Quick take: What if you could attract better coaching and consulting clients with a simple 1-2 page document? We’ll discuss lead magnets that convert this week with Bryan Harris of Growth Tools and Attract.io.
Each week I sit down with incredible entrepreneurs and marketing minds to bring you inspiring and actionable lessons you can use to start and grow your coaching, consulting, or service-based business. Be sure to subscribe above so you don’t miss an episode.
Bryan Harris is the founder of Growth Tools, which creates software tools and online accelerator programs to speed up the growth of your business. I’m excited to announce that Leadpages has partnered up with them to provide you 100% free access to their lead magnet creation tool, Attract.io, which we’ll talk more about at the end of our conversation.
In this episode, Bryan shares best practices of lead magnet creation, including mistakes to avoid, key components that turn new subscribers into top clients, and 3 simple methods for promoting your lead magnet for faster email subscriber growth.
Transcripts, resources, and top-takeaways are below.
If you’re short on time, here are a few golden nuggets from our conversation and the resources mentioned.
Ask for consultations on your thank you page. Hide your free consultation/strategy session behind the lead magnet opt-in to get more qualified prospects.
Aim for a bigger email list. When you focus on list building, your larger email list can be leveraged in multiple ways, and your client acquisition costs can be dramatically reduced.
Immediate gratification is key. Quit over-complicating your lead magnets – keep them focused on quickly solving a key problem for the new subscriber.
Promote your lead magnet wisely. Get your lead magnet in front of your ideal prospects through lead magnet swaps, paid advertising, and feedback requests inside of Facebook groups.
Bob: Bryan, it's so great to have you here for this week's episode of The Lead Generation. Thanks for being on.
Bryan: Yeah, thanks for having me, Bob.
Bob: I'm really looking forward to this call. We've got a lot of cool things to share. Something to announce to the world that you and I have been scheming behind the scenes for a little while, but before we get into all of that and how to best utilize lead magnets to market a business, can you share the kind of impact that you and the people at Growth Tools have on your audience that people can get to know you and what it is that you do a little better?
Bryan: Yeah, absolutely. So started Growth Tools six years ago. What we do is we come in and audit the marketing of online businesses. Typically businesses in the 5 to $50,000 a month range. Work with online course businesses, econ business, SAAS businesses. A lot of their marketing found a couple small hinges that swing big doors for them, things they've ever looked, or things they haven't tried before.
And then we'll give them the playbooks and coaching to actually execute those. Typically when we work with a client, we will double their revenue in 12 months or less.
So that's what we do. We have a bunch of tools we use to do that that we can give away for free. But our main service that we offer is analysis and coaching in order to double your business in a year or less. So that's what we do.
So yeah, I'm excited to talk today. We got a bunch of cool stuff. We've been talking about a bunch of fun stuff we've been working on over the last few months that all kind of ties into that. Yeah, that's a quick intro to me.
Bob: Excellent. And I think people who have been following you for a while have enjoyed all the types of experiments that you run and you really get into the weeds with your company to make sure that what's working in marketing five years ago still works today or you ditch it. So whatever it is that you're coming up with and showcasing does work extremely well in this moment. Not just in the past.
Use lead magnets as a client qualifier
Bob: Today's topic is really about better ways to utilize lead magnets for small business owners who might not have a ton of time to market their businesses. They are typically wanting to get clients in the door to work within one-on-one or one to few, maybe in courses and so forth. And a lot of times they're making some key mistakes where lead magnets can be a solution. So talk to us for just a minute about what a big mistake that a lot of these types of small businesses are making that having the right kind of lead magnet can solve.
Bryan: Yeah. So let me reframe this in a mistake we were making and then some of you are making the same mistake. This might be directly applicable to some, the principal might be applicable to others.
Our main sales process is for our, the service I just mentioned, our coaching service, is we get on the phone with people and talk to them, do a little coaching with them, make sure they're a good fit for us. And then we present our programs to them.
Most of our sales happen on the phone for that product. The process we had or the funnel that we had laid out is all the call to actions on the website or paid ads we ran, or partnerships, we did all led directly to book a call with us. We'll do a quick audit of your business and we'll talk to you about what it would be like for us to work with you to actually execute things we find after checking out your business.
A mistake with that was that's a big ask the first time you meet someone. It's like asking someone to marry you on the first date. So what we've done, we made this tweak about eight months ago. We put a lead magnet at the front end. So instead of having to talk to us, or maybe your variation would be join this webinar or sign up for an email course or something like that. Instead of having something that's more involved, a bigger commitment level, we put a lead magnet on the front end, an immediate gratification item that solved a big problem they had but didn't do it in a way that seemed like it would take a lot of work.
I'll give you an example. We offer, one of our main lead magnets we offer right now is a six part email sequence that one of our clients used to do a promotion that sold $10,000 or $20,000 worth of their, this particular client was online course creator, so it was the first online course.
