Are you looking for some new ideas to help you capture more B2B leads? If so, you’re in luck! This article will list nine B2B lead magnets working for actual businesses.
“What has been your best-performing B2B lead magnet in the past 6-12 months?”
To help you identify B2B lead magnets, we asked CEOs and business leaders this question for their best advice. From creating company blogs to offering clients free site assessment, several recommendations may help you with B2B lead magnets for your business.
Here are the nine B2B lead magnet ideas:
- Create a Company Blog
- Employ B2B Chatbots to Engage Clients
- Build Customer Trust with Case Studies
- Incentivize Customers with Coupons
- Design Quizzes to Create Trust and Capture Leads
- Create Social Media Marketing Plan
- Try Gated Videos
- Address Specific Problems with Short Practical Information
- Offer Clients A Free Site Assessment
Create a Company Blog
“Our blog has been one of the best-performing B2B lead generators in the past year. Because our organization is fully remote and our sales team works exclusively on inbound leads, we rely heavily on SEO marketing. By producing helpful and relevant industry content, we have been able to attract clientele interested in our services and convert visitors into customers.”
~ Michael Alexis, TeamBuilding
Related: How to create articles that rank on Google using Surfer SEO + Jasper
Employ B2B Chatbots to Engage Clients
“Chatbots engage leads better and drive faster conversions. B2B buyers expect B2C experiences. And AI B2B chatbots will power communication with your clients, leading to quicker conversations. While conversational marketing has become essential for any business, it’s the speed of that conversation that fastens the sales process. If your sales team is too slow to answer questions in the digital world, your lead may jump to your competitor’s website. But AI B2B chatbots use data mining to understand your leads’ preferences and tastes in seconds.
This feature enables them to immediately serve up the most appropriate answer or content, reducing the time a client spends searching for information themselves. And because an AI chatbot can drill through billions of documents and social media conversations at a pace impossible for human teams, they can guess each customer’s needs and preferences. This strong personalization results in better user engagement and higher conversion rates.”
~ Chris Gadek, AdQuick
Build Customer Trust with Case Studies
“Outreach case studies provide word-of-mouth marketing that builds trust with potential customers and helps elevate the reputation of our business. Clients will always give the most meaningful marketing material because it’s their honest review of your product or service. These studies serve as an organic way to collect customer-centric content that you can then share on your website and social media channels. But they’re also an effective means of educating prospective buyers on your product’s various uses, features, and benefits. Spotlighting use cases as a separate tab in your “About” section can be a much more effective sales tool than an old-school cold call.”
~ Shaunak Amin, SnackMagic
This isn’t the first time we’ve heard successful business owners extol the virtues of case studies, and there’s a good reason for that. They’re an excellent way to show off your product or service in a real-world setting and demonstrate the value that it can provide for potential customers.
Here’s Taki Moore, author of Million Dollar Coach, talking about why case studies have become an integral part of his marketing (and why he recommends all businesses use them):
Related: How to Create a Case Study That Converts: The Ultimate Guide for Businesses
Incentivize Customers with Coupons
“Coupons are a tried-and-true method of incentivizing people to buy things. Digital coupons are also excellent for generating new leads. Because our consumers appreciate a good deal, we offer them to sign up for our email list to receive exclusive coupons and promotions, and I believe this is the ideal lead magnet. Customers on our email list are also enrolled in our loyalty program, which awards them with one point for every dollar spent.”
~ Gerrid Smith, Joy Organics
Design Quizzes to Create Trust and Capture Leads
“A quiz is a great and entertaining method to create trust and rapport with your guests. It’s also one of the most efficient ways to gather email addresses from people who are interested in what you have to offer. I believe so. Creating a series of questions that individuals must answer creates friction and suspense. We don’t want anyone on our email list who doesn’t have the patience to answer seven questions (especially because we write long-winded emails). You can design quizzes to capture leads.”
~ Edward Mellett, Wikijob
So why do quizzes (also referred to as “scorecards”) work better as a lead magnet for attracting prospective clients to your business? In the following video, Glen Carlson of Dent Global shares the psychology behind scorecards and why they work.
