An irresistible lead magnet is the one that momentarily grabs the attention of buyer personas and delivers genuine value to them. By winning over your potential customers with a skillfully crafted free offer, you are making them more interested in your paid offers. Conversely, the effect of a lackluster lead magnet will be quite the opposite. In the following article, you’ll learn how to avoid the latter.
Forming Your Buyer Persona
The gravest mistake marketers tend to make with lead magnets is trying to grab the attention of too many people, which is why you should do the exact opposite – your lead magnet has to be ultra-specific to those you want to attract. If your lead magnet is irrelevant to the needs and preferences of your targeted buyer persona, they are hardly going to download it.
Identifying Your Value Proposition
Once you’ve established your target prospects, you need to offer them a convincing reason to get your lead magnet. The quantity of leads your magnet generates depends on the promises you make to your prospective leads. Naturally, the most effective value propositions are about something that your prospect already needs, demanding considerably less persuasion on your part. Instead of attempting to come up with something you think they might want, determine what they already need and provide it.
Giving Your Lead Magnet a Name
Now that you are familiar with what exactly you’re offering and to whom, naming your lead magnet shouldn’t be that hard. In essence, your title is a headline for the value proposition that your buyer persona is interested in. Similar to writing a captivating headline for marketing a blog post or email, the title of your lead magnet can have a huge impact on its conversion rate.
Choosing the Type of Lead Magnet
With the name in place, you now have to decide on the type of lead magnet that will compellingly deliver your value proposition. Here are some pointers to facilitate your selection:
Keeping it simple – An excessively complicated lead magnet simply defeats the purpose. If no one understands what you’re saying, they can’t fully appreciate it. Make sure it’s simple, concise and value-packed.
Focusing on your strengths – Are you comfortable on camera? Video is most likely your format. Camera hates you, but you sure know how to write? Go for an eBook, instead.
Prioritizing rapid consumption – You want to address your buyer persona’s issue ASAP, as this will give them a quick and easy win (which you promised, btw) and move them down your funnel faster. Decide on a format that enables quick delivery and consumption.
The lead magnet options are seemingly countless, but most of them fall under these seven categories:
Resource list/toolkit offers a single, comprehensive piece of reference material that the buyer persona can use repeatedly, without having to browse for all those resources and tools on their own.
Cheat sheet performs well because it provides tactical pieces of information that can save your prospect a considerable amount of time.
Video training is a particularly engaging format, provided that you are confident in front of the camera and know exactly what you can teach.
Discount works best for businesses selling physical products, allowing you to get repeat purchases from your customers.
Quiz is an effective format only if it actually solves a problem. For conversion rate optimization, remember to offer your prospects the opt-in form once they’ve finished the quiz.
Sales material is specific information that the buyer personas already interested your offer use to make a purchasing decision.
Lead magnets are exceedingly common in inbound marketing, for good reason: they can work very well, yielding your business those much-needed conversions. As you work on creating your lead magnet, remember who your prospects are and what are you promising to them. Bearing these two things in mind, the process can actually turn out to be refreshingly straightforward.
Because every industry, business, and audience is different, there is no exact formula for implementing design and copy that will create the perfect landing page. But, there are elements that have proven to work best at attracting attention, educating audiences, and initiating conversions. By using these elements, you can improve the effectiveness and power of your landing pages.
These are the ten elements you must have if you want to create the perfect landing page for your products or services.
1. Concise and Compelling Headline (and Subheading)
A headline is one of the most important pieces of a perfect landing page. It’s also one of the most difficult elements to create because you only have a few words to execute such a big task. A strong landing page headline must be concise while attracting attention and promoting understanding. It must interest and educate audiences in just a few short words. Because this can be difficult to do in one phrase or sentence, the best landing pages also include a supporting subheading that drives the message home.