So we lead with, and several of our ads and our promotion and our partnerships, all the different lead sources, we lead with download the six part email sequence instead of leading with, "Hey, book a call to talk to us and we'll do X, Y, and Z." It's a little hard to comprehend what that would look like. It's a bigger commitment level. We now lead with the lead magnet and then, here's the key thing that we were doing differently than we did before.
Once someone opts in for that lead magnet, as soon as they enter their email address into the form, into the Facebook ad, whatever the source is, the page they go to now says at the very top, "Hey, thanks so much for opting in. We're sending that thing you opted in for,” in our case the email sequence. “We're going to email that over to you so you have a copy of it. While you're here, claim your strategy call." Whatever the copy is or the exact copy is there and on that page we actually ask them to do the next step we want them to do, which in our case is book a phone call with us.
We have a video there that talks to why they would want to do that. A couple of examples of what they'll get out of that. At the very least, even if they don't sign up they'll actually get the couple, two or three pointers of the things that they hadn't thought of before. Things they can do immediately by doing that. But putting the lead magnet first and then having the next step, which in our case is book a phone call with us on the thank you page we increased our bookings, our phone calls that we booked, by three and a half X. Same traffic, no traffic increases at all, no more ad spend, no more partnerships, no more organic. But we increased our bookings about three and a half X and here's why.
One, we got more people to opt in. We got more people to do the initial action because it was easier and it seemed the immediate gratification step was there. Second thing is anybody that didn't book a call on the thank you page, we now have their contact information so we could follow up with them and send them a handful of emails to give them the download they wanted, the resource we offered initially, and to show them why having a call with us would be a good idea.
We get half of our signups and follow up with them, and the other part of the gain was gained by just making the first step they took easier. And I know several people have reported back in the day, we haven't run this exact report but we've seen ancillary evidence that shows this, by giving people a couple small actions to take first that lead up to a big action, you actually have way more big actions that take place.
An example of this is in our paid ad funnel. When you click a button to enter your email address to get the six part email sequence, you don't just enter an email address. First, you click a button to say what stage of business you're at and then, you click another button to say what stage of revenue you're at. And then, you enter your email address.
We get more signups via asking you two questions before email. We don't even do anything with the questions right now. Literally they go to nowhere. But more people sign up with that method because they're taking these micro commitments. And I think the same principle is at play here, by taking a micro commitment of getting this super crunchy, immediate gratification bonus that's really relevant and really sexy to me. Then, you asked me to do something else, I'm more likely to do that thing.
You get more people opt in, more followup and more bookings as a result. So the results of making those couple tweaks has been 3.5x more bookings, 2.8x more revenue from the exact same traffic amount from putting the lead magnet first. And then the next action we want to take on the thank you page for that and following up with anybody that doesn't take that action.
Bob: That's awesome. There's so many things to unpack here. So first of all, I love the example you share in this ad. I believe it's the one with Brennan Dunn with his email course, correct?
Bryan: Yep. That's one of them.
Bob: Yeah, because I'm constantly being advertised to by Growth Tools since something that we're in the works for. And then, I also wanted to mention this idea shouldn't be a surprise for a lot of people if you've been following what Leadpages has taught for a long time. Back in the day, Clay Collins, our co-founder, popularized this idea of behavioral inertia with a two-step opt in, that even just having a button on the page before a form gets people to be more likely to fill that form out because their guard has been lowered.
They're not as defensive when they see that opt in form right there on the page. They click the button, then the form shows up. They're more likely to commit to that. So it's not a surprise that you’re finding, take that to that next level, have a little micro-commitment. Then a micro commitment beyond that very, you know Robert Cialdini-ish of you guys as you've put into practice and that you are doing that.
A third thing I want to point out is that you have implemented the booking on the thank you page and I think a lot of people who initially get the idea, "Oh I need a lead magnet first." They wait until email two or three or four or five to continue doing some form of qualification before they ask for the booking, and their open rate goes from 40% to 20% to 10% in those three emails and they never see that page.
Bryan: Nobody's reading by the time you ask him to do anything. They've all dropped off. No one's there anymore.
A simple consultation funnel for coaches
Bob: Right, exactly. So just let's reinforce this idea of, did you experiment with booking not on the thank you page for a little bit? And does the same thing apply to actually asking for a sale on a thank you page as opposed to waiting a couple of stages down the road for maybe a trip wire, as Ryan Deiss would call it, or some other type of product to purchase?
Bryan: Yeah, with our specific product, the price point is fairly high. So they're going to have to talk to someone. So we've never experimented with doing that on the thank you page. That'd be interesting to do. But my hypothesis, based on everything we've tried, we've tried to sell this product via email launches and that kind of thing, direct to checkout and it just hasn't worked well.
So I don't think cold traffic hitting that especially would not convert well. That would be my educated guess on that. But yeah, we did for a period have a lead magnet leading to a thank you page, leading into an email series that then gets you to book. But you're right, that first email gets opened at an 80% rate clicked on very high because they wanted the lead magnet. And then, the numbers drop off precipitously towards the end.