Related: Leveraging scorecard marketing for generating leads and sales
Create A Step-by-Step Guide
“The best-performing B2B lead magnet in the past 6-12 months has been an ebook that provides a step-by-step guide on how to create a social media marketing plan. It includes tips on which social media platforms to use, how to generate leads, and how to track results.
The ebook is offered for free in exchange for contact information. It has been very successful in generating leads for the company’s social media marketing services.”
~ Natalia Brzezinska, PhotoAiD
Try Gated Videos
“Bloggers and content marketers have been using gated articles as lead magnets for years, and with great success. Recently though, we’ve tried gated videos and have found them to work quite well. Right before our videos (demos, reviews, and tutorials) get to the juicy part, we pause the video, which can only be unlocked and continued by having the viewer enter their name and email address.
The honest truth is that a vast majority of viewers drop off at this point, as expected. However, a much larger portion than we anticipated entered their info and continued watching. Whether this is because video is more compelling than written articles, or people actually need the info, we don’t know. But it has proven to be very fruitful for us in the last year.
YouTube doesn’t allow you to “gate” contents like this, so you do have to privately host the videos, but if leads are more important to you than views and likes, you should absolutely consider gating your videos.”
~ John Ross, Test Prep Insight
Address Specific Problems with Short Practical Information
“Our best performing B2B lead magnet has been a simple but useful tax return checklist. It’s a single-page PDF that provides a general overview of what needs to be considered when preparing taxes. It’s been a great success over the previous twelve months, allowing our client to establish herself as a go-to source of trustworthy information for businesses in the region.
We’re seeing less interaction with multi-page ebooks and more interest in quick, practical information that can be easily understood and used.
Short, straightforward, and direct lead magnets that address a specific problem have worked really well for us when paired with a short series of automated emails to maintain the discussion.”
~ Dan Gissane, Huxo Creative
We can certainly attest to the value of a simple checklist as a lead magnet. One of our clients, Bean Ninjas (an online bookkeeping firm), created an Ultimate Xero Starter Checklist to help online business owners save time, money, and stress with their finances.
This lead magnet proved to be popular, and we were consequently hired to write an updated email nurture sequence for it so that potential leads would be further engaged.
(Side note: The Xero checklist mentioned is no longer available as the business has pivoted to a new direction.)
Offer Clients A Free Assessment
“Our products are complex, and often the biggest challenge to overcome with customers is to help them understand how we can help them and make their processes more efficient.
The best way we can do that is by demonstrating what we can do, and so the best-performing lead magnet we have is our offer of a free, no-obligation loading operations site assessment.
To sign up, customers have to give us their details and information about their company. It then gets us onsite with the key decision-makers, and we can demonstrate precisely how we can save them time and money.”
~ Gary Warner, Joloda Hydraroll
While Hydaroll offers an onsite assessment, free online assessments can make terrific lead magnets too. For example, Hubspot offers a free website grader tool that assesses website health.
Another useful B2B online assessment is Dent’s Key Person of Influence scorecard. This particular assessment is great because it takes the user through forty questions and then gives them a tailored report at the end, rather than a generic one-size-fits-all PDF.
The report includes an action plan with specific, concrete steps on what the user can do to increase their influence.
So what makes an effective B2B lead magnet?
For a lead magnet to be effective, it needs to be something that your target audience will find valuable enough to exchange their contact information for. It also needs to be relevant to your product or service so that you can continue the conversation with leads down the sales funnel.
In this video, Adam Frankin, co-author of Web Marketing That Works, shares what works for him and his clients.
Where to from here?
As a B2B company, it can be tough to capture leads. You need something valuable enough for people to exchange their contact information for but also relevant to your product or service so that you can continue the conversation with leads down the sales funnel.
Luckily, there are a variety of lead magnets you can use to capture more leads (as we covered in this article).
Check out our recent podcast episode to get more tips about creating a high-converting lead magnet to attract B2B customers.
This article was written with the support of Terkel. Terkel creates community-driven content featuring expert insights. Sign up at terkel.io to answer questions and get published.
