser.
- SME package: ‘Can you manage your business finances more efficiently?’
Questions around having different systems for different elements (like payroll, book-keeping, tax returns), how much time they spend on finance-related jobs in their working week, and identifying inefficiencies.
Their results report is chock-full of ways for them to immediately improve their worst scoring area. With the logical next step being your software – that does everything from one dashboard.
As you can see from these examples, the customer segment drives the quiz focus and format.
Lead magnets for different awareness levels
You have some prospects who have just identified a problem and are researching possible answers.
You have other prospects who are hovering near the checkout, making the final decision between their two best options.
Each needs a different resource to answer the questions or concerns specific to their stage on the path to purchase.
Customer journey mapping is a way to successfully provide the right lead magnet for each stage of client awareness, for each product or service you offer.
Consider how your customers feel at each stage and how your resources can provide reassurance and education to remove any barriers to the next stage, including:
- Awareness
- Consideration
- Decision
These are the key stages that, ideally, your clients progress through and the key questions you need to understand in order to provide the perfect lead magnet for that stage.
Let’s explain each stage in detail…
Stage: Awareness
Where your customers are in their journey: They first meet your brand. Big smiley wave!
Key question you should ask yourself: Where do most of your clients first hear about you?
Lead magnet example: A scored assessment quiz that tackles a common problem you know your clients have so you can introduce yourself to new leads with something useful.
For example, ‘A spring clean for your sleep’ to help people identify what parts of their sleep habits are contributing to their lack of sleep. Their personalised Sleep Report analyses their answers and gives advice they can act on straight away. Plus, you can also highlight how much value they’ll get by subscribing to your sleep app to help them with all the other areas.
Consideration
Where your customers are in their journey: Research time! Your prospects are researching the product or service they need, your brand, your reputation, and your competition. They’re looking at everything they need to make an informed buying decision.
Key question you should ask yourself: What factors are most important to your ideal clients?
Lead magnet example: A downloadable guide that answers their fundamental question and maybe saves them some research time. For example, whatever business you’re in, a comparison of ‘Which is the best ‘X’ on the market?’
Decision
Where your customers are in their journey: All the research crystallises into a final decision. They either buy from you or a competitor. Bear in mind that there may be a buying team making a negotiated decision, so consider all members’ positions.
Key question you should ask yourself: How do your customers come to their purchase decisions?
Lead magnet example: If you offer a SaaS, you could offer a free trial or demo call to get people who are interested over the line.
For example, ask people to sign up for a 30-day free trial so they can test the software for themselves.
Testing different types of lead magnet formats
Using lead magnets is a ‘test and learn’ process. There’s no repeatable formula that guarantees success. It’s important to accept this attitude of experimentation throughout your whole organisation.
There are loads of different types of lead magnet formats you can use. Some people love reading and hate video – and vice versa. And then there are other people who like a little smattering of everything.
We’re talking about the main pros and cons of a couple of traditional formats you’ll already be familiar with and highlighting some you might not have considered yet.
White papers
White papers and reports give your audience insight into a key industry subject. Producing something like this positions you as a thought leader within the industry and a trusted authority on topics that are hugely relevant to your customers.
Their purpose is to deep-dive into the subject matter, perhaps based on your primary research, and give your unique take in the conclusion.
Downloadable PDFs
It seems like every business is touting a downloadable checklist or 1-pager of some description. They can be useful and reinforce key ways that you help your clients solve their problems, but they’re easy to download and forget to read, so your audience never actually gets any value out of them.
Although downloadable PDFs are quick and simple to create, they don’t inspire a great deal of interaction so are less likely to convert.
Quizzes
A quiz, by definition, is interactive. Your audience invests time and thought into answering questions about themselves and their business on the spot. In return, they get a report that gives them insights into their situation and some immediately actionable advice.
You get an absolute goldmine of data about quiz participation (such as drop-offs and completion rates) for each question. Quizzes are also great to segment your audience based on their answers, and you can use this to send personalised emails.
To easily create great interactive quiz lead magnets, ScoreApp is excellent value, with the ability to plan an entire quiz in 3 minutes. And there’s zero risk to try it for free!
Video mini-courses
In a video mini-course, you share one bit of your expert knowledge with your audience in a maximum of a few hours. This time is chunked into short, manageable videos that you might drip-feed over a few days or weeks.
A clear expectation is set at the start and the audience successfully learns something by the end of your free video mini-course. That might be new information or a practical skill. Great for people who prefer auditory and visual learning experiences, and people can learn at their own speed.
The value of this quick win is obvious. They also get to know you more, as they spend time with you through the camera lens. If you’re using a video mini-course as a lead magnet for selling a longer course, they can see if your content fits their learning style.
Webinars
You can host a live or pre-recorded webinar to share your take on a topic your audience needs help with. Webinars have a high perceived value and really showcase your expertise.
With a webinar as a lead magnet, you are relying on people who sign up to actually attend – and when it’s free, not showing up has little consequence. But even if people don’t show up on the day, you will have their information and can send the recording plus post-webinar sales emails.
Waitlists
A waitlist strategy mitigates the risks of launching a new product or service while giving your subscribers a sense of exclusivity and excitement. On sign-up, your audience gets a valuable offer, like ‘for your eyes only’ early access. This also initiates your corresponding email stream, bringing the hype all the way to launch day.
By adding in some strategic questions with the basic information gathering of your waitlist, you get some invaluable audience insights. Sharpening your ideas in the market using a waitlist is much more successful than trying to do that in your head or the boardroom. It means that if your new thing is going to fail, it fails fast and cheaply. A waitlist lead magnet helps you save money and learn from the process.
See what resonates with your audience
Don’t just release your lead magnets into the world and cross your fingers. As part of the creation process, you set up the metrics you’re going to use to assess their performance.
Look at the data of your lead magnet, like:
- Click-through rates of your CTA or link
- Platform and device analytics
- Feedback and comments
- Conversion rates
- Social media performance – shares, likes, engagements
- Audience demographics
- Completion rates and user drop-off points – How many people finish the quiz? Where do people stop watching the video course?
- Average time spent on your lead magnet
- Repeat participation
All of this data gives you the ability to see which types of lead magnets perform the best with different audience segments, and for promoting different services or products.
Working out how many lead magnets your business needs
There isn’t an optimal number of lead magnets that you need to hit – it’s a process of experimentation.
And one lead magnet won’t power your entire lead generation strategy.
In summary, you need a separate lead magnet for:
- Each of your core services or product levels
- The different awareness levels of the customer’s journey for each
You need to map out the customer’s path to purchase and have lead magnets that guide them towards a sale at every touchpoint.
When it comes to what type of lead magnet, try different formats at different points and see how they perform. Refine them, and keep tweaking.
Create epic lead magnets for your business with ScoreApp
ScoreApp is the perfect partner to create interactive lead magnets for your business. With ScoreApp, you can do so many of these things from your account – and it integrates with your existing email marketing tool.
Get ready-to-go templates to create quizzes, waitlists, video mini-courses, landing pages, and email streams in no time. Create a quiz lead magnet in minutes.
You know you want to give it a go! Create your first ScoreApp lead magnet today – for free!