It's kind of like having a really popular blog post that ranks, but having your content upgrade at the very end. You're just not going to have any opt in for it. You need it at the beginning. You need to at the end, and just sprinkled throughout so people actually see it.
Just to add, there's probably two pieces of this that had been big for us. One is having the lead magnet first, but also having the thing I want them to do very clear next, on the page next, right there. And we send an email delivering the lead magnet as a separate email and we also send another email if they don't sign up within an hour, another email saying, "Hey, don't miss your extra bonus you got."
I think that the important part is one, to make sure that the thing you want them to do next, it's good for them. And then two, making it very clear on why this is a really good thing. You just got an email sequence. How about you talk to one of our coaches about how to use that in your business and we'll actually audit your last launch and pull it apart and give you a couple of pointers of how you can do it. Who wouldn't want that? Maybe you don't want to get on a phone call, that's fine. But that's a good value proposition.
It's a really good thing for you to do. And it just so happens that if at the end of that we seem like a good fit, we'll ask you if you want to know more about working with this. And if so, we'll tell you about us. It's just a natural thing to do and it's a total up sale that's not a sell but it's a good upgrade over what they got.
I think as long as your next step is positioned like that and it actually is that, it's totally a benefit for the digital customer there. We tried without booking on the thank you page, that was a short-lived experiment because the booking sucked. And then we put it on the thank you page and they wound up through the roof.
Then we started building the followup stuff for anybody that didn't book. And that just bolstered up even more. So that's been a really effective funnel. We've spent hundreds of thousands of dollars in ad spend. Pretty much every partnership we've done and all organic all runs through that basic funnel. We haven't been able to beat it yet. And we've tried a lot of stuff to try to beat it. And that's the thing that stood the test for the last 18 months total. The last eight months we've been hyper focused on all the nuances of what I just shared.
Better math for lowering client acquisition costs
Bob: Cool. And we don't need to dig into the weeds of this one too much. But a fourth thing I wanted to pull out from what you said observationally is when you do focus on that lead magnet with your paid traffic, you're getting 30% to 60% of opt in. I don't know what your numbers are, but typically that's what we see for a strong audience matched to the landing page. You might've been getting like 5% to book in the consulting prior to that, right?
So you get that much multiple of people actually being on your list. And that means that you no longer have to spend your money on retargeting to the people who didn't opt into the consultation because you have 5 to 10 times more people who opted in. You're just falling up with them via email without paying for that.
Those of you who are advertising with paid ads, this is reducing your costs. You mentioned lowering costs of customer acquisition. That's one of the fundamental reasons why. Is you get to be the one who controls that communication talking back to those people.
Bryan: Yeah, and the difference in booking a hundred sales calls in a month via ads, even if we were doing it profitably and building an email list of 10,000 people that month, you get to talk and build a relationship with 10,000 people now. We routinely sell, this week we've made almost $40,000 in sales from people that opted in to that lead magnet. Never booked a call, but 90 days later did. It was early summer when these people joined, it's 90 days later they'd been nurtured, they'd been talked to, they'd been shared information with and then we send them another call to action organically through our newsletter that we send it to them to that specific list and they book calls in bulk.
Would you rather have a hundred people and have two of them buy, or you will have 10,000 people and have two of them buy? I'd rather have the 10,000 because now I can nurture a relationship and grow that. And I can even build lookalike audiences and retargeting and that helps with leveraging with partnerships as well. If you're trying to book webinar partnerships, or lead magnet spots, or guest posts. Now you have a list of 10,000 you can use to say, "Hey, I'm going to write this post and promote it to 10,000 people."
So it increases your leverage with your partners, increases your ad spend leverage. It's just, I would rather have a lot of people than a few people, and if I can make the money basically be the same or better, then I'm definitely going to go that route.
Bob: Cool. So we might have to have you back for another day for email follow-up nurturing because that's super fascinating and I think you guys really have that nailed down. I think a lot of people would love to learn what was this 90-day follow up that did get the people, who are initially a no, to come back in. But I do want to focus us on the lead magnet side of things for today.
3 essential factors of effective lead magnets that get you more clients
Bob: The next question I have for you centers around. Well, there's two things. I want to talk about, how you're getting the lead magnet in front of people without paying for it? I know you're doing a lot of ads, but you also do some other creative things, I think, to promote lead magnets in general. But let's talk about the types of lead magnets for a second. Because you sort of alluded to this earlier, what are some of the mistakes people make when they think, I've got to have a lead magnet to collect people's email addresses? What do they typically do that sabotages their success? Delays their results quite a bit?
Bryan: Yeah, that's a really kind of thing is just over-complicating the process. I was just doing a coaching call last week. We were talking about lead magnets and optimizing their site for conversions and whatnot. And when one person asks like, "Hey, I get this seven part video course, do you think that would make a good lead magnet?" I'm like, "No, that's a terrible lead magnet actually."
