How to create the best B2B lead magnets

Any free content you offer in exchange for someone’s details is a lead magnet. The goal of lead magnets is email capture, so you’ll need to promise prized content in exchange for someone’s personal information.

This means your mission is to serve people the content that they’re expecting. And if you do, congratulations – this new lead now has confidence in your brand – all through your content.

We’re going to show you the best types of lead magnets people are willing to give their information for, with a special focus on B2B and SaaS audiences.

But wait. What are leads and why do I need them?

You wouldn’t do much business, now or in the future, without leads.

Leads are those people who’ve willingly signed up for your newsletter, clicked on an ad, or swapped their details in exchange for your content. They’re interested enough in your brand to be contacted by you.

You need to capture leads for business growth, and with a strong lead generation strategy in place, you can forecast sales pipeline and revenue.

The importance of gathering quality leads

High-quality leads are those most likely to use your product or service. If you want to increase business, you’ll need to specifically tempt the right people.

With this in mind, let’s look at how to bring the right leads into your brand’s orbit.

Hang on. What about the law and GDPR?

To respect the UK’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) law, it’s important not to contact anyone who hasn’t chosen to opt into your communications or expressed an interest in your company.

GDPR focuses on collecting, using, storing, deleting, and processing data from people or organizations. If you don’t follow GDPR rules, your company can face huge fines.

Consent must be given in order to use people’s data, and this must be unambiguous – there’s absolutely no wriggle room.

Try these tips for GDPR compliance

• Consent requires an active opt-in, so don’t pre-check your form boxes.
• GDPR requires that people must opt into all communications separately. So even if someone in the UK has given their details for a lead magnet, you can’t automatically subscribe them to your newsletter as well.
• Try seeding a newsletter sign-up inside your lead magnets once they’ve started enjoying your content.

B2B audiences want knowledge and consume a huge amount of content, so make the lead magnet easy to take in and remember. Let’s dive in and look at what you can create.

Whitepapers and industry reports

Use your own data, commission a survey, or collaborate with relevant organizations, and pull the results into an in-depth industry report. You’re looking to provide hot-off-the-press information and analysis to B2B professionals in your target market. Thought leadership content works very, very well for lead generation.

Here’s a whitepaper highlighting the value of thought leadership across business goals and decision-making. Inside, you’ll discover the biggest challenges content creators face when delivering thought-provoking content. And what do consumers feel about the results anyway?

Click to read Rethinking Thought Leadership

This hungry audience feeds across many channels, which reminds us of…

Webinars or online events

Live webinars or online events make it easy to bring industry experts together without geo-barriers. It also gives you global lead capture without limits. Record the session and send lead-capture content after the date to max out returns.

Toolkits or resource libraries

Create a curated collection of tools, resources, and educational materials that address common challenges faced by B2B pros and make their lives a whole lot easier.

Infographics or visual guides

People digest complex information more readily when it’s visual – visuals are also easier to share.

Slightly different from other industries, SaaS lead magnets typically look like this.

Free trial or demo

In this typical product-led strategy, SaaS marketers use free trials and demos to get people to use the product or see it in action, fast. Test your CTAs, buttons, sticky forms, and journeys to help high-intent people reach these goals fast. Here’s our demo request form in action.

Case studies

Showcasing success stories – those real-world examples of how your SaaS product has helped people solve their problems and win at work – can draw leads in fast. We’ll show you how and where to place them. Lay your case studies out clearly, allowing people to pick and choose what they want to explore.

Templates and checklists

Ready-to-use templates or checklists simplify and streamline common tasks or processes for your target audience and can get them into your product quickly.

White papers or ebooks

These comprehensive, informative resources delve deep into industry trends, best practices, and specific topics relevant to your SaaS product. They’re highly valuable thought-leadership pieces that people love to consume.

This white paper discusses content marketing success, trends, and budgets. If you’re interested in content marketing, you might want to give it a read. It can be gated at any point, or soft-gated to allow readers to choose to hand over their details.

Click to read The voice of the content marketer | Report (Gated Version)

Tech company Redstor increased MQLs by a whopping 567% using Turtl instead of PDFs. They also improved content operations and scaled their ABM campaigns.

Click to read Redstor + Turtl | Case Study

Where are your buyers and what are they doing?

Even if you seize their attention, what will you do with them?

And if they miss you the first time, how will you catch their eye?

Intent data shows you what an audience is researching online – and where they’re doing it. You usually gather intent data yourself (first-party intent data) through cookies and IP addresses from visitors to your website, or via intent data software (third-party intent data).

Tools like Bombora, 6sense, or Demandbase reveal people and domains by the keywords or topics you’ve fed into the software. You provide the topics and these intent tools show you who, or that someone from X organization, is searching that topic.