2. Hero Shot
A “hero shot” is a large, eye-catching image featured at the top of a landing page. Hero shots are essential because you want to quickly convey a message to your audience, and images help people process information up to 60,000 times faster than text alone. So include an image that represents the message you are sharing. Choose a graphic that captures the feelings you want to convey or the results you want to show.
3. Identification of Audience Problems
The perfect landing page helps audiences identify their situation and the problems they are having. It clearly explains the troublesome world that the potential customer is living in which can be fixed by your product or service. Use copy that outlines the complicated issues they experience, the questions they have, or the struggles they face.
4. Expression of Your Solutions
Once you outline the problems your audience has, explain how your product or service provides a solution to those issues. Connect audience problems to your unique positioning statement, and explain how your product or service helps them overcome their obstacles.
5. List of Features and Benefits
After you introduce the larger solution you offer, dive deeper into how you are able to provide those benefits. Outline the features of your products and services and tie each one to the benefit it provides users, customers, and/or clients. Never only list your features. Always link them to benefits so your audience can understand why the features are relevant and important. Also, make this text easy to read, absorb, and scan by highlighting your copy as bullet points or call-out blurbs.
6. Credentials
Once you’ve made a few bold statements about how you help customers solve their problems, prove why you are qualified to do it. The perfect landing page includes credentials that give authority to the person or business offering the products or services. These credentials should include industry awards and recognition, a list of experience, or results data. It may also include logos of brands who have used or benefited from your products or services.
7. Social Proof
In addition to sharing information that shows your audience you know what you’re doing, also include social proof. Social proof is anything that helps your audience see that others are happy with your product or service. It may include testimonials, reviews, and social mentions. Whenever possible, make your social proof even more effective by including pictures of the person who made the comment. Kissmetrics found, “Testimonials are more likely to be believed when they are accompanied by a corresponding picture.”
8. One, Clear Call-to-Action
A landing page is designed to get an audience to take action. The most effective way to accomplish that goal is by using one call-to-action on the page. The perfect landing page doesn’t confuse audiences by pushing them in multiple directions. It’s built around one, clear call-to-action and continually uses copy that guides the audience toward taking that step. Consider the buyer stage your audience is in when they find your landing page, and always end your copy with a phrase that explains what they need to do next to advance through their buyer’s journey.
9. A/B Testing Capabilities
As mentioned at the beginning of this post, there is no exact formula for creating the perfect landing page. Landing pages will perform differently based on industry, audience, and offerings, and slight changes to details like copy, font colors, images, and button sizes can drastically change conversion rates. See this handy infographic on increasing lead conversion for a good primer. Then, so you can’t become complacent with your landing pages. You must continually adjust and test to see what changes make your page more effective. To accurately test your work and find the perfect landing page, use A/B testing tools that allow you to adjust and monitor your changes.
10. Inbound Links Directed to the Landing Page
The last must-have for a landing page has nothing to do with the content on your actual webpage. It has to do with the content on other pages of your website. The perfect landing page is linked to by other pages on your website. Adding inbound links that point to your landing page from other pages on your website will help your landing page get better SEO rankings. More links to a page tell search engines that a page is important. So link to your landing page from other pages on your site using your landing page’s target keyword as the anchor text.
Plug the Perfect Landing Page Into a Complete Digital Strategy
Now that you know how to create the perfect landing page, it’s time to put it to use.
A landing page can’t create results on its own. It needs to be book-ended with a strong strategy to draw traffic to the page and a strategic nurturing process to convert leads into sales and customers.
To learn how to plug your landing page into a complete digital marketing strategy that leads prospects through the entire buyer’s journey, get our free ebook that outlines the process from start to finish.
From time to time, I’m asked to tell companies what lead generation options work for their industry. While I am a big proponent of inbound marketing, there are many viable lead generation options that are effective — from trade shows, to banner ads, from SEO to co-marketing. Effectiveness can be measured for any given industry and tactic. Wit that in mind, here’s a list of tactics you might consider.