The number one rule of lead magnets is they need to be extremely built around immediate gratification. So somebody needs to be able to look at that headline, the name of your lead magnet, and immediately be attracted to not feel like they're going to have to do a lot of work to figure it out. I don't want to watch seven more videos. I'm good with videos. Give me the two, the one page summary of the thing. Just give me the emails. Don't talk about the emails.
The lead magnet needs to have a high sense of immediate gratification, keep it simple.
Another mistake people make is not having a call to action for the next part of your funnel built into the lead magnet itself. So we do this with the last page is typically a call to action page. There's a big headline like, "Hey, do you want to do X, Y, Z? Do you want us to audit your last launch and give you a few pointers? If so, book a call here. It's free and we'll talk to you and give you some ideas." We'll just build that into the lead magnet itself. So people consuming the lead magnet see it, obviously, and follow up is there as well, but those are the three.
Just not making them simple, not making them crunchy in immediately gratification enough and not building a call to action into the lead magnet itself.
A two page, how to start your Facebook ad funnel summary checklist will get a higher conversion rate than the 17-part masterclass video that'll make you $300 million in the next three seconds course.
Because one, nobody believes that and two, that just sounds like a lot of work to watch all that stuff.
Give me the thing that I read it, and my immediate pain solved. This will take me three seconds to consume. I'm good with that and move forward.
It takes you just an hour or two to make it max and it'll get you a higher conversion rate. Typically, that's what we've seen. So immediate gratification needs to be the thought, the number one thought when you're making it.
Why simpler lead magnets are better than complicated ones
Bob: I think to drive that point home with this idea, a lot of people do try to have this thud factor for a free lead magnet. The challenge psychologically for the prospect is they have to set aside time to actually go through it. And they never will.
Their brains are in this kind of Zeigarnik effect of a loop, right? They can't go to the next step in your funnel until they close that initial stage that they've worked with you in. Right?
So if you tell them you need to go through these seven videos before you go to the next step and they're never going to listen to your pitch or the next step in whatever emails you do. And if they never finished it on their own, they're never going to move forward. So I love this idea of consuming quickly. Plus, you can create it quickly and you can experiment more expeditiously because you can try out a lead magnet. It didn't take you three weeks to make. You create it in an afternoon or an hour, then you can try out another one a couple of days later. There's just a lot of ways to benefit from keeping it simple.
Bryan: Yeah. The result of your lead magnet should build trust and high desire to do the next thing. And if doing the next thing takes me three months to do or three weeks to do, or three hours to do, then that's literally just a delay point to move to the next step. So if I got the seven part video course or, this is why I don't like email courses as front end lead magnets, I got to wait for your 14 day email course to finish. So it's literally a built-in 14-day delay. Right?
I'm not going to move forward because I'm literally waiting to finish this thing until I take it the next step. Versus, if you gave me a two page checklist, that's probably just as valuable as that 14-day email sequence, I'm done with that step and ready for the next step in an hour.
I should finish it and I should trust you and your opinion and your guidance on that topic a whole lot more than I did when I opted in, and I should be ready for the next step. The next step should be really obvious and built into that lead magnet.
That's why bigger ones just generally don't convert as well because my attention span attended the 14 days is a lot lower than it wasn't the beginning and it just delayed me. Because I'm not going to sign up for the call or for the webinar or buy the product until I finished the free thing. Let me finish that first. But we know completion rates are low the longer it gets and attention spans and open rates and everything drop as you go through. So yeah, super crunchy, immediate gratification lead magnet that builds trust and move into the next step as quick as possible, is, we found, to convert the best.
Promote your lead magnet with Facebook ads
Bob: So the next part of our conversation takes two parts. One is paid and one is free. I mentioned this a moment ago. So I'd love to know, and you can pick either way that you want to go, how are you getting this lead magnet in front of most of your audience? Paid wise and free wise that people could learn?
Bryan: Yeah, so our three main traffic sources are partnerships, paid traffic, and organic search.
Let's talk about partnerships and PPC. So paid ads, you can literally just go to our Growth Tools page and look at the ads we're running. You can see exactly everything, the whole point I just outlined. Just go reverse engineer it, and check it out.
We run an ad, typically right now, almost all of our ads are pointed to a couple of different email sequences because our best clients, that's the immediate gratification. We don't make them 23 part email sequences. They're typically three to six part email sequences because I don't want you to save that and say, "I'll get back to it later when I'm ready." I want you to get it and read it now, so you can take the next step.
Remember: trust and move to the next step as quick as possible. So we're running ads to that email sequence. They opt in, they go to a thank you page, we can book a call and then, we talk to them. That funnel typically produces, in a month we run ads, 1.5x - 2.5x on ad spend.
Bob: Let me clarify, you're saying you're sending people to a lead magnet that is an email sequence for people to use as a template. It's not, they are getting into an email sequence, just to be clear.
Bryan: Yes, yes. Yeah. That's a good clear clarification. Yep. A little meta, but yeah, they are downloading a six part email. So, they're literally downloading a PDF of a series of emails that have been used to promote a product because our people want to sell more product, they want to grow their sales. So here's the way we did it. Just go copy and do it. Yes. Good clarification.
