How to create the best B2B lead magnets

When it comes to B2B marketing, capturing high-quality leads is the lifeblood of business growth. But how do you get the right people to willingly share their details? The answer lies in crafting irresistible lead magnets: free, valuable content that your audience can’t resist exchanging for their contact information. In this guide, we’ll dive into the best B2B lead magnets that drive conversions, and how to go about creating them.

What is a lead magnet?

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, with a special focus on lead magnets for B2B 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 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.

To create lead magnets that land all the right people, here are a few tips for success:

1. Offer exclusive industry insights: B2B audiences like to stay ahead of the latest trends, research, or forecasts. Give them what they want.
2. Collaborate with experts: Google’s extra E in EEAT means that if you haven’t before, it’s time to collaborate with authority figures. Partner with thought leaders to co-create lead magnets and make super valuable content. We hit up several industry leaders to create a pillar post all about B2B content marketing.
3. Address challenges: Find the common challenges faced by the B2B professionals you’re targeting, and head straight into making content that helps overcome them.
4. Get personal: Hit a chord and send leads content they care about. Deep personalization can automate topics of interest – straight into your leads’ inboxes.

So, now we’ve looked at what makes a really great lead magnet, let’s break down what goes into the creation of lead magnets, step by step. 

Want to create a B2B lead magnet that actually works? The goal is simple: attract the right people, give them something valuable, and turn them into leads that are ready to talk business.

Let’s dive into the steps you can take to craft lead magnets that grab attention and help you build strong relationships with potential customers.

1. Identify your target audience’s pain points

First things first, you need to know what keeps your audience up at night. What challenges are they facing that you can help solve? Once you nail this down, you can create content that speaks directly to their needs.

Example: If your audience is struggling with digital transformation, a guide on avoiding common pitfalls could be just what they need. This makes sure your lead magnet is not only relevant but also super valuable.

2. Choose the right format for your lead magnet

Think about what kind of content your audience would find most useful. Whether it’s a white paper, webinar, report, or a simple checklist, pick a format that aligns with the information you’re sharing and what your audience prefers.

Example: A SaaS company might offer a white paper on industry trends, while a marketing agency could provide a handy content calendar template. The key is to offer something that your audience can’t resist.

3. Create high-quality, value-driven content

Your lead magnet should be packed with actionable insights and solutions. This isn’t the time to hold back – give them something they can actually use. When your audience sees the value, they’re more likely to trust your brand and take the next step.

Example: Laetitia Catta from Cegid saw a boost in campaign performance after switching to creating digital lead magnets with Turtl. By tracking engagement data, they could see exactly what content was hitting the mark with their audience.

4. Design for readability and professionalism

A good-looking lead magnet is easier to digest and more engaging. Keep the design clean and professional, and use visuals to break up the text and highlight key points. A well-designed lead magnet shows that you’re serious about quality.

Tip: Whether you hire a designer or use a design tool, make sure your lead magnet looks as good as the content inside it.

5. Implement a strategic gating approach

Gating your content – asking for contact details before giving it away – is crucial for capturing leads. Decide whether you want to gate the whole thing or just part of it. A soft gate can be a smart way to balance lead capture with a smooth user experience.

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

Example: BrightGen used a soft gate on a survey page within their lead magnet, knowing their audience would be interested. This approach helped them capture leads without turning people off.

6. Promote your lead magnet across channels

Once you’ve got your lead magnet ready, it’s time to shout about it! Share it through emails, social media, blog posts, and even paid ads to get it in front of as many eyes as possible.

Tip: Make sure your landing page is set up to convert, with a clear and compelling call-to-action (CTA) that makes it easy for people to sign up.

7. Measure and optimize performance

Don’t just set it and forget it – keep an eye on how your lead magnet is performing. Track downloads, conversions, and engagement to see what’s working and what could be better.

Example: Use tools like Google Analytics and Turtl’s engagement analytics to get insights into how your content is performing. This will help you tweak and improve your lead magnets over time.

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

8. Align with sales for lead handoff

Finally, make sure your sales team is in the loop. Share insights about what content leads have engaged with so they can follow up in a way that’s personalized and relevant.

Tip: Incorporate quizzes, surveys, or polls within your lead magnet to gather more info on your audience. This extra intel can be gold for your sales team.

That’s it – you’ve created a great lead magnet. Now let’s take a look at types of lead magnets you can add to your lead gen arsenal.

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

Providing practical resources like templates, checklists, or tools that your target audience can use in their day-to-day operations can be incredibly valuable. Create a curated collection of tools, resources, and educational materials that address common challenges faced by B2B pros, make their lives a whole lot easier, and keep your brand top of mind.

Infographics or visual guides

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

Free trials and demos

Offering a free trial or demo is like giving potential customers a sneak peek of what they can expect. This hands-on experience allows them to test out your product or service without commitment, helping them see the value you bring.

You’ve made one of these details-worthy lead magnets – but what do you do with the data you gather from it? You use it to create more bespoke experiences, of course!

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.

Turtl Analytics provides deeper behavioral insights, allowing 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 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.

Build a relationship with the people researching topics around the solution you sell, because they’re really starting to look like future buyers.

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.

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?

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.

By monitoring your content closely, you’ll see who is engaging. Marry this with full-funnel tracking, and you’ll see which ‘engagers’ convert to ‘closed’ later.

These are insights worth chasing.

Stepping beyond ‘number of downloads’ as a metric, can you track time spent on a page, click-throughs, or even how many times someone has read a specific part of your content?

You can see very detailed reader behavior in our Analytics Dashboard.

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.

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 every user interaction and journey 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.

Showcase it on 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.

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.

Share it around on 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.

Include it in your email marketing

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.

Promote it with 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.

Boost its exposure through 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

Lead magnets aren’t just a one-trick pony – they can be used in various ways to engage and convert prospects. Whether you’re looking to spark initial interest, provide valuable insights, or give potential customers a taste of what you offer, the right lead magnet can make all the difference.

Here are some real-life lead magnet success stories:

Hubspot

As lead magnet legends Hubspot knows all too well, offering downloadable resources like white papers, guides, or eBooks is a classic and effective lead magnet. HubSpot offers a variety of free downloadable reports and eBooks, such as “AI Insights for Marketers”. This positions HubSpot as a thought leader in the marketing space, and, as a result, they attract high-quality leads interested in learning more about their software solutions.

Salesforce

Hosting a webinar or virtual event gives you the chance to connect with your audience on a more personal level. Salesforce frequently hosts webinars where they discuss upcoming trends and showcase their CRM capabilities. These webinars attract business professionals looking to improve their customer relations, leading to high engagement and a strong pool of potential customers.

Hemingway

A free trial is a powerful way to move interested prospects closer to becoming paying customers. Hemingway offers a free version of their editing app, allowing businesses to experience the product’s functionality before committing to a paid plan. This approach has helped Hemingway grow rapidly as users often convert to paid plans after seeing the platform’s value in improving their content output.

Trello

Trello provides free project management templates for various workflows, such as content calendars or project tracking. These templates not only help users get started with Trello but also demonstrate the platform’s flexibility, making it more likely for users to adopt Trello for their project management needs.

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 behaviors 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.

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.