I hear this all the time from prospects and our readership. Have you heard this before?

• WEBSITE TRAFFIC IS LOW: “Our website sucks! It’s not getting any traffic, and it doesn’t capture any leads for our sales team.”
• BLOGGING ISN’T WORKING: “We putting in tons of resources and effort into blogging but isn’t paying off.”
• PROSPECTING ISN’T WORKING: “Our sales teams are having a very difficult time getting the attention of new prospects. We can find active buyers. And, what used to work, no longer does.”

If you are experiencing any of these issues, well read on… There are millions of way to market your products and/or services. While you may here terms like inbound marketing, content marketing, and account-based marketing but what does it all mean? The concept is simple, it works, and it works for every company. Unlike some outbound marketing techniques. The ideas is to attract, content, engage, and convert people that are searching for your stuff. Simple right? Not so fast.

There are a lot of components to make it successful including positioning, messaging, content creation, promotions, nurturing, and technology to name a few. A well tuning lead generation machine is not a trivial task. So let dig into one of the critical components to make your lead generation system work: Lead Magnets.

What Are Lead Magnets

If you’re not familiar with the term, a “lead magnet” is something you give away for the purpose of attracting potential customers (“leads”). It could be a free report, a webinar, a template, or something else that will persuade a person to give you their contact info.

In other words, it’s something you give to a website visitor or social media connection so you can collect their email address or any other contact information you might need.

Spend enough time in the digital marketing world and you’ll notice that even the term lead magnet has a lot of variations to it. Chances are you’ve also heard the term lead magnet as a “free gift”, an “giveaway”, and an “incentive.”

You need lead magnets if you want to convince people to not only give you their email address but also drive them down your entire marketing funnel.

This allows you to turn your most skeptical leads into brand evangelists. But think about lead nurturing and use lead magnets to help you educate your audience with their current problems.

Keeping track of potential leads is important, especially considering that less than 5% of visitors to your website will make a purchase on their first visit. 

But creating a signup form for your blog updates isn’t enough to draw volumes of new leads. More and more people are using feed aggregators (e.g., Feedly or Pulse) to read their favorite blogs, making signing up for email updates seem pointless.

Incorporating some different lead magnets into your marketing campaign, on the other hand, can help you capture more than 75% of your web traffic as leads.

Here are 12 different lead magnet ideas that you can use to drive dramatic results.

1. Report

Special reports are one of the most popular lead magnet ideas. The best ones offer relevant educational material or useful data that target audiences can use. If you are a marketing leader, you have to read this State of Inbound by Hubspot (@Hubspot).

This report is cited in content across the internet, and social channels all year round.

It’s worth the effort because the Hubspot marketing team gets information all year round from people that are interesting in learning more about how to improve their inbound marketing automation platform and this report explains the key issues all marketing leaders are experiencing including the top key issues.

This report is not evergreen content because it’s published in 2015. Therefore, it has a limited shelf life. Anything written about this year’s current events, for example, is not evergreen content because it will become obsolete in the following months and the keywords used with the topic will end up in the SEO graveyard, never to be searched again. Evergreen content typically does not have a shelf life.

Here is another example of a report from Abode. Click on the report to get it.

2. How-To Video Tutorial

“How-to” content is valuable for your audience, which makes it a great lead magnet. How-to content are great lead magnets for the awareness and consideration stage in the buying cycle.

Develop a list of critical issues your target audience is trying to solve. Then create useful content that will help training and educate them to remove their issue. Content like this also will position you as an expert on the subject matter.

Check out Michael Koehler (@michaelkohler20) how to video’s on YouTube. Here’s a great about "Google Analytics Tutorial For Beginners" - How to Use Google Analytics.

Your audience has a problem, and you have the answer; all they need to hand over is their email address to get access to the tutorial.

3. Free Webinar

Offer a free webinar that brings value to your audience. Anyone can attend by registering.

Here’s one webinar lead magnet about the Buyers Journey hosted by HubSpot (@hubspot) and Matrix Marketing Group (@mmgtweets).

Or sign up on my friend’s, David Garland (@TheRiseToTheTop), and learn how to David reveals the "5 Steps to Creating A Course That SELLS." Enter your email for a step-by-step breakdown of the EXACT strategy he used to generate six-figures with his Create Awesome Interviews course.

4. Slides From a Webinar

Once your webinar is over, you can still use it to attract more leads.

Write a blog post or information page about it, and offer readers access to the slides in exchange for their contact information. And consider promotion it on LinkedIn’s SlideShare. Grab the buyer's journey slide here>>>

5. Discount/Coupon

If you’re an online retailer, discounts and coupons can be a valuable lead magnet.

You could offer customers 20% off on their first purchase, for example. This will get them to sign up, and encourage a conversion. Then, you can continue to market to them via email.

And even if they abandon their cart and don’t make a purchase. 

6. Assessment or Test

Even if the prospect is not ready to buy, audiences would love to get some personalized information about how they can benefit from your products and services.

So, offer an assessment of free consultation in exchange for signing up.

Matrix Marketing Group put together a Marketing Performance Grader:

When a person clicks on the ‘GET STARTED’ button above it take them to the land page below.

7. Exclusive Podcast

IF you’re considered an authority in your niche, people will be interested in getting access to your exclusive content, such as a podcast.

For our friend Amy Porterfield (@AmyPorterfield) this is the main part of her marketing strategy:

8. Infographic

Most marketers like to make their infographics easily accessible for others to share and integrate into their own content. Infographics are often available as a downloadable image and embeddable code. 

Instead of giving it all away for free, you can turn some of these components into a lead magnet. Offer a high-resolution copy or the embeddable code by asking for an email address. Here’s one from Statista (@StatistaCharts)  and Forbes (@Forbes).

9 Calendar or Template

It’s pretty simple to put together a helpful template or calendar in a spreadsheet that your audience would find useful. 

Offer it as a lead magnet, like this Social Media Planning Template.

10. Plugin

If your business is online, a plugin is the perfect lead magnet. Take the content amplification platform AddThis (@addthis).

Their plugin is one of the most popular social sharing widgets for WordPress websites. But it works on HTML website as well.

The plugin is free, but they also offer a wide range of other services – that they can now easily market to the plugin’s users.

11. Event Recordings

If your brand is hosting a high-profile event, the recordings can be used as a valuable lead magnet.

It’s a way to expand beyond marketing to the event’s attendees – using the recordings as a lead magnet will help you target others who were interested in attending, but couldn’t. See more here.

12. Add Click-to-Tweet into Blog Posts

If you have a great blog post or high-quality article that your audience might want to share add an image with code from Click-to-Tweet to get more shares and pull reader back to your website or content.

Offer it to them as a downloadable PDF, as seen here on our website. Try it be clicking on the images below.

Conclusion

As this list shows, there are many different ways to offer small pieces of value to your audience as a lead magnet.

And considering how valuable that audience’s contact information is for moving them down the sales funnel, we as marketers should constantly be looking for new and unique ways to get them to sign up.

Use these 12 different lead magnet ideas as a starting point to inspire the kind of value proposition that will encourage your audience to take action.

Know any examples I forgot? Let me know in the comments below!