Grow your email list with lead magnet swaps
Bryan: So one is paid ads, the other one is partnerships. There's one form of partnership that I don't know if I've ever seen done before, but we do it a lot and it's called a lead magnet swap. So, think about a guest post, a guest article you would write. You write, you'll spend 5 to 10 hours writing a really good article. You'll hopefully build a content upgrade for it. You will post it on the partner site. Depending on the partner and how well you did at formulating the partnership, maybe the partner emails on it, maybe they don't. If they don't, you get almost nothing from it unless it's just an insane ad traffic site, which is not normal. Or you've negotiated well, and they email to it and they send an email out that says, "Hey, check out Bryan's cool blog post he wrote about lead magnets." You click the link, you go to an article, you read the article, and maybe somewhere in there there's a call to action to your site where they can join the email list.
So typically if you really crush it on a guest post, you'll spend about 10 hours and you'll get anywhere from 500 to 1,000 email subscribers. That's if you know how to negotiate well, you know how to formulate your promo plan well, and the partner agrees to what you want to do that'll generate leads for you.
There's other reasons to do guest posts and SEO is a good one, backlinks and whatnot. But for lead gen, that's probably hard.
A lead magnet swamp has all the basic parameters of a guest post, but none of the downside. The downsides to guest posting is it's heavily relied upon the partner understanding the nuance of what you want them to do enough to promote it well so you actually get some traffic and leads from it.
And it also depends on you spending five to 10 hours of writing a new article every time you do it. You can't reuse guest posts. That doesn't go over well.
With a lead magnet swap, you can do all of those things. You make one lead magnet that takes you a couple hours to do and then, you go around and find other companies and influencers in your industry that have similar audiences. Similar audiences that aren't directly competitive with you and you talk to them and you get them to email your lead magnet out and you email their lead magnet out.
So, to your email list you're saying, "Hey, I just found Leadpages has this awesome how to make a lead magnet guide. Here's a link, go check it out." And it literally is a link to their landing page to opt in for the thing. They're not emailing to an article that then there's like three steps between the email and you getting on the list. A lead magnet swap, you’re emailing directly to a landing page.
I take Bob's lead magnet, send it to the Growth Tools' email list and say, "Bob is awesome. His lead magnet's awesome. Go check it out." And it's relevant to them.
Bob takes our lead magnet, the Growth Tools' lead magnet and emails out that email sequence to say, "Hey, if you guys want to learn how to sell your high ticket thing, here's some email sequences. Use these, they've made $2 million for Brian. Go check it out." Download link and they can go download the thing.
Instead of having to spend all this time making a unique piece of content and remake it for every new partner, with a lead magnet swap you use the same lead magnet over and over again. And there's almost no text. So if you have one landing page with an email download. And the partner's emailing directly to it.
We found that to work really well and it becomes, for us, that's one of our primary lead sources, one of our three primary channels is our lead magnets and getting partners to promote them for us. And we do that in a variety of ways. That was one of them.
Lead magnet swaps are great. They work really well. Start with people you know, friends, family, people you know that have sites even if they're small and work your way up the ladder. But yeah, that's been a great source for us. I would definitely recommend that.
Bob: Cool. So before we get to your third tip on promotion, I want to get a little bit deeper into the lead magnet swap because doing a lead magnet swap can be magnified, I think, in two ways. And I don't know if you've tried both of these ways. I'd love to hear.
So one is you just mentioned, basically I broadcast to my list. You broadcast to your list. It's a time and space situation. It's October, we're going to swap. After that, no deal. Do you find partners willing and get good results from setting this up in follow up sequences that are evergreen that can be set up in October but then run 365 for the rest of the year?
Bryan: Now you're talking my language. Yeah, absolutely. The first step is to do the initial one. The next step is if the partner was good, go deeper with them. One, try to schedule a live promotion twice a year with them. Swap up lead magnets. Make a new lead magnet. We just landed a big partner for a lead magnet swap, an actual PDF lead magnet swap. We just made a whole new one for them and it made sense due to the estimated impact that would have.
I generally don't negotiate this on the front end with the lead magnet swap, the evergreen piece of thing, but absolutely can. There's a few ways you can do that. One, like you said, if they have a relevant welcome sequence autoresponder somewhere and that could be for new customers, that can be for new subscribers, that could be for a special email course they have. A special webinar sequence they have.
What I do after that initial lead magnet promotion goes well, I'll go just analyze their site and see like, "All right, if I could wave my magic wand and put it anywhere I wanted that made sense for their customer, where would I put it?" And then just go back to them and ask for that. And then we'll do the same thing on our side. And that might be, "Hey, maybe the lead magnet, maybe..." Just to give you an example, let's say for Leadpages we sent out y'all's lead magnet building course thing, I forget the name of it, but the other course for that. Let's say we email that out. Maybe we find that went well, we got 1000 subscribers. You guys got 1000 subscribers. You love that. We come and approach you and say, "Hey, what if every time someone opts in for that lead magnet course, you also gave them this resource as well?" And it's just one of our resources.