You can also see if known contacts from your database/CRM are checking not only your pricing page/product features – but also those of any website you’ve asked to track.

Deeper behavioral insights allow content marketers to tailor the right content for leads as they hit different intent thresholds. And it’s a virtuous circle, with many martech tools continually revealing more and more information about an audience.

Turtl Analytics shows you exactly who is reading what, how many times they’re reading it, and how long for (among other things). You can use it for intent signals, lead scoring, and understanding more about which prospects convert and become long-term customers.

It’s an absolute rabbit hole of intel.

Now let’s look at how to track online activity and automate the next thing your leads see. You can automate retargeting leads, which means landing exactly the right content in their inbox or browser.

First up: a short tutorial to help you retarget leads on paid media – and collect email opt-ins

1. Upload your lead contacts/company names to your CRM (most third-party tools have integrations that do this). Segment them and organize the most high-intent into a list ready to export.

2. Export the list as a CSV file from your CRM into LinkedIn Ads. You’ll either be working with company names or individual contacts, and LinkedIn Ads (or Google Remarketing) will show your campaign to the audience you’ve specified.

3. Create a downloadable asset – or lead magnet – that you know these people will care about. This is your lead capture campaign and will give you further intent signals about your leads.

4. Gate your lead magnet and use an opt-in checkbox (remember, not to pre-tick the box), with a short explanation stating that once checked, people are agreeing to receive marketing information from you. That’s your email opt-in covered.

5. Advertise your lead magnet and collect an email list that you can use in email nurture streams.

Next up: Retargeting leads across your website

You can match content to intent by retargeting leads using pixels, tags, and cookies. This way, you can remind people about your brand after they’ve left your website.

Cookies. Third-party cookies are being phased out as they can track people across websites and it’s proving a bit invasive. But first-party cookies aren’t going anywhere.

Using cookies means you can personalize visits to your site, say, remind people of what they last viewed, show a pop-up discount offer, or nudge someone about an abandoned product.

Pixels often go undetected by users and can track people across various devices. These 1×1 pixel squares can be embedded into HTML code on your website, ads, or emails.

Pixels help marketers track behavior while a user is surfing the web. This is exactly why you might get an email about the shoes you were looking at last night – and maybe an enticing discount code.

Tags are scripts placed on web pages that report on-page events. The Google Remarketing Tag can pop the script across all of your site’s pages and work with Google Ads to deliver custom content to people who’ve performed an action – one that you’ve specified – on your website.

These tools’ results can, and should, feed into your content marketing, including your lead magnet creation.

Lastly: Forming relationships over email nurture

Let’s say you sell ABM software and have captured B2B leads who’ve downloaded a lead magnet about account-based marketing (ABM).

You could build a series of emails with valuable content all about ABM. The goal is to warm these leads and make them feel as if you’re an expert on the subject, so they come to trust your brand as an industry leader.

Or, perhaps you caught leads showing a high intent to consider your brand; they’ve visited a competitor’s comparison page with a table that compares its offer to several competitors, including yours. You could use paid media to show these leads targeted content, such as ads that feature an offer, or a message that tells viewers why your product is better. 

Now you’re ready to score your B2B leads

When you’re targeting and retargeting leads, you can start working out how engaged they are by scoring them according to their intent to buy from you.

You can adjust your lead scoring to match lead intent, accurately.  In our guide, we detail how we improved our MQL-to-SQL rate just by tweaking our lead scoring model.

Improve lead conversion rates – and we’re talking closed deals – by serving your lead-gen engine the right ingredients from the start.

You’ll gain high-quality, high-intent leads right from the off by knowing your ideal customer’s problems, desires, and tastes inside out.

Once people who look exactly like these profiles start interacting with your website and marketing material, feed them more content until they burst into an MQL. MQLs still have a few courses to get through before they’re ready for the Sales menu, so the trick is to keep serving delicious content.

Persuasive copywriting

If you’d like any help with copy that gets people to act, we’ve got a guide for you.

Click to read Writing for conversions | Turtl

The psychology behind marketing

Marketers use an understanding of human psychology to connect, gain attention, and foster trust.

And serve content that converts readers into customers.

Click to read Content Psychology 101


We’ve got some great articles on the subject, covering everything from decision-making and innate bias, to what happens when people read.

We also know that using deep personalization in content streams can work wonders for your lead nurture programs.

Here’s a stacked library of resources for lead-conversion winners

Nudge psychology: three effective methods to help edge your audience back to your content.

Content psychology: what happens when we read. This may surprise you.

Five marketing psychology tips to help you grow your business

The psychology of decisions. It’s a thing.

Five behavioral biases every marketer should know.

Five sales psychology lessons that are also great for marketers.

