Step 3 of 6 · Prospect Magnets
How to build a Prospect Magnet, the kind of lead magnet your best buyer will ask for.
Most company websites give a new visitor two choices: read about the company, or fill in a form to talk to sales. The buyers your sales team most wants to meet are usually months away from wanting that conversation, so they read a page or two and leave, and by the time they're ready to talk, a competitor has often helped them already with a budget estimate, a checklist they could take to their board or a straight answer to a question they'd been putting off.
That useful thing is what marketers call a lead magnet. In ProfitPaths® we call it a Prospect Magnet, because it's built to draw in your IMPACT Prospect specifically, and a magnet that attracts anyone willing to trade an email address fills your list with people who will never buy. It can be a calculator, an assessment, a planning template, a benchmark report or a specific free offer, as long as it solves a problem your best buyer already has and leads naturally to your IMPACT Offering. This page shows you how to build one, test it before it goes live and measure whether it brings in customers.
Prospect Magnets come third because a magnet has to fit one buyer and lead to one offering, the ones you chose in the IMPACT Offering and IMPACT Prospect steps, and they come before conversion and channels because the page a buyer lands on is built around the magnet, and a channel's job is to carry it.
Prospect Magnets
Build a Prospect Magnet your best buyer would ask for.
A Prospect Magnet is something valuable enough that your IMPACT Prospect will trade their attention, and often their contact details, to get it: a calculator, an assessment, a planning template, a benchmark report or a specific free offer.
What separates a good one from a forgettable one is how precisely it fits a problem your buyer already has, which is also why so much company content goes unread, since it answers the questions the company wishes buyers asked rather than the ones they bring to a sales call.
Generic offers rarely pull, because "contact us," "request a consultation" and "sign up for our newsletter" ask for something without giving much back. In our own campaigns, a specific, risk-free offer (a free homepage mockup delivered within two days) drew a better response than a generic free assessment, because the buyer could picture exactly what they'd get and it didn't feel like a sales trap.
We use five tests before a magnet goes live:
- It solves a problem the buyer already has, in words they’d use themselves.
- They can picture exactly what they’ll get, and roughly when.
- It’s useful even if they never buy, so asking for it doesn’t feel like agreeing to a sales call.
- It leads naturally to your IMPACT Offering, so the conversation after it is about the thing you want to sell.
- It costs well under your ceiling to deliver, including the time of whoever delivers it, where your ceiling is the most you can afford to spend to win one customer (the Channel Selection step shows how to set it).
Example The commercial HVAC contractor we follow through every step chose property management firms as its IMPACT Prospect. Property managers have to budget years ahead for replacing building equipment, and they're often guessing, so the contractor builds its magnet around that problem.
Each unit's age, condition and likely replacement year, ready for a capital budget
A technician spends half a day on site, which costs the contractor a few hundred dollars and is a small fraction of its $13,680 ceiling, and it puts the contractor's technician in the building before any competitor is invited in.
useful even if they never signKinds of Prospect Magnet
Choose the kind of magnet by whether your buyer is already looking.
The ProfitPaths method lists fourteen common kinds, from blog posts and newsletters to calculators and templates. Any of them can work, and which one fits depends less on the format than on where your IMPACT Prospect is when they meet it.
Buyers weighing a decision want something they can use on it.
Calculators and other web tools, assessments and quizzes, templates, checklists, case studies and specific free offers like the contractor’s forecast all help a buyer with a decision they’re already facing, such as a budget, a replacement or a change of supplier.
These are worth asking for contact details in return, because the people who want them are close to a purchase and the request itself tells sales who is ready to talk.
Buyers who haven’t started looking need a reason to remember you.
Blog posts, videos, podcasts, newsletters, infographics and social media content reach your IMPACT Prospect before the problem is on their list, while longer guides, eBooks, whitepapers and webinars suit the stage where they’ve started reading about it.
These earn familiarity, so ask for little or nothing at first and give each one a clear path to a magnet from the first group for when the buyer is ready.
Measure it
Judge a magnet by the customers it brings in and what each one cost to win.
The numbers a magnet produces first are downloads, form fills and cost per lead, and they reward the generic ones, because a broad topic draws more names. A cheaper download that brings in more names can look better on cost per lead and still cost more per customer, because so few of those names sign.
The contractor's forecast costs a few hundred dollars of technician time each, against a $13,680 ceiling, so it can afford to deliver a good number of forecasts for every property manager who signs, and the question that decides whether to keep it is how many of the people who ask for one go on to become customers. The Prospect-to-Lead Conversion step covers the page and follow-up that move that number.
Three numbers for every magnet
- How many of the people who see or use it become leads, counting only the requests that match your written description of the IMPACT Prospect, so a flood of poor fits doesn’t pass for success.
- How many of those leads become sales, tracked from request to signed customer in your CRM over at least one full sales cycle.
- What it costs to deliver against what a customer is worth, adding the delivery time and the cost of promoting it, dividing by the customers it won and comparing the result with your ceiling.
What doesn't work
Five ways companies waste a Prospect Magnet.
- 1Offering nothing worth asking for.
If your only call to action is “contact us,” you’re asking your best buyers to do all the work.
- 2Building it for everyone.
A topic broad enough to interest anyone fills the list with people who want the information and have nothing to buy.
- 3Leaving it unconnected to what you sell.
Even a good-fit buyer who uses it then has no natural next step toward your IMPACT Offering.
- 4Sending every request into an email sequence.
A buyer who asked for something useful while weighing a purchase is ready for a conversation with a person now, and an automated sequence makes them wait for it.
- 5Judging it by downloads.
Downloads and cost per lead show how popular a magnet is, and a popular one can still cost more per customer than the customer is worth.
At every size
A small company needs one good magnet, and a large one usually has too many weak ones.
If you run a smaller business
Start with one specific free offer that solves a problem your buyer already has, delivered by you or someone on your team, before you spend anything on building a tool or a report. At that size you can follow every request by hand and see for yourself whether the people asking for it turn into customers.
If you lead marketing at a larger company
You probably have a library of guides, webinars and downloads, each made for a past campaign and never retired. Run each one through the five tests and the customers it has produced, keep the few that bring in your IMPACT Prospect, and put the effort that went into the rest behind making those better.
More on Prospect Magnets
Guides that go deeper on building and promoting Prospect Magnets.
They're in progress and will be linked here as they're published.
Content Marketing Strategy
For building content around the questions your IMPACT Prospect asks.
- What Makes a Good Lead Magnet?: the criteria for a magnet that attracts the right prospects. coming soon