Are lead magnets a waste of time?

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What the hell is a lead magnet?

You probably don't live and breathe this jargon, so here's a quick definition before we get started.

A lead magnet (rhymes with "deed," not "dead") is a bit of content - that someone has to give up their contact information in order to download. So, unlike a page on your website, a post on social media or a blogpost, you can make contact with the people who consumed your content.

That's pretty much it. Straightforward stuff.

There's a growing conventional wisdom that lead magnets are a waste of time because they generate few leads, few of those leads turn into paying customers, or both.

My view is that this is not actually something intrinsic to lead magnets. Rather, lead magnets don't perform because marketers are using the wrong content. This newsletter is going to show you what I mean, then show you examples of companies that are doing a good job of this.

Right content, wrong people

I summarised this in six words on Linkedin the other day:

I wrote this because I'm constantly seeing social media ads trying to get me to download a case study about how this or that company helped achieve some great result for their customers.

Problem is, I have no idea who this company is, and I have no idea who their customers are. So I'm naturally not that interested in reading their case study.

And this is not a sneer at case studies. Case studies are great! But they're best-suited for people who already know who you are. People in the middle of this process:

But lead magnets aren't really targeted at these people. If someone is in the middle of your sales funnel, you pretty much by definition have their contact details already. Lead magnets are for people at the top of that diagram - people who aren't really aware of your company, the problem you solve, or both.

It's not just case studies

This mistake isn't limited to case studies. Here's an ad I saw in my Linkedin feed the other day:

Do you see the problem here? This ad is offering me an eBook on how to become a "power user" for a product I've never heard of in my life. There's no value in there for me; it's like getting an owner's manual for a car I don't own.

That's the paradox of this approach. The goal of a lead magnet is to get people's contact details. Yet, companies often choose to use content that is best-suited to people whose contact details they already have.

Create useful content

A lead magnet really needs to add value to your target customer's life in a way that is not directly connected to your product, because they don't know what your product is.

The absolute gold standard of this approach is marketing automation platform Hubspot. Here's one of their social media ads for a lead magnet:

This lead magnet isn't really about Hubspot at all. Rather, it's providing something useful to people who might have problems Hubspot solves. This is a critical difference.

Someone who is in charge of social media content is probably going to have problems that Hubspot solves. But at this point in their buying process, they're not even thinking about Hubspot. How to use Hubspot and case studies about Hubspot are not relevant to their life.

But a social media calendar is relevant to their life! They're much more likely to download this - and then Hubspot can gradually introduce themselves over time.

Wrap it up

Here's the bottom line: if your lead magnets aren't performing as well as you'd like, don't write lead magnets off entirely. Rather, take a hard look at the content you're promoting, and ask yourself if it's really going to be valuable to someone who's never heard of you in their life.

More often than not, the answer's going to be no. So make something new!

And if you're stuck, just get in touch and I can help you out.

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