Three ways to use psychology to boost your email marketing.

Key takeaways from Rory Sutherland’s psychology-logic book Alchemy.

The psychology of personalization.

Spock vs Homer: the psychology of personalization. Nick Mason, CEO and Founder here at Turtl, and Shirin Oreizy, Founder and President of behavioral science agency Next Step discuss behavioral science and personalized experiences.

Squeeze every channel and technique you can to promote your lead magnet.

Choose channels and methods that will hook the right audience and return useful data on who’s interested in your lead magnet.

Lead magnet data for insights

You can track user every user interaction and entire journeys across digital channels. Web analytics show referrals, visits, time spent on page, bounce rate, scroll depth, and click-through rates. These metrics show how well a landing page performs and how in demand your lead magnet is.

Use email analytics to see open rates, clicks, and unsubscribes, while social analytics show impressions, reach, clicks, and shares.

Identify journeys in Google Analytics with UTM tags. These show traction across any campaign, revealing exactly what is driving traffic.

Here are some suggestions and how each is best used.

Your website

Landing pages give you a dedicated page and URL that brings customers to the same place. You can directly promote the value of your lead magnet without distractions

Shopify encourages sign-ups for a free trial on the home page, tells you exactly what they do straightaway, and back all claims with data and social proof.

Once emails are captured, nurture streams can be set up to say thanks, introduce the product and any new features, send success stories about other customers doing well with the software, or use nudge psychology to encourage people back into the platforms.

Web banners and pop-ups

Eye-catching notifications with some short, sharp copy are perfect for your inbound audience. They’ve already engaged with your website: banners and pop-ups will draw them to your lead magnet.

This example from Spotler is hard to ignore. As soon as you land on their site it appears. It offers useful content that positions them as experts and generates leads through email capture.

Blog

Create a story around your lead magnet and blog about it. Identify audience problems and build them into your story, or educate them with a how-to, positioning your product as the ideal solution.

It’s a solid inbound marketing tactic that, when done well, draws in audiences from your other blogs, SEO, and keeps the audience engaged until the end, and boosts click-through rates on your static landing page.

Social media

A straight-up promotional post draws attention to your lead magnet. Make sure your CTA is clear and your visuals stand out. Or post snackable snippets of your content – quotes or data that hook your audience.

Videos or reels

Spice up your promotion with video content – show snippets, outline benefits, and create a short scroll-stopping advert for your lead magnet. Get it right and it’ll appear to non-followers on discovery pages and your followers’ feeds. They’re the perfect shareable content too.

Banners

Make your lead generation promotion hard to ignore for visitors to your profile pages. Keep in line with your brand look and feel but post your offer loud and proud at the top of your page.

Don’t forget to measure post interactions through your social media analytics or UTM links.

Bios

Use your bio to link to your lead magnet. If you need more than one link live at the same time, sites like Linktree are great for linking to multiple sites from a bio and are helpful for tracking link clicks.

Using email

You already have a pool of engaged subscribers. Promoting your lead magnet in your regular emails gives your audience a tangible action to take for something useful and helps them engage with you further.

You can track click-throughs and lead magnet sign-ups with email analytics and UTMs.

Email signatures

Simple but effective – if every colleague uses them – every customer interaction becomes a lead gen opportunity. Set up UTM links to track clicks.

Paid media

Promote your lead magnet to a huge audience base and use targeting options to make sure they’re audience-centric.

There are heaps of tracking data available across paid media. You can A/B test different variations, update on the fly, and direct your budget easily

PPC ads

Increase your reach with improved visibility in SERPs. But be mindful – you’ve got tight character limits to make an impression.

Retargeting

Potential customers were on your site for a reason – give them a reason to come back. Retargeting gives you a second chance to convert leads and keep drumming your benefit-led messaging home.

Content partnerships

Reach new audiences by partnering with other brands or content marketers. Guest post or collaborate on their blogs or social channels, or invite them to review you on their website. Overdeliver with high-value content and beat your competitors.

Frost and Sullivan managed to do exactly that, with incredible results using Turtl over conventional campaigns. We’re talking about a 60% increase in global lead generation.

Click to read Frost & Sullivan + Turtl | Case Study

Your conversion rate is the easiest way to see what success looks like. Work this out by dividing unique visits by the number of sign-ups.

So, what is a good lead magnet opt-in rate?

Typically, a full-funnel lead generation program will use the following ROI equation:

Revenue generated from leads – cost of lead generation program = return on investment. 

There are other ways to look at your return for a lead magnet that work really well.

• If you’ve increased the number of leads in your nurture streams, what’s your average cost per lead or Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC)?
• Or, how about your Cost Per Visitor or Revenue Per Visitor?

