Now that you know how important lead magnets are we’re going to start to generate ideas for our lead magnets.

The key here is to know how the lead magnets fit in your overall funnel. Nail this and the rest becomes easy.

Let’s get started:

The sole purpose of a lead magnet is to get the email address of an audience member so that we can continue the conversation.

If you don’t do this then the rest is unimportant - the quality of your lead magnet, what you do with leads, how you bring them to the sale. All unimportant if you fail to capture the lead in the first place.

In the business framework I teach lead magnets are a crucial linchpin between Audience and Tribe.

My framework again is BATON (Business, Audience, Tribe, Offer, Network).

Having an audience is amazing - it lets you talk en masse to many people about the value you offer. But crucially we aren’t in full control of our audience - the social media platforms or ad platforms are. If they change the rules we’re done for.

So we need to get someone into our tribe (newsletter, email list, community, Whatsapp group - it takes many forms!) so we can keep talking to them.

The lead magnet is what we use to transition people from Audience into Tribe. That’s its core purpose.

Key to transition

The key to transitioning someone from Audience to Tribe using a lead magnet is congruency. That’s a fancy word for consistency really.

We need our lead magnet to make sense to our audience. It should talk about the same things as our content. It should be a natural next step for them.

I’m going to pull in an example that isn’t me for a change to show I’m not a narcissist! I’ll use vegantechnomad Jennifer Chou:

Her brand is unhinged productivity. And she nails it. Here’s a link to follow her: https://www.instagram.com/vegantechnomad/ and here are her recent videos:

She talks about her systems for productivity. For people who are interested in “unhinged” levels of productivity. A lot of her content is running through the Notion documents she has made to track areas of her life.

What do you think her leads magnets are?

Yup! Templates of her systems that people can use themselves to build an unhinged productivity system.

Your lead magnets should have a similar pathway:

• someone follows and consumes your content

• your lead magnet gives them an entry point to DIY what you do

• your paid offer is helping them to get it done

This is where so many lead magnets collapse - they fail to connect to what is before (content marketing) and what is after (your sale). Nail this and you’ll have a constant stream of profitable leads.

Brainstorming lead magnet ideas

We know the lead magnet should sit between our audience’s interests and our offer. So we can now us a prompt:

Act as a digital marketing strategist

Brainstorm 20 potential lead magnet ideas for my business

My business is [provide description]

My audience (social media) most enjoy content about [add top content topics]

My first paid offer is [add first paid offer]

The lead magnet ideas should be consistent between audience through to my paid offer. There should be a logical through-line so that when an audience member becomes a lead my first offer makes sense. 

For each lead magnet provide the topic, the problem it solves and why it is consistent

Do not give me the format - just the idea

When I plug in details about my business ChatGPT gives me the following ideas (3 out of 10):

All honestly great ideas for lead magnets.

Notice that the prompt specifically does not ask for formats. We’ll cover those in the next Part. Right now we only want the ideas themselves.

Use the prompt to generate lots of ideas and review them all.

We want multiple lead magnet ideas. We are not looking for one or two.

The reason for this is that we need lots of lead magnets for our business.

We need a stable that we rotate through. Lots of businesses create one and hope for the best. Mistake.

The absolute worst lead magnet is to write a whole ebook! My god that’s a terrible idea. But I see people do it again and again.

No one wants to read a whole book. Especially not as the first thing they get from you. And it takes a huge amount of time to write a book!

Instead remember that the key to a good lead magnet is the ability to transition an audience member to your email list. We need the bare minimum to get that done!

Instead of making one really big and time consuming lead magnet therefore we’ll make many smaller lead magnets.

We’re going to make a handful and feature them one at a time to our audience so that our audience doesn’t get bored. It’ll be possible to create lots because we’ll leverage AI. Don’t worry though they’ll still slap.

Right now what I want you to do is start to compile a list of ideas. We’ll then combine with formats (in the next Part) and then mass produce the lead magnets.