Maybe it's a lead magnet templates, or a tool we built or some type of lead magnet of some sort. And we did the same thing, so every time someone downloads that now, they get our thing as well. So the way to approach this is to zoom out. One, keep your partner first. Any kind of partnership stuff you do, it's easy to get into the realm of what do I want? And for us, we've done partnerships for awhile, we've done this successfully. It always has to start with what's best for the partner. Give them the bigger win by far, if humanly possible. Make sure they get more, they're happy, they never want to leave.
Your stuff always comes second. But when it gets to your stuff, look at their business, look at the funnels they have set up. Look at the lead sources they have and try to find, if you could wave your magic wand, where would you put it? And then go ask for that. And if you've done a successful partnership, you've done a successful live promo from before that, that's going to make that ask pretty easy.
And you'll need to reciprocate on your end. Whatever you're asking them to do, most likely you'll need to do something similar in the ballpark of that for them. But that can be managed and negotiated well. If in a year you did 50 lead magnet swaps, one, good job, come talk to me, I want to hire you. Two, your list will have exploded in that time period and you will have found three or four really good partners at those 50 people. Go deep with those people. Don't go deep with all 50, it's impossible to do all that.
You can develop twice a year promotions with those people and get evergreen hooks into quite a few things of theirs and likewise with yours, your customers will love it because you're sending them really cool stuff. Their customers will love it because you're sending them really good stuff and both of you like it because you're getting a lot more leads out of it.
So absolutely any time you do a partnership, always have a live promo in mind and an evergreen promo in mind. Sometimes the evergreen part doesn't work. The majority of the time it doesn't work and you'd actually don't want it to work because the partner just didn't sync well or something didn't work well. But you do want to go deep with the people that you really hit it off it.
Bob: Yeah, and one thing that I'm hearing you or not hearing you mention is an affiliate relationship. So if you can do a rev share, great, but that's not necessary. It seems like you're putting a lot of value in the assumption of I get great value. You get great value. We don't have to track things on the backend.
Bryan: Yeah, I mean you can do that. I've found, you don't have to. There are scenarios where it can make sense to build that off the backend a little bit, but if you go to someone, this is a really easy pitch. If you go to someone and say, "Hey, I would love to promote your lead magnet to my list of X number of hundred people, 1000 people, 100,000 people. I'll estimate you'll get 1000 new leads from this. We don't want an affiliate relationship at all and we just want you to do something similar." Your pitch needs to be better. That's a terrible pitch. Don't lead with that, but that basic pitch like, "We'll give you 10,000 subscribers. You give us 3000 subscribers. How does that sound?" Thumbs up on that. No splits. We don't have to worry about any complication of that, let's just share leads back and forth and you sell to your people and take 100%. I'll share to my people and get 100%.
It's just simpler and it's not pitched a lot. Hopefully everybody doesn't start doing that and screw this up. But, yeah, it's something, it's unique in the marketplace. You can lead with a result for them and you don't just don't worry about it. It's just a lead-gen source. You have to position it for them as a lead-gen source, not an affiliate relationship.
So with people that are really hardcore on affiliate stuff, it can be a little bit different of a conversation, but they're not used... Nobody's used to lead magnet spots right now. Nobody does them. If you tried to pitch them on a webinar where you didn't promote something and they're used to doing webinars, that'd be a really hard pitch for them. But a lead magnet swap is a complete unknown in the marketplace right now. So I'm getting leads, straight lead swaps and it's easy.
And it's in the best interest of both of you. You just don't want to split any money at all. So if there are great at converting leads, I get to make more money. If you suck at converting leads, you'll make less money but still have the leads. But yeah, that can be a benefit if you position it correctly.
Bob: Awesome.
Build your list faster with 1-click trigger links from Leadpages
Bob: The second thing I wanted to mention in this area, I don't know if you've tried this out yet or not, but one of the unsung heroes of the Leadpages platform are what we used to call Leadlinks. We now simply call it trigger links.
Bryan: Yes.
Bob: And these are something that you can create in your account and in your partners accounts to where you have this specially formulated link. You give it to that partner and say, "All you have to do is put this link in your email." And with that one click they're actually subscribed to your list. They don't even have to go fill out a form on a landing page. They go straight to the thank you page, that means your conversion rate goes from 40, 50, 60% on the landing page to 100% of the people who clicked that link because the link builds in or bakes in that person's email address that they just received an email from. So you know it's a valid email and it's going technically through the interwebs, through our system, straight to your email list and have you tried that yourself or can recommend it?
Bryan: Best single partnership, little marketing tip, you can do is that. Let me make sure people understood what you said. So typically, let's take a webinar funnel because most people have been invited to the one by someone before. Let's say Bob is hosting a webinar for Pat Flynn or Pat's hosting a webinar for Leadpages and he's promoting them. And Pat sends the email out to his list of 300,000 people. Typically, what that email would say is, "Hey, we've got this webinar coming up and dah, dah, dah." They click a link in the email, the register link, they go to a landing page. They sit there and wait for the landing page to open. Then click another button, a Leadbox pops up. They enter their email address. They click another button and now they're signed up. So you'll get 40 to 80% of people to do all that.
