If I’ve learned one thing from client/user acquisition it’s that creating value trumps all.

It makes sense. If someone wants something from me, I am more motivated if they’ve provided value to me first.

Random cold email (“I’d love to schedule time”) = 0% chance I’m responding.

But if you point me to interesting research or a free tool that can help my business, now I’ll be engaged. I’ll remember you, and maybe even become a customer or refer you.

Lead Magnets 🧲

In the final years running our agency, we did no outbound sales, all of our sales came from referrals.

Referrals are easier said than done (we have a whole article on referrals with templates here) so what are other creative solutions for client acquisitions? Enter, lead magnets.

Lead magnets are tools, reports, quizzes etc that attract your ideal client and provide value in exchange for some info from their end.

I’m not really talking about gated content either (not a fan). I’m talking about something that goes further something like Hubspot’s website grader, or any of our free tools here at Tether.

Another example of a lead magnet would be a fun quiz/form.

If you sold services to early startups, a good quiz might be “which type of startup CEO are you?”. You can find out all sorts of interesting info (technical vs not technical etc), enriching your leads, while giving them a good time.

How to set up your own lead magnet ⚡

  1. Start with your target, get as specific as possible
  2. How can you provide value? Hubspot tells teams how to improve their site, Tether tells teams where bugs may live in their product. What can you do? What can you teach?
  3. A fun name never hurt
  4. Manual vs automated? It’s okay if you start with a manual process to test out your magnet. For example, our feedback service at Tether was manual. Once we saw it started to work, we began to automate it.
  5. Build & promote: Build the magnet + landing page and start directing traffic to the page. There are plenty of tools to build forms and quizzes which makes the time to develop some magnets quite low.
  6. Manage those leads and close some highly relevant, and enriched opportunities!

More lead magnet examples

We've now launched a few different lead magnets, check them out here.
Need help or have questions about setting up your own? Drop us a a line!