How A Lead Magnet Can Help Your Service Business Get Clients

A lead magnet is a great tool for attracting more clients to your service business. Rather than having to proactively seek new clients, a lead magnet draws potential customers to you. When paired with an automated email sequence, these potential clients are then taken through a nurturing process that ultimately may lead them to hire you. And once it’s set up, this all happens in an automated fashion, with minimal time and effort from you.

There is a lead magnet that can work for you, no matter what type of service industry you’re in – whether you’re a nutritionist, accountant, hairdresser or disability support provider. And, by utilising automated software and low-cost (or free) ways of promoting your lead magnet, this is also a marketing tool that’s affordable to every service provider.

So lets take a look at what a lead magnet is, what it can do for your business, and how to choose the right lead magnet for maximum effect. Here’s what we’re going to cover:

What is a lead magnet?

How can a lead magnet help my business?

What is a great lead magnet example?

How To Create Your Lead Magnet

What Is A Lead Magnet?

A lead magnet is the marketing term for a free or discounted item or service that you give away in return for a person’s contact details. A lead magnet is often a downloadable file, such as a checklist, how-to-guide or template, but might also be a service such as an audit or phone consultation. In order to receive the lead magnet, a person must enter their contact details – usually their email address.

How Can A Lead Magnet Help My Business?

When targeted to people that fit the mould of your ideal client, a lead magnet is a great way to draw prospective clients to you, without you having to go out and chase them. Once you’ve captured their contact details, you can market to them.

What’s great about this is, if your lead magnet is aligned with your service offering, these people will be ‘qualified leads’ – that is, people that are already interested in what you offer. For example, a Moving House Checklist will attract people who are getting ready to move house – a perfect qualified lead if you are a removalist business.

Even better, once you’ve set up an automated marketing funnel to deliver the lead magnet, the whole process will happen without you having to lift a finger.

Using a lead magnet marketing funnel reduces your reliance on outbound marketing (such as advertising, networking or cold calling), and is a great way to generate a steady stream of leads for your service business, with minimum ongoing expense.

Now, all of this only works if you have a great lead magnet – one that is:

Correctly targeted at people you want as your clients;
Appealing to those particular people.

What Is A Great Lead Magnet Example?

A great lead magnet is going to be different for every business. Your lead magnet needs to:

Be helpful to your ideal client;
Match where you want to get them in the buyer’s journey;
Take into account your service area (location).

Let’s look at each of these things in turn.

1. Be Helpful To Your Ideal Client

First thing’s first, you need to know what sort of person you want to target. Look at their demographics, income bracket, likes, dislikes, values, and then think about what problems they have, that your lead magnet can help solve.

2. Match The Buyer’s Journey

When people are considering investing in a service, they’ll go through 3 stages:

Awareness – Identifying they have a problem and a service exists that can help solve it.
Consideration – Finding out more about the different types of service or providers on offer.
Decision making – Deciding on which service provider to go with.

Think about where in the cycle you want to first engage your customer. Do you want to get in early and educate them through the process, so they’re more aware, and trusting, of your brand? Or do you only want to deal with people who are almost ready to buy?

Different lead magnets work better at different points in that purchasing cycle, so match your lead magnet to the point you want to intervene at.

How to match your lead magnet to the buyers journey

3. Consider Your Service Area

Remember that the internet is global, while your service area may not be. Identify the location of your ideal service area, and include it in your lead magnet. People from other areas may well download your lead magnet, but you do want to mostly attract the right locale, otherwise you’ll have an email list full of people you can’t service. And the more people on your email list, the more you typically have to pay to use automated emailing software.

If your lead magnet involves you performing an actual task, such as holding a discovery call or undertaking an audit, you definitely want to make location requirements very clear on your sign up form. Ideally, it should also be incorporated into your lead magnet title.

Examples of great lead magnets:

‘Australian Small Business Deductions Checklist’ … For an Australian tax accountant.

‘10 Wardrobe Essentials For A Stylish Melbourne Winter’ Guide … For a Melbourne-based personal stylist.

‘How Much Do I Need To Borrow – Sydney Market?’ online calculator … For a mortgage broker in Sydney.

‘Free Social Media Audit For Gippsland Hospitality Businesses’ …For a digital marketer specialising in regional tourism businesses.

Additional Considerations

Lead magnets also tend to perform better if they are:

Immediately accessible – such as a download
Quick and easy to digest – such as a short guide or checklist
High perceived value – offering useful information that pleases the reader (and also shows off your expertise).

Take a look at these 20 lead magnet examples for service providers and see what might work for your business.

How To Create Your Lead Magnet

You can create your lead magnet content from scratch. However, before you do that, take a look around at your own blog posts, social media posts, past client work, etc, and see if there’s something you can repurpose. Collating snippets of information into one cohesive guide is a great way to make a valuable lead magnet without too much additional work.

You can also repurpose content found on the internet. Don’t plagiarise – give it your own spin, presentation style or value-adding commentary. But do grab inspiration and information from what is already out there.

Once you have your information, it can be laid out in whatever program you’re most comfortable with, before being converted to a pdf. To save time and achieve a great design, search your software for templates. Canva is an amazing online design tool that is easy to use and contains a large library of templates (or you can purchase additional templates from Etsy).

And if you don’t have the time, inclination or skills for this … outsource. Get a copywriter or graphic designer to create your lead magnet for you.

In Summary

A well thought out, well targeted lead magnet can be a powerful tool for attracting more of the right kinds of clients to your service business.

Whether you’re a personal trainer, financial advisor, dentist, or any other type of service provider, putting time or money into creating a well-targeted lead magnet is a worthwhile investment – as it will save you time chasing new clients.

Of course, it doesn’t stop there … a lead magnet is no use without an automated marketing funnel to deliver it and to nurture those leads with a follow-on email series. How to set that up is the subject of our next blog, How To Set Up A Lead Magnet Funnel For Your Service Business.

Don’t forget, if you don’t want to create a lead magnet yourself – outsource! If you’re an Australian based service business, Keep Up Copywriting can help you create your lead magnet, landing page and email series.