If you’ve been online for a while, you’ve heard the term lead magnet. And if you haven’t, then it’s simple. Lead magnets are helpful resources you share with leads for free in exchange for their email.

Once you capture the lead’s email address, you should have an automation series set up in your email service provider that provides relevant information based on your customer journey map to help them make a buying decision.

The purpose of a lead magnet is to attract leads using an inbound marketing strategy rather than an outbound strategy, such as cold emailing. I’m a fan of lead magnets because, depending on the resource you’re offering, the people who sign up are warm leads and most likely want the service you offer.

The most challenging problem to solve for service professionals is deciding what type of lead magnet to offer and how much you want to give away for free. This article will teach you how to identify your ideal client, create an effective lead magnet for them, promote your lead magnets, and nurture your lead with an automation series.

II. Identifying Your Ideal Client

The first place you need to start when creating a lead magnet is who the lead magnet is for. You may serve a variety of clients, but take a moment to think of your best client to date.

Think about the following questions;

• What did that client do for a living?
• How did they find you?
• What was their biggest challenge?
• How did you help them overcome it?

Remember, at this stage, we’re only thinking of one type of person who wants this lead magnet and that should represent the best client you’ve had to date. If you’re brand new to providing services, then think of a client that would be an absolute dream to work with.

III. Creating Effective Lead Magnets

So now we know who you’re targeting (just that one client), but now we need to understand what type of lead magnet will be the most helpful for them and the most effective for your overall goal.

To help you out, let’s think through this using an example. Meet Jessica. Jessica is a copywriter. She’s worked with a lot of clients over the years, but her best client was Emily.

Emily (Jessica’s client) sells handmade candles and soap in her online store. She found Jessica on Twitter after she tweeted she was looking for help with her online store. After a brief discovery call, Jessica learned that Emily’s biggest challenge was writing her product descriptions. Emily hired Jessica to write product descriptions for her existing products. Although this was a one-off project, Jessica went the extra mile and gave Emily a formula for writing future product descriptions.

At this point, what type of lead magnet do you think I’d suggest Jessica start to offer to get more clients like Emily?

If you guessed a lead magnet that helps shop owners write product descriptions using the formula she provided to Emily, then you guessed right!

Another point I want you to consider is what service you plan to offer that goes hand-in-hand with your lead magnet. 

For Jessica, it might be a content retainer because Emily will need more product descriptions, Instagram captions, blog posts, video scripts, and more if she wants to keep selling more of her handmade goods.

IV. Promoting Your Lead Magnets

When it comes to creating a strategy to market your lead magnets, I like to start with a platform where you already have an audience or a platform where you already get leads on.

While you can certainly promote your lead magnet on every platform you’re on, I recommend focusing on one platform while using things like your bio on any other places to promote your lead magnet. If we use the past example of Jessica the service professional, I’d recommend she uses Twitter to primarily promote her lead magnet since that’s where Emily (her ideal client) found her first.

Personally, Twitter is my biggest platform. I have 12k+ followers, and I get a lot of engagement on things I post there. My lead magnet promotion strategy includes using Hypefury, a social media scheduler that also automatically auto-plugs a tweet about my lead magnet after I receive 25 likes on a tweet.

Here are a few helpful tips for promoting your lead magnet;

• Create a landing page with an opt-in form that automatically delivers your lead magnet via email
• Create a redirect to a thank you page after a website visitor downloads your lead magnet
• Use Google Analytics to track your conversion rate of how many visitors view your lead magnet opt-in page versus how many people see the thank you page
• Use a social media scheduler to promote your lead magnet on auto-pilot
• Use your lead magnet as your call to action on blog articles and social media posts
• Update all of your online profiles to include a link to your lead magnet

Once your lead magnet is performing well organically, you can even start running ads to it to amplify your results. However, I don’t recommend running ads until you have a lead nurturing plan in place.

V. Nurturing Leads

You’ve identified your ideal client, created your lead magnet, and now people are even signing up to receive your lead magnet. But what’s next? Now you need to nurture your leads to become a customer.

Everyone who signs ups to receive your lead magnet will not be your ideal client. That’s why you need to create a funnel using an email automation series that continues to qualify the lead to work with you. This is what we call nurturing leads. The people who do not want to work with you will unsubscribe, which is what you want.

The people who are interested will stay in your series and wait until they receive the information they need to make the buying decision. This will likely be done over a series of emails, but here are a few emails you may want to include in what I call your Lead to Client automation series:

• Welcome – This email tells leads who you are and what they can expect
• Blog Post – Show off your expertise with a blog post related to the service you offer
• Story Telling – Tell a story of how you’ve helped someone like them.
• Audit / Review – Offer leads a 1:1 low-cost audit or review of their current processes and how they can use your lead magnet to help.
• Follow-up – Did your lead book an audit or ignore the email about an audit/review?  Depending on their action, send a follow-up email to ask for the sale or what they have questions about.

Depending on what you offer, the cadence and info you include in your Lead to Client email series may vary. The best way to figure out what to include is to think of your past clients and what they asked before working with you. Thinking of your frequently asked questions or industry myths/facts are also good points to address in this series.

Start with Your Client Journey Map

The purpose of lead magnets is to attract your ideal clients without cold emailing or only counting on referrals. However, if you’re not clear on your customer journey, then you need to start here first. Your client’s journey is a timeline of events that shows where someone starts when they have a problem up until their experience when they become a client. 
Without this map in place, you might find yourself creating an ineffective lead magnet and, even worse, attracting the wrong clients. If you don’t have a client journey map or know where to start, I can help you figure it out. Complete my New Client Inquiry Form to start the process of getting the help you need.