Episode 215: Lead Magnet Strategies For Every Stage Of Business – with April Beach

You’re listening to the Sweetlife entrepreneur podcast, simplified strategies to grow your service business and launch a life you love faster with business, mental and entrepreneur activator, April Beach. Hey, you guys welcome to episode Number 215 here on this sweet life entrepreneur and business podcast. And I’m so excited to dive into this fundamental online marketing topic that we’re talking about in today’s show.

This should be a rather short episode for you, but it’s going to be jam packed with important information that if you aren’t using lead magnet marketing strategy in your business, you’ll want to make sure that you stay with me here today. We’re talking about lead magnet marketing for every business stage and who is this for when I say every business stage? So just like all of our podcast episodes,

each one is tagged to a stage or a phase of business that you’re currently in. There are five phases to my business design launch growth and scale roadmap. And you can find out what phase you’re in by visiting sweet life co.com forward slash quit. And when I say lead magnet strategy for every business stage, I really truly mean that it’s every stage of where you are in my business roadmap in my start to scale up system.

But we are specifically talking to a couple of you guys. So let’s hone in a little bit tighter here. This episode is great for established businesses who are not yet using using online marketing or new entrepreneurs. We’re just now launching your very first online marketing strategies. So let’s kind of break that up. This has been really a hot topic again, even though this is what we would consider an online marketing foundation,

like a newer concept, it’s been a really hot topic, especially for the last 12 months is so many offline businesses or service-based businesses are now pivoting to offer online services. So some of these online marketing strategies that might be widely known to quote unquote, marketers might be new to you. And I appreciate that. So this is actually we’ve recorded episodes on this about three,

four years ago, but I really understand the need to kind of go back to these online marketing and foundations for those of you established businesses, because it’s important that we give you the tools. So you can start implementing these right away in your business as well. Again, this is for established businesses and you’re trying to leverage and use online marketing strategies. You’ve been in business.

You do a great job at what you do. You could be like the best in town at what you do, but you don’t yet understand online marketing fundamentals. And so this is an important episode for you. And of course, if you’re a new business, if you’re a new service based entrepreneur, you’re just launching from scratch, then you’re in the right place for this show as well.

So in summary, if you are not utilizing online marketing, that this is where you’re going to want to begin. So in this week’s show, we’re talking about what is a lead magnet? What is the strategy behind it in the one thing about lead magnets that nobody tells you it’s really important. We’re going to dive into some lead magnet strategy in reference to overall program development or service development.

And I’m going to make sure that, you know, some of the strategy that very very few coaches will tell you, and this is the one that’s going to make or break it for you and creating the right lead magnet for your business. At the end of this episode, you are going to obviously know, what is it, lead magnet. You’re going to understand why it’s important and today’s marketing.

And you’re going to know what kind of lead magnets are the best for you. And of course, you’re going to learn the most important lead magnet strategy that no one tells you. So if you’re ready, let’s go ahead and dive into today’s show all of the show notes and the resources which we have a ton on our podcast website, a free grab and go resources can be found by visiting Sweetlife co.com

and simply click on the podcast. All right, let’s go.<inaudible> Okay. So to kick us off, let’s start with the basics. What is a lead magnet? Other words that people use for lead magnet could be like a freemium or a freebie. Those sound really fluffy to me. I don’t really like those words. I’m a strategist. So I’m like,

okay, what is a lead magnet? It is literally a magnet that magnetizes and draws cold traffic to you for the purpose of generating the lead. It’s a piece of information of high value. We’re going to come back to that of high value, a piece of information or an information piece of high value that you give away for free in exchange for the name and email address and contact information of a cold lead that we’re going to turn into a hot prospect,

but they’re pretty cold at first with this strategy because they usually have not ever heard of you before, or is their very first time they’re visiting your social media or your website. So why is this important in today’s marketing? So a lead magnet allows you to start a relationship with tomorrow’s clients. It’s a very, very, very special thing, and it shouldn’t be taken lightly.

It’s incredibly strategic. And we’re going to talk about some of the strategies here on how to choose what lead magnet content that you’re going to deliver. But it’s a privilege for us in today’s over information overload world, to have an opportunity to connect with somebody who resonates with what we do, who just might be able to, you know, use your services,

they might need you desperately, or maybe they’re just kind of fishing a little bit and wondering what it is that you do. So, first of all, lead magnets are important because it gives you the privilege of starting a relationship with somebody that could become a client. It is a privilege that should not be taken lightly. People are incredibly busy and they have very little attention to give unless they are dealing with a major problem right then and there at that moment,

or here’s the other side of it. People love to collect great resources and save them for later. So there are two different ways that somebody is going to accept or want your content in your lead magnet. Number one, if you are literally talking about a problem that they are currently facing something that they’re saying to themselves in their mind, something that is top of mine,

something that they are currently looking actively looking for a solution for, or it’s actively a deep desire of theirs, and they’re wondering how to fulfill it. So those are the first people that are going to grab your lead magnet piece of information. The other people are the hoarders of information. I mean, how many times have you grabbed something for free or saved a bookmark?