Online Lead Generation Options:
Search – SEO and PPC: Your website is the best source of leads. SEO is key to your success. We use SEO as a staple of our lead generation diet. We use PPC for faster results, or for getting visibility for very competitive (and therefore very difficult) keywords. Use landing pages, optimized per keyword/campaign for the highest conversions.
Banner Advertising: Either targeted by website or with companies like Bizo. These are highly measurable, so watch your results carefully and continually optimize your program. Banner ads in industry or partner newsletters often do best.
Content Syndication: Best when using late stage content to help qualify buyers.
Dedicated Emails: Don’t buy lists. That is considered spam. And in some countries, there are legal consequences. Instead, pay companies with lists of your target to send email on your behalf with offers. More expensive than lists, but the right thing to do.
Social Media: We think of social media as an enhancement strategy for lead generation. Make sure that your website is in good shape to convert leads before spending a lot of time in social media.
Blogging: Make sure you extend the reach of your blog any way possible. Writing a blog that doesn’t get read or subscribed to is a lonely and frustrating exercise. Once you can count on readership, this is an excellent way to create relationships and interact with prospects and buyers.
Virtual Trade Shows: The key to making these work is to be selective. Only participate when the topic is extremely relevant to your target audience.
Offline Lead Generation Options:
Telemarketing: I don’t like it, but it works. A professional firm will have better results than your sales force in qualifying leads. You can combine this with other campaigns including direct mail, email, etc. to generate about 20% of the deals that are not created by marketing.
Direct Mail: Direct mail when done to target campaigns as part of a broader integrated program can be very successful.
Events: Trade shows can be a good source of leads. But watch the costs. Best to have more than one reason to attend a trade show. Lead generation alone will not provide a solid ROI.
Relationship Driven LeadGen Options:
Referrals/Channel/Partner: Your second best lead source, referrals are critical to your success. Regardless of whether they are from customers, partners or friends, the key is to make sure they are captured in a trackable way. Formal partner programs are also an important lead source.
Co-marketing/Alliances: Working with other companies that sell to your same target enables you to increase the size programs you can do, and also exposes tour company to another’s database without spamming.
Nurturing LeadGen Options:
Email Marketing: Since you should not email prospects who have not opted-in in some way, use email marketing only as a great way to stay in touch with and educate your prospects and customers (called lead nurturing).
Road-shows/Seminars: Any time you can bring customers together with partners you will experience success. These type of events let customers sell for you, which leads to shorter cycles and higher margins.
Whatever you finally decide, remember to do your strategic planning first. Coming up with the best blend of these tactics is harder than it looks and the ultimate key to success.
If you just launched a website, and you’re sitting back waiting for the leads to roll in, you’re going to be waiting awhile. A website doesn’t simply launch and start attracting new leads. For a website to effectively attract new customers and clients, it must be built around a strategic Inbound Marketing plan.
Inbound marketing is a strategy that draws targeted audiences to your website and converts them into valuable, qualified leads. A website can’t do this all on its own. For all the pieces to work together, it needs a strong inbound marketing strategy that includes each of these five essential elements.
#1) Clear and Detailed Buyer Persona
A strong inbound marketing plan starts with a clear and detailed buyer persona.
A buyer persona is a description of your ideal customer or client. It outlines their demographics, behaviors, goals, attitudes, problems, and fears. A buyer person brings your target audience to life and enables you to clearly envision your customer. It also helps you know exactly:
Who you are targeting.
What your target customers needs and wants.
Where your target customers spend time.
How to speak your ideal customer’s language.
Most companies gloss over this crucial step. Oftentimes, the sales force believes they know who their prospects are, but no one has done the research to flesh out a clear picture of the ideal candidate, their needs, how they acquire information, their worries, the decision-making group they are in, and more.
Having a clear buyer persona makes it easier to execute the other elements of your strong inbound marketing plan, and it gives you the information you need to lay a strong foundation for the rest of your strategy.
