Lead Magnet Ideas, Tips, and Best Practices for Social Media Advertising Campaigns

Are you trying to attract customers to your business and wondering how to start the conversation?

The best lead generation funnels start with a lead magnet. 🧲

A lead magnet is an asset of value that helps attract people in your target audience to your business by offering them a small piece of value.

Think about it… every person’s attention is on themselves as they go about their day – thinking about their own problems, thinking about their goals…

The best lead magnets choose one of these topics, which are already top of mind for your prospect. They offer an instant piece of value (something they value) – a quick solution, a tip, an example… in exchange for their email address and contact information.

Lead magnets are the perfect tool for list building, high-value lead generation, and authority building.

Your prospect gets a quick win. They get to know you. And they see your expertise first-hand.

Know, like, and trust… ✅

Strategy

Every new customer starts along with some path to you. The perfect lead magnet attracts them to you and lowers that barrier to entry (‘buy now’ and ‘sign-up’ are high barriers to entry). It also sets the stage for the next steps in the journey, so positioning is important.

The topic should be a problem that your prospect is currently experiencing (a pain point), or an active goal they are working towards.

Therefore, your lead magnet’s first task is awareness – to help your prospect fully understand their situation.

Our ultimate goal is to spur them to buy – where our main product/service can help them fully solve the situation they are in. The only thing that will drive them to get all the way there, is having enough of a reason to do so – a WHY.

The best lead magnets build that desire in the prospect’s mind, which sparks them to take the next step.

EFFECTIVE LEAD MAGNETS:

1. Help them understand their current situation, their problem.
2. Hit on their pain points and explain what will happen if they don’t take action. (You, as the expert, have likely seen their scenario play out many times – they have not seen it yet).
3. Show them the way, the path to you. Tell them the specific next steps to take.
4. Build an attractive, detailed picture of what success looks like (be realistic – you have to deliver on this eventually).

Finally, after your lead magnet delivers on its promise and provides value, it should position your core offer (or a tripwire) as the clear next step in the process. This is often a free consultation, free trial, or demo.

Asset Format

Our goal is to grab their attention and deliver value quickly. Most people are on-the-go… often on their mobile device… with several other notifications pinging in the background (why lead forms work so well)

Therefore, our lead magnet must be easy to understand and easy to opt-in.

• Avoid complicated wording.
• Avoid asking for more information than you need (you usually only need name and email… not my zip code and revenue numbers, collect those at the next step).
• Avoid any hurdles (register for this webinar starting in exactly 2 hours! – ugh…)

The best lead magnets are:

• Checklists
• Cheat sheets
• Guides
• Whitepapers
• eBooks
• Case studies
• Webinars

On webinars, we often avoid calling them webinars – “free training” or “case study” are often better. Webinar seems to suggest a long, boring presentation that both you and your audience don’t want to deal with. Also, you’ll get the most consumption if your videos are instant or on-demand.

The best lengths are:

• PDFs do best at 1-3 pages in length
• Videos between 5-10 minutes.

These lengths long enough to convey real value, but manageable enough to digest (and manageable time to create). Too long and your prospect will put off actually consuming it (put off… and never come back). Downloading without consumption misses out on our ‘know, like, and trust’ opportunity.

Other ideas are blog posts, free trials, and free downloads.

Blog posts are usually easily repurposed into PDFs. And case studies are a great way to illustrate what it’s like to work with you, especially for more complicated B2B services or software.

And when it comes to using it in an advertising campaign, we recommend split testing at least two at a time, so you can compare their performance.

Platform

Facebook is typically a hang-out, kill-time experience – so longer, richer video content in Facebook Ads does work better here, because video is more engaging and can convey more info, faster. Plus, people don’t mind spending some more time watching.

LinkedIn on the other hand… people are using it as a work tool – they’re usually on there with a specific task at hand. They’re job hunting, looking up a prospect of their own, or responding to a message. They have an intention and they get on and off. Therefore, with LinkedIn Ads we find the best performance in quick and easy downloadables. People are less likely to sit through a video.

The Content

Ok, now what goes into this magical lead magnet?

A typical content outline looks like:

1. Cover page – Grab their attention.
2. Introduction – Set the stage, raise awareness, hit pain points, and show them why they should listen to you.
3. Deliver value – Be sure you deliver on your promise… and give your prospect a quick win or a quick ‘aha!’. But keep in mind the lead magnet is just the initial touchpoint and should be just enough to whet their appetite. It shouldn’t be a long-winded novel.
4. Tell them about yourself – Fit in some information about yourself. They want to know who’s telling them this anyway and why they should believe you.
5. Call-to-action – What’s the next action that they should take? Tell them specifically what to do next.
6. Scarcity – What happens if they don’t take action now? Hammer on the pain points. Sell the next step.

Make the content itself digestible by keeping paragraphs short and spaced, using bullet points and lists, and breaking up text with visuals, such as graphs, imagery, or quote callouts.

The worst is opening it up and seeing a giant wall of tiny text. Ain’t nobody want to dig through that!

Design

You don’t get a second chance to make a first impression – so make it a good one.

After your ad, where they likely saw your logo for 15 seconds… This will be the most memorable introduction with your prospect.

Your lead magnet should be nicely formatted and designed. It should carry your branding so that it feels consistent and familiar when they later reach your site, and reach you.

We also recommend using visuals throughout the guide to break up the content and boost retention.

You don’t have to spend a lot on a designer or buy expensive tools. Free tools like Canva are great, or there are people on Fiverr who specialize in transforming your Word Doc into a nice PDF.

Contact information

Make it easy to get ahold of you. A prospect shouldn’t have to dig around to try and find your contact info.

The bottom of each page should have links back to your main site, your email and phone number. We like linking to a calendar or scheduling widget, such as ScheduleOnce or Calendly.

Examples

Sometimes it’s easier to see a few real examples. Here’s a few that we’re using in our campaigns.

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Your Turn

If you need to improve your lead generation efforts, then working on your lead magnet is the best way to reduce your cost/lead and increase your lead flow.

If you need lead magnet ideas, see some of the examples above. Lead magnets help kickstart your relationship with the prospect, build your list, and start your lead nurturing.