Because you’re like, Oh, this is so cool. I want to come back to it later. Well, people do that. And that strategy and utilizing that, building that relationship from that strategy definitely has to be taken into considerations because people love to collect great resources and save them for later as well. Both of those are great reasons, terrific. Whether they want your thing right now,

or they think they might need it later. That is a pre-qualified person that we want to have an opportunity for you to build a relationship with. So both of them are great opportunities and develop great rapport for you and your potential clients. Now, with that being said, what happens with a lead magnet? So when you give them this piece of information,

you have a chance to connect and build trust with this new audience. And that depends like how well you do this, frankly. It depends on how great of content in how great of a micro transformation you are going to give them with your lead magnet content. So let’s go ahead and answer the question that I know you’re asking is, you know, really what,

what kind of lead magnets are best. So, first of all, let me give you some high level examples of lead magnets that I know that you’ve seen quizzes, PDF downloads, free recipe planners, workouts of the week, 10 steps to XYZ or five ways to pack your family more efficiently for vacation. Those are all examples of lead magnets, but in order to actually figure out what is the best we’re going to go back a little bit in history,

not too far back because you know, online businesses technically only been around for a couple of decades. So let’s talk about the history of lead magnets. This is really important for you to know. I want you to bring like level up your entrepreneur history IQ here, because this is going to affect what you choose to create. And I also want you to understand the psychology of buyers and what they’re doing,

how they’re behaving right now. So going as far back as we can go in the lead magnet history from about 2010, probably a little bit earlier than that, 2008 tell about 2000 and I would say 17, we would give away these amazing, huge pieces of content. His lead magnet is a matter of fact, the bigger the lead magnet you gave away,

the better and the faster your list grew. So you would see lead magnets that were given away, you know, a big, long hour long, two hour long training videos, or, you know, huge white papers that were like 50 pages long. And people loved them because it was the first time in history that information was seen as a commodity until the more information you were giving them,

they were like, Oh my gosh, this person is so great. I love this business. They just gave me a hundred pages or they just gave me a five-hour video to watch. And so with like this competition, if you will, amongst entrepreneurs to give the biggest, most bad-ass best lead magnet ever. Okay, well now, like let’s slow down a little from 2018 on,

we started seeing this onset of massive information overload in busy-ness all of us did you did. I did our people, did our kids, did everybody did like your grandma even did, right? And so this massive information overload has made it. So people are like, wow, you know what now is most valuable thing to me, my time time is much more valuable than money and much more valuable than all the information you’re about to dump on me.

And so people have started to strategically not want to grab your lead magnet as free and wonderful as it may be. If it’s going to require them two, three, four hours to go through it because their time is more valuable than the information you’re going to give them. So starting now about three, four years ago, we are diving into a different era of lead magnets,

if you will, where they deliver high value in shorter time. And there’s a third part of it that if you listen to me for years, you know, I geek out on this. It is also the lead magnets that create a transformation in the people that received them. And I’ll kind of save that a little bit and we’re going to come back to that word transformation,

but let’s kind of go back to the actual content itself. The lead magnets that generally seem to be doing the best at the recording of this episode in 2021 are the ones that deliver high value in a short period of time. So here are some very specific samples in honestly, it can be anything just think high value, short time, high value, short time,

okay. Here’s some specific examples of different lead magnets that are currently doing a great job at this quizzes and self-assessments are winning. And they do a great job because they also provide curated, customized information. So the people that are taking them know that they aren’t just getting the same information as everybody else, but it’s curated based on how they respond. And we all want something that’s customized to where we are.

So quizzes and self-assessments or any type of assessment, super great consider the length of it, right. You know, we have some assessments out there that will take us 50 questions to get through. That’s not a great lead magnet assessment. And in most cases, it certainly depends on how it correlates with the program that you’re selling next, but quizzes and assessments overall are great.

The second thing are quick items that really are able to be implemented by your people that grab it, your we’ll call them your future clients without really much thought. So examples of this are templates that they can just grab swipe files, swipe files, and swipe copy are literally like pre-written marketing copy or pre-written things or pre done graphics. It can literally swipe like,

think like Dora the Explorer, like swiper, no swiping, but we’re like, yes, wipers swipe it. And they can literally swipe it and put it into their business with little or no modification. I just probably aged myself because my oldest son was watching Dora the Explorer have these people listen to airplay, like what the heck is Dora the Explorer. Okay.