Wait. Don’t forget the seriously useful success data

It’s all well and good getting all these leads, but how many are actually the right fit for you?

You’re about to run a lead magnet campaign and capture leads to bring into nurture streams – which is all time-consuming stuff. And you need to report to someone. The good news is that time-on-hands, reporting, and ROI figures will improve – if you start with better quality leads in the first place.

Deep data about lead magnet performance, teamed with observing the whole user journey, will show you more about your ideal customers than any ICP template or wet finger in the air ever could.

True content intelligence – fed by an individual’s actual behavior – is what marketers need to whittle ICPs into realistic shape.

The ability to gain additional feedback through mid-content surveys provides even more intel –  straight from the source.

A lead funnel, or lead generation funnel, is a journey you send a potential lead on once they’ve engaged with your lead magnet.

The lead magnet funnel can be treated as your guidance of the customers’ journey from their first sign of interest – all the way to buying your product or service.

It’s a common misconception that lead magnets are only used for top-of-funnel (TOFU) journeys. In reality, these useful contact hooks can be used all the way throughout the funnel – and even once a lead has converted into a customer.

Let’s look at some examples of lead magnets and how they fit into different parts of the funnel, or journey.

Lead magnets encourage leads to engage with your content, learn more about your business, and eventually become customers. If you’ve designed content for people’s intent, you’ll pass high-quality leads to Sales.

Understanding which leads follow through to conversion is key. If you notice that a digital document is popular with high-performing lead subsets, then it’s clear this is the audience you’re after.

After all, understanding which leads follow through to conversion is key to business success.

Warm leads, rather than cold calls

No one likes cold calling anymore. There are ways to warm people up.

A lead scoring model ranks leads based on their behavors and actions with your content. Once your leads are ready, you can deftly pass them to Sales.

A lead nurture program cultivates a lead from someone not yet ready to buy, into a familiar party, primed and ready to talk about your offer.

Now you’re ready to score leads

When targeting and nurturing leads, data and analytics help you work out how engaged they are with your brand. Once you define a lead scoring model, you can start giving points to leads and see which are most likely to convert into customers.

Find out how we score leads at Turtl, and how we switched our lead scoring model up, to improve the quality of leads passing through the system.

Start including lead magnets in your lead generation strategy to ultimately improve your pipeline.

1. Use a digital lead magnet

Capturing leads can be challenging. You need to tempt people with your lead magnet and know if your efforts are working. It doesn’t make sense to use non-digital formats that can’t report on effective lead magnet campaigns. You’re going to need a digital lead magnet for full visibility.

Laetitia Catta is Head of Content Marketing at SaaS firm Cegid. Since switching to digital lead magnets, Laetitia’s seen campaigns grow and content operations fly.

Audience insights – best led by engagement data – will help you decide on the best content format.

Let’s show you how to measure engagement data, based on your goals, your audience, and that foolproof friend: your data.

Without understanding how to measure content performance, you’re a little in the dark. We’ve covered how to do it in this Doc.

Click to read How to measure content performance | Turtl

Knowing more about audience behavior can help you create great thought leadership content, like…

2. Make white papers, webinars, and reports

Using data to inform audience insights, our customer BrightGen made a great lead magnet. It strategically includes a soft gate on a survey page. BrightGen knows that its audience would want to participate from previous engagement data.

3. Try super-useful templates and checklists

Downloadable templates and calendars are handy takeaways to offer. We added social calendar templates (among other things) in our comprehensive B2B content marketing guide – and we made sure they’re available in different formats so anyone can use them.

4. Encourage exploratory content journeys

Steer people to discover what your brand can bring to them, and back up your content with solid testimonials and case studies.

5. Get people signed up for demos, trials, and freemium offers

Getting people to use your service/product as soon as possible and experience its worth. Have an entire journey in place, that includes a feedback loop so that once they’ve signed up, they’re guided and reminded to use your offer and enjoy its benefits.

6. Gated content – how, what and where

Think about whether you’ll gate some or all of your lead generation content. You can gate from the start of an asset, at any point within it, or choose not to at all.

We discuss, in detail, the ‘to gate or not to gate’ content debate among marketers. It includes a really great guide about demand generation.

7. Grab lead intel for Sales

What’s the most valuable audience information you can tease from leads before you hand an MQL to Sales?

It could help your Sales team tremendously if they know what type of content these leads are gorging on. Or even which country they’re doing it from – if they want to make contact during sociable hours.

See how people are generating better leads in Turtl

Head to our customer examples page to see how people like Brightgen, Deloitte, and KPMG are choosing a content creation platform that creates high-performance lead magnets.

We hope you found our lead magnet advice, examples, and ideas useful. Feel free to take a look at how Turtl’s data can help you make content that performs to inform your content marketing goals and bring you more revenue.