Lead Magnets: Finding Customers, Content Upgrades, Case Studies

​​“Approach each customer with the idea of helping him or her solve a problem or achieve a goal, not of selling a product or service.” — Brian Tracy

Get Full Access to Trends Pro

❓ What You’ll Learn

• How can you use lead magnets to land a job?
• How to use private communities as lead magnets?
• How can free platform credit be used as lead magnets?
• How to use free tools to attract customers?
• How to make your lead magnets easily shareable?
• How can dedicated landing pages help you get more leads?
• How to retain prospects once they have signed up?
• How to decide what to make instantly accessible?
  
  

💎 Why It Matters

You can use reciprocity to boost sales.

🔍 Problem

Finding customers is hard.

💡 Solution

Lead magnets give us a reason to invite you into our inbox.

🏁 Players

Lead Magnet Examples 

• Supplement Quiz • Get personalized recommendations from Care/of about the right supplements for you.
• Contract Management in the Digital Era • Webinar used to engage prospects with useful information while demonstrating how Docusign can help.
• Mortgage Calculator • Zillow’s calculator. Which helps home buyers estimate their mortgage payment then connects you with a lender.
• Social Selling Index Score • Scores your ‘social selling’ ability when you create an account, then explains how LinkedIn will help you improve.
• Marketing Examples • A list of the best marketing examples which can only be saved when you create an account on SwipeWell.
• Project Management Kit • Formeer is a discord server feedback generation tool which curates a list of project management resources.
• Email Flows for Every Industry • Ready-to-use email sequences, advice, and best practices to promote Mailmodo’s interactive email marketing tool.

Lead Magnet Tools 

• Beacon • Create written lead magnet templates.
• Attract • Build checklists, how-to guides, resource guides, and case studies.
• Vidyard • Video marketing tool for tutorials and demonstrations.
• Outgrow • Create interactive content like polls, assessments, chatbots, and calculators.
• StealthSeminar • Video-based tool for webinars and training sessions.
  
  

🔮 Predictions

• Access to exclusive communities and private groups will become a popular form of lead magnet.
  • Mary Fern’s best performing lead magnet for her prenatal fitness service was a private support group for expecting mothers on Facebook. 
  • Nikki Gundy offers a weekly “Honestea” session in her private facebook group that helps her build trust with new leads. 80% of customers are more likely to buy from businesses that offer a more personalized experience. 
  • Meredith Marsh encourages her viewers to join her private group for personalized help and resources.

• Lead magnets will be used by individuals to demonstrate skills to potential employers. Businesses are not the only ones who will reap the benefits of lead magnets.
  • Thomas Ong wrote The Creator’s Manual to share lessons he’s learned as a student-creator while establishing his personal brand and audience.
  • Brian Moore is a viral marketer who was featured in Vice for Do Not Touch Your Face, a website that uses your webcam to shame you when you touch your face (to prevent COVID). 

• Free platform credit will become one of the most popular forms of lead magnets.
  • Social media ad platforms like Snapchat and Google offer hundreds of dollars to new sign-ups in ad credit. 
  • SuperRare offered $50 worth of $RARE to NFT collectors who collected a new artwork on the platform within 30 days. 
    

☁️ Opportunities

• Build free tools to solve problems for your prospective customers.
  • Tweet Hunter grew to $20k MRR with free ‘side products’ like Unretweet and Powerful Dynamic Banner which drove growth to its Twitter monetization product.
  • Wall is an NFT analytics platform with a free and fun Rekt Meter which tracks the performance of other NFT wallets.
  • NomadList grew to $908k+ ARR helping nomads rank and filter the best cities for remote work, then offers tax residency services to those users.
  • Dashboard offers a free content brief generator to promote its SEO optimization software.
  • Hubspot offers free CMS tools to help onboard customers to its premium CMS management platform.

• Make your lead magnets easily shareable. It should be easy to spread the word about your resource.
  • Visme gives leads the option to share its free course on presentations to their Linkedin, Facebook, Twitter, and Pinterest profiles directly from the landing page.
  • Trends.vc tags the projects and experts referenced in our newsletter on Twitter when we announce a new topic. 
  • 16 Personalities makes it easy to share the results of their free personality test and encourages friends to compare their results.

• Build dedicated landing pages to customize your value proposition and attract different leads.
  • Dashword created a page for its content brief generator to promote independently on social media platforms while generating leads for its paid content tool. 
  • Aiseo created a standalone slogan generator which serves to market its copywriting product.
  • Relayed launched its tool which automatically summarizes Zoom meetings to generate leads for its meeting capture and transcription tool.
  • TweetHunter uses Dynamic Twitter Banner as a tool to add social proof to your Twitter while demonstrating expertise at Twitter growth and monetization.
  • Namecheap operates NameGenerator as a useful tool to generate a name for your brand while funneling you to purchase a relevant domain.
    