So these swipe files are really, really great. Other ones are grabbing NGOs. So anything they can literally grab and apply into their program or their client process or any other thing that they can grab from you and go, and it relieves a pain that they have had good. These are wins like these are LinkedIn ending with winners. Okay. Another example of a great lead magnet right now are forms.

So again, templates. So if you can give somebody some sort of a template to start with that they can either fill out on their own, helping them come to a decision about something or that they can share, even within their company, just don’t put any intellectual property or any of your logos in there. Then those could be great solutions for you as well.

So generally speaking quick things that they can implement right away without much thought. So any sort of done for them solution of really any kind is amazing. And those are doing really well as lead magnets that are getting people results and converting very well. You know, calendars other types of things. But I will say this, I don’t know your business. I wish that we were live on clubhouse right now.

So we could have this conversation back and forth, which wink, wink that will be happening very soon here on this. We live entrepreneurial podcast. So if you’re a listener that is coming guys, I’m very excited about that. But right now, unfortunately it’s a one-sided conversation. So what I’m going to say next, take it with a grain of salt because I don’t have my eyes on your business.

So I’m not exactly looking at your content, but I want to tell you that like general PDFs that are just kind of like the, or anything else like that, doesn’t tend to have a ton of value as much as it used to, but they could be very valuable. And this is on a case by case basis. But a lot of people are told that,

just create a PDF of like 10 steps to do this or whatever. That’s just creating content just to share more content, nobody needs more content. We need to give people and I’m going to come back to this word I said earlier, but our job as teachers, as coaches, as mentors, as leaders, as service providers, to give people a transformation when they come across our programs and our content,

the transformation could be huge transformation, or it could be what I call micro transformation. We have to do that within your programs, the way we extract your information and your expertise and all of your assets and build it into your programs or your main services has to be transformational program design. Even in the lead magnet, we need to give a micro transformation.

It is our responsibility to not just throw information at them, but to give them a transformation. So nobody needs more information. They need transformation. And that is what we are talking about with your lead magnet strategy. So if you want to do a PDF, download great, but ask yourself what transformation is somebody going to experience from the beginning of this?

Either reading it or filling out the PDF or whatever it is to the end of it, what can they expect? What’s the end result from spending their time, downloading my PDF, getting all my lists and did I wow. Them, did I show them that I’m trustworthy to take them to the next level? You know, so really think about that in your lead magnet strategy.

So I’m going to dive in here at the end and just actually break down the tech side of it. If you’re worried about that, if you’re thinking this and you’re like, Oh my gosh, I don’t really understand the tech. Don’t worry. I’ve got you. We’re going to talk about that last year, right before I wrap up. But the next thing I want to get into is an extension of what we just talked about the transformation.

So this is a really important thing and lead magnet strategy that nobody probably tells you again, we don’t want to just pick the lead magnet. We want to create one that is a winning lead magnet and it does a job. Okay. So here is a way to choose a lead magnet that does the job that we want it to do. Number one,

what are you selling next? Oftentimes lead magnets are just created without thought is to their connection or their step within the greater process that you self serve or deliver. Right? So what are you selling next? Here is just some, a little more help on that. If you’re new, then go through the process of laying out your program or your offer or service of outlining that if you’re an established business,

you want to ask yourself, what is the primary offer or service program that we want to drive people to with this lead magnet, you want to make sure that the lead magnet is a direct connection to what you’re selling next. Here’s another way that I like to teach it in. This might resonate and help you understand it even more. If you might be struggling with this,

think about your lead magnet as a prerequisite. So do you remember when it was time to register for your college classes or even your high school classes? If, if you went rogue and did something fabulous and, and didn’t go directly to college or college at all, we had to go through this process of saying, okay, I’m not allowed in this class unless I’ve met the prerequisite,

which could have been another class or, you know, an understanding of something to be allowed into that content. Your lead magnet is the prerequisite to your program. So you want to ask yourself, what do they need to know, understand, agree with, learn, decide upon, or what’s the one thing they need to get overall clarity on for one reason,

for them to decide if they want or need to work with you more. So let me say that again, your lead magnet has a very big job. That’s why like just these little checklists, aren’t really cutting it when I’m talking about business strategy, because I’m a business strategist. Like I want you to do even better than that. I know you can.

And this is how we do that. We want to look at what you’re selling next. And then we look at that lead magnet, a prerequisite to either pre-qualify, we’re disqualify people from working with you in your next step program. We want to disqualify the people that are not the perfect fit, just as much as we want to qualify those people that absolutely need what you have next.