But that means 20 to 60% of people don't. So with that, what do you call them now? Lead triggers?
Bob: Trigger links.
Bryan: Trigger links, okay. So, with the trigger link, they click the link in Pat's email that says register now and they're registered. Nothing else happens. They go to a thank you page.
So yes, anytime you can negotiate a one click link into a promotion, absolutely do it. We try to do it on every promotion, every partner promotion we do because it increases conversion rates a lot. The one caveat is: make sure you're really clear in your email that clicking the link opts them in. You don't want a bunch of people that are tricked into opting in. One, it's just like they don't convert and there's just, you spend more money. So you get to say your list is bigger, but literally it doesn't matter at all. You're just spending more money and it hurts your profits.
So just make sure it's clear. And you can do that. Just say, "Click this link to instantly register."
And in parentheses below it, "When you click this link, you'll be registered and go to the thank you page." That's not going to hurt conversions at all. It'll make it really clear and everyone will know that they're opted into the thing. Just don't trick people into opting in by saying, "Click this link to learn more." On the thank you page it says, "Hey, you registered! Welcome." And then send them 100 emails. Don't do that. That's annoying. Don't be that annoying marketing guy.
But yes, that is a great strategy. Any kind of guest posts, lead magnet swap, webinar. Webinars are probably the number one thing where I just very rarely see anybody doing it. I wonder if people get it because it can take a little explanation to understand like, "Okay, I can instantly opt into someone from someone else's list when I send an email out." When I sit down and explain it to people like, "Oh. That's pretty crazy." But I just wonder if people really understand that because it's one of the single best optimizations ever if you do any form of partnership.
So absolutely use those link trigger, trigger links. Those are good.
The right way to share your lead magnet in Facebook groups
Bob: Excellent. All right, so you talked about paid ads, you talked about partnerships with lead magnet swaps. You mentioned some form of organic version of getting your lead magnet in front of people. So talk just a little bit about that third strategy to get more eyeballs on your lead magnet.
Bryan: I guess a little more into the weeds of SEO. Let me share another one, but this will be easier. People will like it a little bit more because if you're going to be getting into organic, you got to make sure your lead magnet is ranking for the keywords surrounding the topic of the lead magnet, which can be a little bit of a longer tail thing. But that's something we focus on a lot. But that can take 6 to 12 months to make progress there.
Here's another one though. If you're in those early stages, you don't have a big list. You don't know how to get a big partner, that's intimidating to you. You come over to Growth Tools, read a bunch of stuff. We got a ton of stuff on partnerships. We even have a paid accelerator class to walk you through a ton of that.
Anyway, this isn't a sales pitch. So here's one strategy you can use.
Find 10 relevant Facebook groups. So, 10 Facebook groups that contain people who would be your target customer. So if you're selling personal training, online personal training is the product you sell. Don't find 10 Facebook groups of other personal trainers. You don't want... They're not your market.
Who cares about them? The Facebook groups you're in might be for owners or practitioners, not for the end customer. Find 10 end customer Facebook groups.
Create your really good lead magnet. Make sure it's quality and legit. It solves a problem. And here's a strategy we found to work really well. Post that lead magnet in the Facebook group and ask for people's feedback on it. You can really easily turn into sleazy internet marketer with this. And make sure you do this correctly.
You go to the parenting Facebook group and you say, "Hey guys, I have been working on putting together something. I've been a marriage counselor for 10 years and several clients have been asking for just some practical tips when their kids start freaking out of things they could do to help them not freak out. So after 75 sessions, I've put together this one pager that you can print out, put on a refrigerator and remember as soon as your kid starts freaking out, go to the refrigerator and read it. I would love to get your feedback on this. Would you please tell me what you think and give me any critical opinion and critical thought on how I can make it better?" And you post the link to the thing.
Now you could post a link to the opt in page or you can post a link directly to the lead magnet, making sure that lead magnet has a call to action built into it. We taught a four week class a few months ago and we had people do this and gain hundreds of email subscribers in a week from doing this right. If you do it wrong, the whole Facebook group's going to blast you because they know you're just promoting your stuff, but you're legit looking for feedback. That has to be your intent here. It just so happens that those people to give you feedback, will go check it out and give you thoughts on it and actually opt into your thing.
So that's a method we've found that worked really well. Don't go spam every Facebook group. But it's a way to get in front of your target customers really easily and also get feedback on how to make your lead magnet better. So it's kind of some research and development plus, list building as well.
Free software to create your lead magnets
Bob: Cool. So as we come towards the end, I don't want to forget about talking about something awesome that you and I've been working on behind the scenes between Leadpages and Growth Tools.
Bryan: We buried the lede man. We're waiting til the end. Everybody’s gone now.
