Lead Magnets 101:A Useful Tool for Growing Your Audience

What is a lead magnet?

A lead magnet is a marketing term for a free item or service that is given away to potential customers for the purpose of gathering contact details, such as their email address. Examples of lead magnets include free ebooks, webinars, and printable checklists.

How do lead magnets help you?

The purpose of lead magnets is to attract potential customers, who hopefully will become actual customers after interacting with your lead magnet. Even those of us who don’t yet have a book to sell benefit from lead magnets, because lead magnets build your email list, which enlarges your platform.

Here are some ways they can attract customers.

1. People like free stuff. Marketers have been exploiting this fact for years.
2. If your freebie is on-brand, it will attract the kind of readers who are most likely to be interested in your writing, and thus and purchase your products in the future.
3. They give potential customers something helpful, which A) builds trust in your brand and B) makes them more likely to return and purchase something from you.
4. They help you acquire potential customers for future sales by growing your email list, which is still the most effective way to convert book sales.

Before you create a lead magnet, you must consider three parts of the definition:

• the What (the free item or service)
• the Who (potential customers)
• the Why (your purpose for gathering contact details)

Don’t put the cart before the horse

To create the best possible lead magnet, you need to consider the Why and Who before worrying about the What.

1. The Why: Consider your specific purpose

What do you want the lead magnet to accomplish? What is your end goal? Possibilities include:

• Gain author newsletter subscribers
• Gain blog followers
• Get people to try your product/service in the hopes they’ll want more
• Get people to read your free ebook, so they’ll want to read more of your books

2. The Who: Define your target audience (and their felt needs)

The more specifically you can define your target audience, the easier it will be to create a valuable lead magnet that meets one of their felt needs.

• What are the target audience(s) of your author brand?
• What subset of that target audience you are targeting with your lead magnet? You will need different lead magnets for different goals and audience subsets.
• What are their felt needs or pain points? The more specific you are at identifying these pain points, the better your chance of creating a lead magnet they will love.
• What social media platforms do they spend time on? Optimize your lead magnet for that kind of media.

3. The What: Create a freebie your target audience will love

The ideal lead magnet will:

1. Meet a felt need or pain point the user has
2. Be something the user can use immediately and easily
3. Be something the user can use repeatedly
4. Make the user feel like they’re “stealing” from you—i.e. getting a lot of value for free
5. Reinforce your brand.
6. Deliver what is promised. Don’t disappoint the user with content that doesn’t live up to the hype.

With those goals in mind, begin to brainstorm:

•  What helpful service or information can you offer that meets a felt need of your target audience? .
• How might you package that information into a downloadable form? (Printable pdf, How-To video, ebook, free link to a training webinar, etc.)
• Which kinds of media and content do you feel most comfortable creating? A quality lead magnet combines a useful idea with good design. If you’ve never created a video before, it’s probably not the best format for your lead magnet.

There are tons of websites that offer lists of ideas. Here are three to try:

Three fiction lead magnet ideas

Lead magnet examples from successful authors.

A comprehensive list of 101 ideas with a handy table of contents.

Finally, don’t stress out! (And stop trying to create the perfect lead magnet.)

There’s no such thing as the perfect lead magnet, so stop stressing over whether your idea is “right”. Your goal is not to spend the next six months analyzing your target audience, coming up with eight dozen possible lead magnets ideas and then rejecting all of them.

Your goal is to make your best effort, put it out there, and see what happens. So have fun.

Award-winning writer Lisa E. Betz believes that everyone has a unique story to tell the world. She loves inspiring fellow writers to be more intentional about developing their craft and courageous in sharing their words. Lisa shares her words through speaking, leading Bible studies, writing historical mysteries, and blogging about living intentionally.

You can find her on Facebook LisaEBetzWriter Twitter @LisaEBetz and Pinterest Lisa E Betz Intentional Living.