Your lead magnet has a really big, like heavy lifting job. Think of it as like mighty mouse. Okay. It might be like little teeny mini, but it has a big job and it’s super strong. And it’s going to lift people up to the next level for them to know if they want to join your signature offer or your program or your membership,

or your course or whatever you’re selling next. So that’s a lead magnet strategy that very few people I speak to are aware of. And I want to make sure that you guys here, you know, all of our suite lead podcast listeners, it’s been about three years since I’ve talked about this on the show. I feel like I talk about it all the time,

especially over the last 12 months with so many businesses scaling online. So we’re kind of going, this is honestly online business basics. And I just want to make sure that you’re nailing it. So whether you’re a new business or you’re an established business and you haven’t leveraged online marketing in this capacity yet, I hope this episode helps you in springboards you to get started in a very strategic way.

Now, I promised you I’m going to kind of break down the structure of what happens, the flow of what happens on the tech side of it on the back end of it. So if you feel like a little stumped here, I’m going to try to simplify the best I can for you. We’ve talked about the content, you know, that we’re delivering within the asset of that piece of information.

That’s all the things we’ve been talking about so far. Now let’s actually talk about the delivery of this and how it works on the techie side. Here is the order of pages or the order of flow that people are going to go through on the tech side. The very first thing is we’re going to direct them to either a landing page or your homepage of your website.

We have to have that part built a landing page, and I have done specific episodes just on landing pages. You guys. So if you’re totally wanting more information on that, make sure that when you’re in our sweet life podcast website, you can actually search that and it’ll bring up the episodes that we’ve talked about. So a landing page is a specific page designed with only one job in mind,

and that is for somebody to fill out a form to get your lead magnet. That’s it it’s really basic. It doesn’t even scroll down that far if at all. And there’s some very specific things there’s really only one call to action on that landing page is not, is fill out the form, get your lead magnet. A whole page has obviously other things going on as well,

but we also can create a way for, to download your ma your lead magnet from your homepage. That could be a banner across the top or something that is located very clearly. And what a website technical term is called above the fold. That means that on a desktop, they don’t have to scroll down to find it. And so you can put the form or your lead magnet either on a separate landing page or on the homepage,

or frankly, any other page of your site. So stop number one, like in this little lead magnet tech journey is the page has to have a form on it. And then what happens is somebody fills out that form. Then we use the magic of what is called email automation, and it is going to automatically send to the person that filled out the form,

your lead magnet, whatever your lead magnet is. It is all done on complete automation. And that is the way we scale your business. Everything needs to be done automation in. I actually just spoke to the client today, honestly, just a little tangent. And she has an amazing business she’s been doing for almost 20 years and she has 150 people going through a program that she has every single month.

And she has had this you guys for, I think about three or four years, every single person that joins she has not had the opportunity to learn these strategies. And she sends them a personal email with the link. That’s 150 people. She’s personally sending an email to every single time they joined and it’s running her life. So with a few little technical software pieces in place,

we can take your company from the way that it’s working, but into a way that works, that is going to increase your sales scale. Your business increase the value and the quality of your life and help your business grow to the next level. So if that’s you and you don’t have any email automation in place, I’ll put the resources in the podcast,

show notes for you, but we are a big advocates. We love Kajabi. And there are a lot of other online software platforms as well that we do recommend. And frankly, we even have a separate side of our business that builds websites and landing page funnels for clients. So if you need that, you can always check us out@sweetlifeco.com. With that being said,

let’s go ahead and do a quick recap of what we talked about today. Today, we talked about what is a lead magnet. We talked about understanding why it’s important for your business in today’s marketing, in the really specific and powerful, like mighty mouse job that it has. We talked about knowing what kinds of lead magnets are best. And I just want you to remember one key word and that word is transformation.

We want to give people a transformation within experiencing your lead magnet, and that’s going to set them up to be like, wow, look what they just did for me. I wonder how amazing their paid programs are. If this is what I’ve experienced in a free capacity. And we had talked about learning the strategy of your lead magnet content, being a prerequisite to what you’re selling into next.

So I helped that. That was incredibly helpful for you. This is again, this is lead magnet marketing for every single stage of business, and it applies across the board, whether you’re established or new I’m April beach host of this podcast and thunder of the Sweetlife company. It’s certainly a pleasure to get to speak to you again on another show. This is episode number 215,

and you can find all the show notes and everything we chatted about by visiting Sweetlife co.com. And please follow me on clubhouse. I’m at April beach and we host a weekly strategy room at 12 o’clock Eastern time, every single Wednesday. It’s totally free. If you have a question about this strategy, as we’re dropping this show, please jump in there with me and ask,

all right, you guys have an awesome week and I will look forward. See you again soon. Bye bye for now