Do Lead Magnets Work?

What Makes a Lead Magnet Work?

A lead magnet works when it helps your best-fit buyer with a decision they’re already facing, and when it’s specific enough that only people in that situation would ask for it. The topic, the timing and who it attracts matter more than the format, so a calculator, an assessment or a written report can each work or fail.

We call a lead magnet built this way a Prospect Magnet: something your most valuable buyer will trade their contact details for, which leads naturally to the offering you most want to sell. The Prospect Magnets step covers how to build one; what separates a magnet that brings buyers from one that brings contacts is this:

• It meets a decision the buyer is already facing, such as a budget, a replacement or a change of supplier, so it arrives while they’re weighing a purchase rather than a year before.
• It’s specific enough to turn away casual interest, because a general guide attracts anyone, while something useful only in a particular situation attracts the buyers in it.
• The buyer can picture exactly what they’ll get, which is why, in our own campaigns, a specific, low-risk offer drew a better response than a generic free assessment that read as a sales trap.
• Delivering it starts the sales conversation, so the next step after the magnet is a conversation about the thing you sell.

Do Lead Magnets Work for B2B Companies?

Lead magnets often work well for B2B companies, because business buyers take months to decide, involve several people and need something concrete to bring into a budget meeting. A B2B magnet works when it helps with that decision, and it usually falls flat when it’s a general guide to the category.

The page the magnet sits on and the follow-up matter as much as the magnet itself, as the Prospect-to-Lead Conversion step and why is my website not converting show in full.

For the conversion rate to expect from a lead magnet page, see what is a good lead conversion rate.

When Don’t Lead Magnets Work?

Lead magnets don’t produce customers when they attract people who will never buy from you, when they reach buyers long before they’re ready, or when nobody follows up with the people who ask for them. In each case the download count can look healthy while the customer count stays flat.

• When the topic is broad enough to interest anyone, such as an industry trends report or a general checklist, because it fills the list with people who want the information and have nothing to buy.
• When it isn’t connected to what you sell, so even a good-fit buyer who downloads it has no natural next step toward your offering.
• When requests go into an email sequence instead of to a person, because a buyer who asked for something useful while weighing a purchase is ready for a conversation now, and how to follow up with sales leads covers what to do instead.
• When buyers decide quickly on price, as with a low-priced product bought on the spot, where asking for contact details puts an extra step between the buyer and the purchase.
• When your best buyers are a short, named list, where a personal approach usually beats waiting for them to find a download, though the magnet can still be the opening offer in that outreach.

In client accounts we’ve seen lead volume look healthy until someone checked which segments the leads came from, which is the pattern to look for with a generic magnet: plenty of names, and a sales team that has quietly stopped calling them.

How Do You Measure Whether a Lead Magnet Is Working?

Measure a lead magnet by the customers it produces and the gross profit they bring, set against what you can afford to spend to win each one. Downloads and cost per lead only tell you how popular it is.

1. Decide the most you can afford to spend to win a customer (your ceiling), from their gross profit, how long they stay, how soon the profit arrives and how long your cash flow can wait. There’s no fixed rule for this, and the Channel Selection step shows how to work it out.
2. Mark every request against your written description of a good-fit buyer, as a fit, a poor fit or unclear, so you can see what share of the people asking are worth calling.
3. Track each request through to opportunity and signed customer in your CRM, over a period at least as long as your sales cycle.
4. Divide the magnet’s full cost by the customers it won, counting the ads that promoted it and the time to deliver it, and compare that with your ceiling.
5. Compare it with what it replaced, changing one thing at a time and keeping the original running, so you know the magnet made the difference.

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.

How Can You Tell a Good Lead Magnet From a Bad One?

A good lead magnet brings fewer, better requests from people who match your best-fit buyer and leads straight into a sales conversation, while a bad one brings many requests from people who will never buy and leads into an email sequence. Your sales team can usually tell you which you have from the last few weeks of requests.

If yours looks like a magnet that brings contacts, rework it before you promote it harder, because promoting a lead magnet only multiplies what the magnet already does:

• Write down who a good lead is first, with your best salesperson, which how to generate high-quality leads walks through.
• Say on the page and in the ads who it’s for and who it isn’t, so poor fits screen themselves out.
• Ask for what sales needs to qualify, even though each extra question costs some requests.