Bob: No, I think everybody's hanging on because this is such a rich and juicy ideas of what to do with your lead magnets. Obviously, one of the big challenges of lead magnet promotions is the actual act of creating a lead magnet in the first place. There seems to be a concern amongst people that they have to go through all this issue, they have to hire a designer to help make it look good and they have to come up with the content, etc.
And there's an easier way. I'm excited for you to tell us a little bit more about it and the partnership that Leadpages and Growth Tools is ready to announce today.
Bryan: Yep, absolutely. So we built a tool called Attract (Attract.io) and it is a free lead magnet builder. So it has currently four really pretty professionally designed lead magnet templates built into it. You can come in and in less than 30 minutes, select one of the templates.
We have a resource guide, a checklist, a case study, and a how to. We're going to have some more over the course of the next three to six months as well.
Each one of those, you can fully customize it, insert your content, design it out the way you want, put your logo on and build your call to action page into it. Really pretty cover page on it.
It helps you create beautiful professionally designed lead magnets that convert well. You don't have to pay for any software. There's several different paid software out there that has tons of fancy bells and whistles and honestly, most of them look terrible when you finish them because they weren't built to look really good. And they weren't built to convert well. They were built to have a thing. Just a lead magnet that you can give away that doesn't necessarily convert, doesn't necessarily look good. But it's like, "Okay, that'll work I guess."
So, Attract is the best thing that we've ever seen and this is the problem we were solving when we were building it. We were trying to build the best product ever created to make beautiful professional looking lead magnets that also converted well and we didn't charge anybody ever before.
Attract.IO. Go check it out.
The four types of lead magnets that we've created, that we've found that work best are resource guides, checklists, case studies, and how-to guides. So those are the first four templates we built into it. Yeah, so go check it out. This is a free tool. You'll never have to pay for anything. Go check our funnel out of how we go from free lead because that Attract is a lead magnet for us. It's a really fancy one. It's a whole piece of software that we spent months and months building.
But remember the goal of a lead magnet is to build trust, which it does really well, and to get you to the next step as quickly as possible. So we do both of those things. So as you're going to check out Attract, reverse engineer what we're doing there and pay attention because you can do the exact same thing with a two page PDF as well. Attract.io, it'll help you build beautiful lead magnets really quickly and they'll actually convert well as well. So go check it out. There's several presets built in each type as well, so you can get an idea of what each one will look like in different kinds of businesses, designed different ways. I think that's it. What did I leave out, Bob?
Bob: Well two things, you didn't really leave out but I just wanted to add on. Number one, we're excited from Leadpages side to partner with Growth Tools to allow this to be a free product and there is no upsell of a fancier version of Attract. It is fully robust. There is no second premium level that you're going to get upsold to on the backend. So that's number one.
And number two, we're also using this as a lead magnet because we know that people who are going to sign up for Attract to create their free lead magnets are going to want to get more conversions for people to opt-in for that lead magnet by using Leadpages and the various conversion tools that we have in our platform.
So this is another example of a great partnership that you've put in place with a lead magnet that allows for benefits for both sides.
And then whether you're a customer of ours or you're not at this time, you're freely able to use Attract to create your lead magnet. And you'd be surprised, hopefully pleasantly, that you will be able to make a really sharp looking, high converting lead magnet, that preps people for the sale of your service or product in less than 30 minutes. And then make a second one, make a third one and experiment with them. Because you can make as many of them as you want. You're not capped out with how many you have.
And the third thing I'd say is you also have in Attract a beautiful system of just publishing a quick link that's on the Attract server and you can customize the slug. So it looks like your brand, but you can put that link inside of a landing page, a thank you page. You can put it inside of an email or you can download the PDF and put it wherever you want.
So a lot of systems out there, they tend to be over complicated. They tend to have too much in the way of design to where it's super overwhelming and complicated. And I think what you'll find in Attract is this perfect symbiosis of functionality plus great templates plus the marketing strategy behind it because like Leadpages, you're building Attract templates that have real text inside. It's not Lorem Ipsum.
This is real content that you can just plug and play your stuff into to make it look really good. So again, we're really excited to announce this partnership today as part of our podcast and we want you to check out Attract.IO.
Brian, I know both of us have kids to get to today as we wrap up our call. Any last thoughts you want to share as we wrap up this episode?
Bryan: I don't think so. I would love to see any lead magnets you make with Attract. I'll retweet the first five or 10 that tweet me, @Harris_Bryan on Twitter. So go over there. Once you use Attract, check it out. I'd love to see what you're making.
Obviously, if you have any feedback or ideas on how we can make it better, I'd love to know that. We're trying to make the best lead magnet creator that's ever been made, and so I'd love your feedback. I'd love to learn from you guys what we could do better to improve that.
Tweet me with a link to your PDF when you finish creating a lead magnet, I'll retweet the first few out. You'll get some lead subscribers from that. Also appreciate you guys. Thanks for having me on Bob.
Bob: Awesome. Thanks so much, Bryan.
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