Marketing tips, marketing help and advice

Lead magnets: Do they work and should you use them?

November 29, 2019 by Jim Connolly

Business owners often ask me “do lead magnets work?“, as a way to grow their newsletter lists. If you’re considering using them, or you’re wondering why they’re not working for you, you should find the following useful.

Let’s go.

Lead magnets?

For those who don’t already know, the term lead magnets was made popular by internet marketing gurus / social media gurus (and pretty much every get-rich-quick guru). However, the concept has been around for decades.

It refers to a freebie, which is used to entice people to give you their contact details. The most common freebies include ‘special reports’, white papers, ‘exclusive’ audio / video content or some kind of information that’s only available via email. In return for the freebie, people are asked to provide their contact details.

Because of the extreme negativity attached to lead magnets, many internet marketing gurus refer to them as ethical bribes. I’m not sure why they think a bribe sounds better!

Building your list

Probably the most common use of lead magnets, is list building for newsletters. On the surface, they seem like a no-brainer. You certainly can attract lots of contact details with them.

However, there’s a major downside.

Lead magnets are notorious for attracting the lowest possible quality contact details. That’s because the use of free stuff as bait, is most attractive to so-called freebie hunters; who are attracted to freebies like moths to a flame.

Why does this result in such amazingly low quality?

Many / most freebie hunters use dedicated email addresses, just for getting their free offers. They check the email address only when they’re waiting for the freebie to arrive. As such, lists built from lead magnets can be really poor quality. Yes, you’ll probably attract some genuine contacts, too. But the overall quality will be massively lower than a normal list.

That said, there are some instances where lead magnets are worth considering.

Really?

Yes. Really.

Lead magnets can work

One example where lead magnets can work, is if you’re building a newsletter readership, where your business model is advertising. Offering a freebie, to people who pay you with their attention, and never need to pay you financially, can be a pretty good fit. So, if you’re offering a newsletter, and your advertisers pay based on the size of your list or reach (which they shouldn’t, but that’s another post), lead magnets will work.

I’ve also seen lead magnets used successfully for the sale of low-cost, downloadable content.

Interestingly, this is exactly what internet marketing gurus sold for years. Before they all switched to selling online training courses, they used to offer ‘information products’. Remember them? Those ebooks that claimed to blow the lid off your potential, or show you how to make a fortune while you sleep… and all for just $29.99.

Sigh.

Where lead magnets work least well

Without doubt, the area where lead magnets work least well, is with service providers; lawyers, accountants, coaches, consultants, mentors and designers, etc., etc.

I regularly hear from service providers, who have built lists using lead magnets and seen terrible results. In fact, I was prompted to write about this after an email I received from a reader in Sydney, Australia. She’s a copywriter and has built a list of over 45,000 lead magnet contacts, which she’d mailed for 12-months. It didn’t generate one paying client. She showed me some of the emails she’d sent, and as you’d expect from a professional writer, they were superb. But the list itself just wasn’t worth mailing.

There are a couple of key reasons why lead magnets are so ineffective for service providers:

The level of trust and commitment required to download a freebie, is close to zero. The trust and commitment required to buy a low-cost information product is moderate. BUT the trust and commitment required to hire the services of an expert is absolutely HUGE.
The service provider needs to somehow reposition themselves as a professional, who offers a high quality service. This, after showing they were fine offering ethical bribes / freebies, in an effort to get clients. At best, it looks needy. At worst it looks shoddy. Either way, that’s a heck of a barrier to overcome!

Conclusion

Before you think about using lead magnets, consider why you need them. Unless you sell advertising based on list size, it’s a pretty poor strategy.

The most valuable lists, by far, are those that grow organically. Organic lists grow because people are genuinely interested in knowing more about what you do. These interested people are of enormous value to your business, as an excellent source of prospective clients.

Let’s look at your competitors

November 27, 2019 by Jim Connolly

Photo: Shutterstock.

When was the last time you researched your competitors?

It has never been easier for you to research the marketing you are competing against, than it is today. In minutes, you can tell if someone is serious competition to your business or simply a dabbler.

For example:

You can read their website and tell instantly if it looks professional or not.
Their site will also show you the range of services they offer and the guarantees they provide.
In some cases, you can see what they charge.
You can also check their social media footprint and see if they are using it to broadcast or connect. You can tell a huge amount about the culture of a business by looking at what they think is appropriate to share on social networks.

Over the past 25 years, I’ve worked with thousands of business owners. One of the things I see, over and over again, is a tendency to underestimate the service offered by their competitors. This is a potentially fatal mistake.

Here are 2 of the main reasons why this happens:

1. Caught-up in their own hard work and dedication

They work so hard on their own businesses, and care so passionately about their own clients, that they can’t imagine their competitors being equally committed. This is, of course, a fallacy. The vast majority of business owners work their ass off and try extremely hard to keep their clients happy.

We need to avoid underestimating our competitors, at all costs. It’s a mindset that causes us to ease off the gas. To coast. And in doing so, we make it way too easy for a hard-working competitor to eat our lunch!

2. Biased reporting

There are a lot of people out there, who tend to tell us what they think we want to hear. Others will tell us what they want us to believe.

Let me expand on that a little.

If you attract a new client, who was fired by one of your competitors for being a late payer / impossible to work with, they’ll seldom admit it. Instead, they’ll often say they left because the service was lousy. Similarly, when you hire people who previously worked for one of your competitors, they’ll often trash-talk about them.

Many business owners use the same suppliers as their competitors. If you ask a supplier how your competition are doing, you’ll often get negative reports. Don’t take too much notice. Those who are unprofessional enough to share news about their customers with you, are potentially unprofessional enough to give fake feedback.

