Woman in red shirt reads from a laptop.

Your ideal client has found you. Through your diligent content creation, meticulous SEO testing or via a referral, she has made it to your website. She’s hovering over your contact button – she’s one click away – suddenly, she can smell coffee. Your cleverly crafted copy is forgotten in an instant. She decides it’s lunchtime.

Before she can click away from your site, a pop-up screen emerges. ‘The 6 Most Common Tech Recruitment Mistakes & How to Avoid Them!’ This gives her pause. She has been struggling to find a good web developer, and she’s not sure why. She enters her work email. As she opens the file, a colleague places a cup of coffee on her desk.

What is a Lead Magnet?

A lead magnet is a piece of content that’s so tempting, your potential customer will share their contact details to get it. There is a delicate balance to this trade-off. Of course, you want to grow your customer database, but if you want to turn your lead into a client, you must deliver real value.

This is why a lead magnet should:

  1. Be relevant to your lead
  2. Solve a real problem
  3. Deliver what it promises

Lead magnets come in a wide range of formats from cheat sheets, to templates, to webinars. The best lead magnets offer something so useful that your potential client keeps coming back to it, keeping you at the front of mind.

Why Do You Need a Lead Magnet?

A lead magnet is like the Sun in our solar system. It is the centre that your content marketing strategy revolves around. All the other pieces of content, from case studies to LinkedIn articles, support the lead magnet. So how does this relationship work?

Let’s say you’re running a recruitment agency. You’ve published a few pieces on LinkedIn about recruitment challenges specific to the tech industry. HR managers and CEOs are reading it, commenting on it, sharing it. This is great for the sake of building your profile, but how do you convert that interest into business?

What if the people interacting with your articles were offered your more substantial piece, ‘The 6 Most Common Tech Recruitment Mistakes & How to Avoid Them!’ for free in exchange for their contact details? How much more effective would it be to use your budget to advertise your lead magnet to those people, instead of spamming all the CEOs in your local area with generic messaging? And when they take up the offer of the lead magnet, you can email them relevant content that you already know matches their interests.

Goldfish swim around a fishing hook

The centrepiece of your strategic content marketing campaign

By taking time to determine what information is useful to your ideal clients, you can tailor your content to suit. This allows you to nurture your relationship with valuable leads. You can prove your value to them before they have even decided to use your services. This is what we mean by strategic content marketing.

The lead magnet is a crucial step in this process. Because it is more substantial than a regular piece of content, we can use it to share valuable market intelligence that comes from your experience and insight. You can demonstrate your expertise, impress your potential clients, and get the contact details of people who are genuinely interested in what you have to offer. That’s a win all round.