#2) Lead Magnet Opt-in Strategy
The core of strong inbound marketing plan is an opt-in strategy driven by a lead magnet on your website.
A lead magnet is something you provide to audiences in exchange for their contact information. Lead magnets are usually freebies designed to give target customers something of value. Website lead magnets are often in the form of:
Ebooks
Free mini courses
PDF worksheets or guides
Free consultations or reviews
Webinars
Audiences “opt-in” to receive the lead magnet. They give you their contact information while showing that they’re interested in what you do or offer. This act creates a valuable, qualified and segmented lead for your business.
For a website to be an effective part of your inbound marketing plan, it must be designed to draw users to the lead magnet so they opt-in and become a lead.
#3) SKIT Website Content
It’s not enough to only have a lead magnet on your website. To support a strong inbound marketing plan, your website also needs content that shows your authority and builds trust with your audience.
The website must be filled with content that explains who you are, what you do, and why you are different. And, it must also drive audiences through a funnel that leads to your opt-in. For website content to do that, it must be:
Strategic: Use call-to-actions at the end of each page to drive audiences through a funnel that leads to your opt-in.
Keyword-focused: Create content based on keywords your target audiences uses to catch their attention and draw them to your pages through search.
Informative: Use detailed landing pages that explain your offerings and their benefits and unique selling propositions.
Trustworthy: Regularly publish blog content that shows your knowledge in your industry, helps audiences get to know you better, and keeps your site filled with fresh content.
SKIT content develops a strong website foundation that gives audiences the information they need as they decide if they want to do business with you.
#4) Content Promotion Plan
Filling your website with SKIT content is important, but that alone won’t bring traffic to your website.
Even if you fill your website with content, you can’t expect visitors to roll in. Even if you have optimized pages for SEO, you still need a boost to draw in viewers. You get that boost by having a content promotion plan.
A content promotion plan is a part of a strong inbound marketing plan that drives traffic to your website. This plan will be widely shaped by your buyer persona. You want to promote content in different places depending on your audience. Seed your content where you know your audience spends the most time.
Content promotion tactics may include using:
Organic Social Media
Paid Social Media
Email Marketing
Search Engine Marketing
Paid Display Ads
Guest Blogging
Republishing Content
Influencer Marketing
Digital PR
Content Distribution Networks
There are many options for digital advertising and content promotion. Don’t try to do it all. Just focus on the tactics that will be most likely to connect with your ideal customers and clients.
#5) Re-engagement & Nurturing Plan
Even with a fantastic website that follows all of the best practices for inbound marketing, not all of your website visitors will become customers or clients.
You usually need to get in front of a potential customer a few times before they choose to do business with you. You can do that through a digital re-engagement and nurturing plan.
Digital re-engagement and nurturing are tactics for targeting people who have already interacted with a brand. It uses strategies that reconnect with people who have already shown interest in a brand by visiting a website or webpage, opting in for a lead magnet, or making an initial purchase. Digital re-engagement and nurturing plans often include:
Email Newsletter: You collect email addresses from your entire audience and stay in touch with them (and at the top of their mind) by sending a regular email newsletter.
Retargeted Ads: You place a cookie on your website that triggers showing “reminder” ads to the visitors who have visited your website.
Email Drip Campaign: You track a user’s actions, and through marketing automation, you send them an email series that is specifically designed to target people who have completed that action (such as opting in to receive a specific ebook, viewing a certain product page, etc.).
With a digital re-engagement and nurturing plan, you bring the cycle of strong inbound marketing full circle. You keep interested audiences in a funnel that increases the chances of them turning into paying and repeat customers.
These are just the essential elements of a good inbound marketing plan. There are many other ways to refine, optimize, and add to this system to improve its performance and produce better results.
For even more tips on how to improve your inbound marketing strategy and set up an online presence that attracts high-quality, qualified leads, get our free ebook.
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