Suppose you’re part of an IaaS (infrastructure as a service), SaaS (software as a service), or FinTech (financial technology) company that needs a steady flow of highly qualified leads for its sales team. In that case, you’ll need some excellent lead-generation content.
In this article, you’ll be introduced to seven different lead magnet ideas that help you educate and build trust with prospects that turn into leads and transform leads into sales opportunities.
1) eBook
While an eBook can be anywhere from a few pages to a few hundred-page version of a print book that you might buy on Amazon, one thing’s for sure.
A great eBook can be a game-changer for differentiation, thought leadership, competitive positioning, sales cycle acceleration, and scalable, predictable revenue growth.
How do you decide what topics you should cover in an eBook?
It’s simple. You don’t decide.
Instead, let your buyer persona’s goals and challenges dictate your eBook content strategy.
(A buyer persona is a semi-fictional representation of an ideal client based on actual research and some select, educated speculation.)
2) White Paper
Similar to an eBook as downloadable content with high perceived value in the eyes of your target buyer persona, a white paper is another kind of lead magnet that educates and builds trust at scale.
Typically a white paper tends to be more technical than an eBook. However, what constitutes technical content vs. business-focused content usually comes down to your target buyer personas and their knowledge.
3) Research Report
Do you have questions that you’re intensely curious about? What about the curiosities of your most important target buyer personas?
Either way, commissioning original research and publishing the findings in a downloadable research report can be a game-changer for your company’s positioning as go-to expert in your industry.
While you could make a huge financial investment in creating, publishing, and distributing your research report, for a 1.0 or minimal viable product (MVP) version, your research really can be as simple as:
- Plan 10 - 20 questions your buyer persona would be very interested in.
- Use off-the-shelf survey software to have a sufficient amount of qualified respondents complete the survey.
- Tabulate the results of the survey into easy-to-understand graphs and charts (many survey apps do this for you automatically).
- Write a research report that presents your research findings and draws some reasonable conclusions.
4) Checklist
For IaaS, SaaS, and Fintech companies that sell to technical buyers, checklists can also be a great lead magnet choice.
Your onboarding and support teams may already have many source documents that can be readily converted into downloadable checklists with high perceived value.
Other times, the other lead magnet content that you create -- such as eBooks, white papers, and reports -- can often be repurposed into actionable checklists.
And when in doubt, your buyer persona research will almost always lead you to additional lead magnet content ideas.
5) Template
If your company sells software, you can often pique the curiosity of your target personas by creating templates that help organize information manually to solve the problem that your SaaS solves automatically.
Whether you’re providing templates in a downloadable format -- such as Microsoft Word, Microsoft Excel, or Microsoft PowerPoint -- or shared view-only Google Workspace files, templates can be a fantastic way to demonstrate value and save your audience a ton of time.
6) Webinar
Are you generating a consistent flow of qualified leads through your lead magnets, but not enough of those leads are ready to pass to your sales team?
If so, webinars can be a fantastic way to educate and build trust at scale in a one-to-many format.
And by using video as part of your webinar strategy, which can be as basic as turning your webcam on while presenting slides, your webinar attendees will feel like they know your presenters.
If you’re curious to learn more about the “why” behind this, look up the Mere-Exposure effect, which Wikipedia defines as a “psychological phenomenon by which people tend to develop a preference for things merely because they are familiar with them.”
7) Tool
Finally, online, web-based tools can be terrific lead magnets that help your target buyer personas discover solutions to their problems and insight into their unique challenges and context.
While tools can be much more challenging to develop than some of the other lead magnet ideas introduced in this article, in recent years, several third-party apps have emerged that allow non-developers to create user-friendly tools with relatively little time and budget -- and zero coding knowledge.
At the most basic level, a tool could be an online quiz that asks a handful of questions and instantly grades the answers while providing feedback and a relevant call to action (CTA) to those taking the online quiz.
What’s your favorite lead magnet idea for infrastructure, software, or FinTech? Let me know in the comments.
And if you need to improve how your lead magnets drive revenue growth, be sure to enroll now in our free 7-day eCourse: Go-to-Market Strategy 101 for B2B SaaS Startups and Scaleups.
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