In short, take your competitors seriously. Because it’s very easy to get a totally inaccurate picture. And as we discovered the last time the economy was this uncertain, some could well be sleeping giants.

Get your business noticed and avoid an expensive mistake

November 21, 2019 by Jim Connolly

Photo: Shutterstock.

So, you want to get your business / products / services noticed? Of course you do. You work hard, your business is excellent and more people need to know about what you do.

However, before you start working on how to get noticed, you’ll need to put some foundations in place. Otherwise, you’ll blow a ton of money, waste your time and miss out on some potentially great opportunities.

With this in mind, consider the following.

Do you have an accurate way to measure the number of people (prospective customers) who notice you?
Have you determined the number of people you need to notice you, in order for your business to flourish?
Are you able to accurately track whether you are getting noticed by the right people, or just a poorly targeted mix?
When people notice you for the first time, do your *touch points build an image of trust? *Touch points are the places where a new customer encounters you, such as your website, Facebook, Linkedin, Twitter, your office, your store, your advertising, etc.
Will new prospective customers find your message compelling enough, to motivate them to come back for more, to contact you or to place an order?
And have you made it extremely easy and intuitive, for them to recommend you to their friends and contacts?
Do you have a robust strategy to obtain their permission to stay in touch with them?
Are your systems (online and offline) regularly tested, to ensure they’re working, or are you losing prospective customers or important data, without even knowing it?

Those are just some of the things you need to look at.

The key is to make sure you don’t simply get noticed, but that you get noticed by the right people. And that when these prospective customers notice you, you’re ready for them. Anything else and you’re leaving money on the table.

What on earth were they thinking?

November 20, 2019 by Jim Connolly

Photo: Shutterstock.

Today’s post is for you. And for me.

I’ve been doing a lot of thinking this morning.

I wonder why thousands of accountants pay, to use the exact same newsletter as their competitors… then complain because their look-alike firms attract fee sensitive client enquiries.
I wonder why marketing professionals join networking groups, desperately looking for leads, when they’re supposed to know how to attract the very best clients.
I wonder why most business owners have no idea who the top 5 or 10 people in their industry are, yet they can name the judges on a TV talent show.
I wonder why business owners say the reason their customers don’t recommend them, is that ‘their customers’ just aren’t that type, even though it’s provably incorrect.

What on earth were they thinking?

Here’s one possible answer

Much like web designers who have ugly websites and communications companies who use bland messaging, I believe there’s too little thought given to the consequences. These situations occur when decisions are made (and avoided) with too little consideration of the effects they will have.

On a surface level, the decisions mentioned here are easy to make. So easy, they’re almost non-decisions.

For example.

Maybe the accountants with bought-in newsletters see them as a tiny financial investment, thus of equally little risk. They’re not thinking enough about the consequences of trying to get noticed and grow their practice, with that cookie cutter approach.
Maybe the marketing person in the networking group assumes, or hopes, that no one will notice the irony of their membership. And if their business is already struggling, they may not even care about the medium-term impact it will have on their reputation.
Maybe the business owners who are less informed about the top contacts in their marketplace, than the judges on a TV show, just want to chill after a hard day at work. They may not necessarily care that much, about the influential people in their niche.
And maybe the business owners who would rather assume their clients ‘just don’t recommend service providers’, aren’t ready yet to face the reality of such a dangerous situation.

Obviously, this post isn’t intended for those people. They’re not the business owners who read my stuff.

It’s about us and our businesses

I’m sharing this, because I believe we should look in the mirror. If we do, all of us, myself included, will find we’re thinking on a surface level in at least one area, where we really should be applying more thought.

And a great place to start, is with any part of our business where we’re not seeing the results we want. Our results are always telling us something. It’s our job to listen. To take heed. And then to take action.

Marketing 101: Closing the deal

November 18, 2019 by Jim Connolly

Photo: Shutterstock.

When I started out, it was all about closing the sale.

In fact, good salespeople were often referred to as good closers.

Decades later, I still see sales recruiters asking for candidates who have a proven record of closing.

Here’s why we need to be extremely careful before adopting the closing mindset, or any of the countless closing tricks and techniques.

Closed for business?

The challenge with the closing mindset, is that it positions the prospective customer as little more than a barrier. A hurdle between you and the sale. An obstacle to be overcome. Little wonder so many closing techniques are based on psychological tricks.

The use of long, uncomfortable silences at key points in the sales process, for example, is used to put pressure on the prospective client. So is refusing to accept a “no” from them, by asking what they need additional clarity on, each time they want out.

In a nutshell: The focus is on outmanoeuvring your opponent. It’s them against you. A confrontation.

Here’s a very different approach, along with why I strongly recommend you use it.

Opening relationships

I built my reputation in sales by adopting the polar opposite approach. Instead of focusing on closing, I focused on opening.

Opening relationships, to be exact.

I found (and still find) the idea of closing to be self-defeating. I discovered that you can achieve a great deal more, by opening relationships with people. This means taking time to listen to them. And then learning about their challenges and what they want / need. If our marketing is targeted correctly, we’re automatically only speaking with people who are our ideal profile of client.

When handled correctly, and preceded with effective marketing, this means there’s no need to close anything (or close on anyone).

The whole process becomes a naturally-flowing conversation, where we seek to help people overcome a challenge, with the products or services we provide.

It also means refusing to sell anything to anyone, if we believe it’s not what they need.

Too passive?

This approach may sound passive, but consider your friends. Consider the people you like. The people you trust. The people you love to have around you. Are they aggressive towards you? Confrontational? No! That’s because we prefer those who respect us and are open and honest with us.

We like people who are open and honest.

We buy from people who are open and honest.

We trust people who are open and honest.

We recommend people who are open and honest.

In short, the more open we are, the more opportunities we’re open to.