A month ago I started asking for topics or questions you’d like to hear more about and this question came in from Lila: “How to do marketing and get the word out to more customers?”
It’s a wonderful question and one that goes through every entrepreneur’s mind at some point. In my case, it is several times a week!
There are a whole variety of ways to answer that question, but today I want to talk about a concept called a Lead Magnet. This will then get followed by a sales funnel, so I’ll talk about that one too.
WHAT’S A LEAD MAGNET?
A lead magnet is a service, item, or resource that you are going to give away for free to get customers to start listening to you. We typically use it to gather potential customer emails, or subscribers to our social media channels. Once we have a way to communicate with the potential customer, we then start sending information that will ideally take them down a sales funnel that we have built (more about this in a moment).
Lead magnets need to be something that is free and that people will want. To get the free thing, they will have to subscribe or sign up, which allows you to capture their email address and name. These are very powerful tools to have for getting your message out to customers about upcoming events or new products that your business is offering. We see lead magnets all the time in the form of free samples, raffle tickets to win a prize (ever tried to win the car in the mall?), free downloads such as images, songs or templates, etc.
HOW DO I SET UP A LEAD MAGNET?
Once you have a lead magnet idea, you have a couple of options. You can do something as simple as:
- A Google Form where you ask them to leave their information in exchange for the file which you will send in return manually once you have their email.
- Ask people to complete a raffle ticket or leave a business card to be entered in a drawing
- Send you a DM with their email so that you can send them the item
- Set up a landing page on a website that has a form built into it for subscribing to a newsletter or to get the freebie (see www.thesimplestartup.com for an example).
- Use a service such as Mailchimp to automatically give the lead magnet to the customer once they give their information.
- Use a webinar service such as Zoom where participants need to register for the webinar ahead of time to take part.
Think about what a lead magnet would look like for your business and how you would capture the customer’s information in exchange for it. Please send me a link to it that I can share out with The Simple StartUp community as an example. If you have a moment, I’d appreciate you also sharing the 102 Business Ideas for Young Entrepreneurs link (not the product) with your communities to help me to reach a wider audience too!