    

🏔️ Risks

• Losing their Attention • Keeping leads engaged after the delivery of your lead magnet is difficult. Create additional value and follow up to retain and convert prospects.
• Over Promoting • You risk exhausting your audience if you focus too much of your content on directly promoting your product. Ideally only 20% of your content is direct promotion. 
• Loss of Credibility • Typos and other small design errors are easy to miss and can make your brand look sloppy.
  
  

🔑 Key Lessons

• Follow up on leads with new offers. Retaining prospects is as important as finding them. 73% of leads may never convert to a sale.
• Make value instantly accessible. The sooner prospects are able to access and benefit from your lead magnet, the better your odds of converting them.
  
  

🔥 Hot Takes

• The most effective lead magnet will become ownership. Web 3.0 protocols like SuperRare offer their projects’ token to incentivize prospects to try the platform. Airdrops like LooksRare’s ($LOOKS) are becoming a ubiquitous form of marketing to crypto-savvy prospects. You can distribute more to those who engage in on-chain behavior most likely to result in conversions.
• The types of information that lead magnets ask for will change. Inboxes are saturated. Businesses will ask you to join their Discord server, follow them on Twitter or complete a bounty.
  
  

😠 Haters

“No one is signing up for my lead magnet. What am I doing wrong?”
There are a few reasons your lead magnet might not be getting visitors or sign-ups:

• Not enough exposure. Your website is not getting enough traffic to drive sign-ups and would benefit from promotional efforts like paid ads.
• Lack of urgency. How are you convincing potential sign-ups that they would benefit from your lead magnet immediately?
• You’re targeting the wrong audience. Are the people visiting your lead magnet the same as those who would actually want to use it?
• Lack of value. Make sure your lead magnet is something the desired audience would actually benefit from having. 

“Lead magnets are dying. No one wants to read e-books or attend webinars anymore.”
In some cases, this may be true. The truth is that there’s no one-size-fits-all approach to lead magnets. What works for one business may not work for another. That’s why testing to uncover the “perfect” lead magnet for your target audience is critical. There’s no reason any specific type of lead magnet won’t work if you are providing real value.

“How will giving away something valuable for free get me paying customers?”
Modern consumers are inundated with content. Lead magnets help you stand out from your competition and prove why your product or service is the most likely to satisfy their needs.

🔗 Links

1. Who has the best lead magnet you’ve seen? • The tweet behind this report. 
2. Lead magnets are boring • Tools and tips from Max Haining to make lead magnets that actually convert.
3. The Threado Case Study • Case study about using side products as a lead magnet for your core business.
   
   

📁 Related Reports

• Curation as a Service • Curating links and resources is a valuable and common form of lead magnet.
• Build in Public • Building in public creates unique opportunities to demonstrate your knowledge and expertise so as to generate leads for your lead magnets.
• Programmatic SEO • A cost effective means to generate and target lead magnets for your prospects.
• Online Courses • Online courses are an increasingly popular type of lead magnet.
• AI-Generated Content • Scale your content creation to more effectively generate leads for your magnets.
• Virtual Events • Events are a type of lead magnet effective for bringing together communities in a niche.
• Lead Generation • How to generate leads for your magnets to convert customers.
• No Code • Create compelling lead magnets without expensive and time consuming technical resources.
• Influencer Marketing • Leverage influencers to generate leads for your magnets.
• Cohort-Based Courses • Give your courses a sense of community by grouping people together.
  
  

🙏 Thanks

Thanks to Katt Risen, Stewart Townsend, Elena Vargas, Vishal Srivastava, Lola Ojabowale, Swapnil Puranik, and Soma Mandal. We had a great time jamming on this report.

✏️ Harry researched and wrote this report. Dru researched and edited this report.

📈 What else?

Trends PRO #0097 — Lead Magnets has more insights.

What you’ll get:

• 28 Freemium Examples (133% More)
• 10 Predictions (233% More)
• 13 Opportunities (333% More)
• 7 Key Lessons (250% More)
• 5 Hot Takes (150% More)
• 14 Links (367% More)

With Trends Pro you’ll learn:

Get Weekly Reports

Join 65,000+ founders and investors

Subscribe

📈 Unlock Pro Reports, 1:1 Intros and Masterminds

Become a Trends Pro Member and join 1,200+ founders enjoying…

🧠 Founder Mastermind Groups • To share goals, progress and solve problems together, each group is made up of 6 members who meet for 1 hour each Monday.

📈 100+ Trends Pro Reports • To make sense of new markets, ideas and business models, check out our research reports.

💬 1:1 Founder Intros • Make new friends, share lessons and find ways to help each other. Keep life interesting by meeting new founders each week.

🧍 Daily Standups • Stay productive and accountable with daily, async standups. Unlock access to 1:1 chats, masterminds and more by building standup streaks.

💲 100k+ Startup Discounts • Get access to $100k+ in startup discounts on AWS, Twilio, Webflow, ClickUp and more.