5 Proven Strategies to Optimize Your Lead Magnet and Maximize Lead Acquisition

For long-term, sustainable success, your lead magnets must generate qualified leads because fewer high-quality leads will always trump many low-quality leads. 

That’s where optimization comes in to help you improve conversions and the quality of leads you get using the lead magnets you already have. 

Once you start optimizing your lead magnets, you’ll have more time to spend on other marketing activities due to increased efficiency and higher conversion rates.

In this article, you’ll learn how to optimize a lead magnet to consistently generate high-quality leads that will convert to paying customers.

How to optimize your lead magnets

A good lead magnet determines the quality and quantity of leads you get. So, you’ll need to track the results you get from your lead generation efforts to know if your lead magnets are effective. 

If you’re not getting the results you’re looking for, then you need to optimize each of your lead magnets to help you generate qualified leads in each stage of the customer buying journey. 

Here are five methods to use when searching for ways to optimize your lead management:

1. Poke a pain point and provide a relief

Your target audience is made up of potential buyers who, in the course of their buying journey, will be looking for information that serves as a relief to their pain points. 

Their pain points determine how they search for information, the information they choose to interact with, and what they ignore. A good lead magnet pokes at the pain points that are nagging your potential buyers and provides relief. Take a look at this lead magnet from Omniscient Digital:

For most marketers, creating content that generates tons of website traffic sounds great. However, that’s not all they want. 

The traffic they generate needs to drive business results. If they don’t, it’ll be difficult for them to prove their value. 

A marketer at a software company looking to convert their traffic into business results will find this lead magnet irresistible. 

It pokes at a pain point: “I want to convert the traffic I get into business results.” It then goes on to provide relief: “Get a free strategy call.”

By poking at a pain point that buyers have, you’re demonstrating that you understand their challenges, and the relief you offer starts positioning you as the solution they’ll need. 

Secondly, poking at pain points helps you eliminate leads who don’t need your product or service, saving everyone’s time and effort in the process. 

2. Make it easy to consume

On a typical day, your web visitor will interact with your content and visit other websites and interact with more content and possibly bookmark their favorite articles. 

The more content they consume, the easier it is to forget what they read earlier, and the less likely they are to implement what they learn.  

So, your lead magnet needs to be easy to consume, so that your target audience can experience their outcomes faster. This way, they’re implementing what they learn and moving further down their buying journey. 

Ease of consumption, however, depends on the buying stage your audience is in. 

For example, a case study would be ideal for buyers at the bottom of the funnel. Using a mix of both written and video content will help bring different elements of the customer story to life in a powerful way. 

A good way to decide on the format for your lead magnet is to test it yourself and see how much time it takes to consume it and put it into action. 

Userlist provides their target audience with email templates for onboarding and payment recovery which makes it easier for the audience to download and use them immediately:

Templates work best for those who want to implement the information they already have—they offer instant gratification for a challenge the audience has. 

Other times, an ebook, a research report, or a webinar can also work as lead magnets. These require your audience to invest more time to consume, which suggests a higher intent to buy. 

3. Make it valuable 

Your audience has to trust that whatever you’re offering is credible and will definitively help them. To earn the trust of your web visitors, you need to demonstrate expertise that proves the value of what you’re offering. 

For example, having all your marketing data in one place helps you get a clear picture of your marketing activities and make informed decisions. It also serves as a single source of truth, eliminating silos in marketing teams. 

However, that’s not the case for most marketing teams, and dash knows this. 

That’s why they’re offering a lead magnet, promising to give them 10 dashboards with all their marketing in one place for their audience. Take a look:

You can demonstrate expertise by sharing your knowledge and personal experience with some of the challenges your audience has and how you’ve solved them. 

Here’s a guiding question to ask yourself when you want to demonstrate expertise: “How have I dealt with the challenges my audience is facing and what will help them overcome those challenges?”

The answer to this question will help you come up with ideas and frameworks that you can use to create your lead magnet and make it valuable to your audience. 

4. Focus on one offer

Being specific eliminates confusion and improves conversion because it helps your audience decide if they want your lead magnet. You can also build up your offer to make it more appealing and increase conversions. 

Without this level of specificity, your lead magnet is confusing and visitors can’t decide if they want it. You can’t also add more benefits to an ambiguous offer to make it more appealing. 

The lead magnet below is clear because it focuses on one offer. It asks the audience to sign up and get lead-scoring templates. 

It includes copy that builds up on the initial offer promising to deliver a newsletter showing them how to make the most of the lead-scoring templates they download. Take a look: 

To narrow down your offer, look at your ideal customer profile and customer conversations. What are the recurring themes that point to the solutions they’re looking for? 

Once you identify these recurring themes, ask yourself what single step your ideal customer can take that will bring them closer to solving their problems. The answer to this question will help you focus on a relevant offer that your audience needs. 

If you end up with several offers, you can create different lead magnets and place them on different touchpoints to help you segment your audience and nurture them by sending relevant emails. 

5. Have a clear call to action 

Assuming you’ve already convinced your audience that your lead magnet is worth their time, you still need to convince your audience to take action and get it. 

Your call to action matters because the words you choose on your call to action buttons will let them know what to do next. 

LawnStarter offers lawn care services. If a web visitor wants to know how much it costs to acquire those services, all they need to do is enter their street address and phone number:

Looking at the lead magnet you have, does your web visitor know what they need to do if they want it? 

Your call to action needs to align with the kind of lead magnet you’re offering. In other words, if your visitor wanted your lead magnet, what would they need to do to get it? Would they need to sign up, or perhaps schedule a demo?  

Conclusion

Over the course of their buying journey, your web visitors will interact with information that helps them learn more about the challenges they face and possible solutions to these challenges. 

Your lead magnets come in handy to capture their attention and help you start nurturing those visitors until they’re ready to become your customers. 

Looking at your lead magnets, do you need to poke at a pain point and provide relief, narrow down and focus on one offer, or do you need to make it more valuable?