Lead Generation, SEO

How to Build the Most Effective Lead Magnet for Agency

When it comes to attracting new businesses, a potent tool at an agency’s disposal is a lead magnet. A lead magnet is an irresistible offer that provides high value to a prospect in exchange for their contact information. Why would anyone want to give out his or her details like an email id to you? They won’t, not unless you give them some valuable information that addresses their pain points in a way that a simple Google search can’t. Lead magnets are a very personal marketing tactic that allows your business to stay on top of a potential customer’s mind.

Do Agencies Need Lead Magnets?

The answer is yes. Blogs and social media interaction build your brand identity, make your business more visible and grow your reputation, but all these metrics are intangibles. Besides, none of them will result in sales unless you know precisely who is interacting with your content. What makes a lead magnet powerful is that it drives leads directly into your sales funnel. With the leads generated online, you can grow your email list for lead nurturing, as well as increase traffic to your website. Lead magnets result in the kind of success you can measure.

What Makes A Strong Lead Magnet?

Simply providing someone with generic information will not result in any leads (or at least, not many). Strong lead magnets need to be built keeping the following characteristics in mind.

They must be ultra-specific:

Whatever the format of the lead magnet, it should offer a reliable, relevant and a valuable solution to a particular problem. For instance, if you are in the business of mobile-apps, instead of creating a guide on how to build a mobile app (something that can be searched for online easily), get very specific, like writing about how a hotel management app can increase bookings by 25% every quarter.

They must offer one big promise:

That’s it. Narrow down on that ONE burning problem your ideal customer wants to solve, and show him/her how to resolve it. Instead of offering a 20-week marketing course for freelance writers, which is too broad in its offering, design a cheat sheet on how to write articles that go viral instead.

They deliver what is promised:

Once people opt-in for your offer, you need to ensure they get what you have promised as soon as possible. You need to have a system in place for this (and this is where technology comes into play). Will you deliver the offer over an email? Or will your offer be ready to download on the landing page itself, immediately after you have received the visitor’s contact information?

They are free and actionable:

If it’s going to cost them, people are unlikely to use your offer. Your lead magnet needs to cost nothing, except asking someone for their contact information. Also, the lead magnet needs to have practical value. Your prospective customer should be able to use it readily without having to look for additional information.

They should be easy and quick to consume:

There’s no point in offering a 3-month email course because that’s too long a time for someone to gain value out of your offering. A 300-page ebook will not meet your purpose either. A lead magnet should be designed to be short, easy and quick to act on without having to wait for successive sessions or information from you.

They should offer instant gratification:

Your offering should get to the point immediately. Think of a checklist designed to give precise tactical-level tasks that the user only has to refer and check off, say while planning an event. Or a free trial demo of your product which the user can download and start using immediately. Only when there is instant gratification, will your offering be attractive enough for someone to leave their contact details.

They should have a high perceived value:

There is ample information available for everyone on the Internet today. A simple Google search can get people the results they are looking for. Specific questions can get answered in community forums. So your lead magnet has to deliver the kind of value which comes from your unique expertise and which won’t be easily available elsewhere. A lead magnet with a high perceived value has a much higher chance of a conversion.

They should transform leads to potential clients:

The idea behind using a lead magnet is to provide value on a small scale and showcase your agency’s expertise. By addressing your target customer’s pain point, you are creating a natural route for them to go one step ahead in their consideration phase, which leads them to hire your agency.

How To Build A Lead Magnet That Converts

A strong lead magnet creates a win-win situation, both for the agency as well as its target customers.

Begin by conducting in-depth research into your target market:

You need to understand your audience’s needs and wants, their challenges and aspirations, so that you can devise an offering that fills that gap, thus making your lead magnet highly attractive to opt-in.

How you design your lead magnet can be just as important as the offering you create:

A dedicated landing page with the right layout and design elements is critical in capturing the audience’s attention. Catchy headlines and large, bold call-to-action buttons make your offering more likely to be digested and clicked on.

The most critical element in your lead magnet is the lead capture form:

Built to get someone to share their details. People are both hesitant to share their details for fear of spam, and not interested in wasting their time if you ask them too many questions. This is why you must make your move quickly. Your form should be as short as possible, capturing no more than three fields to minimize the effort someone will have to go through in getting to your offer. Sometimes, just asking for an email will be more than enough for you and cost the visitor only a few seconds.

Depending on the persona of your buyer, choose which format of the lead magnet works the best. Here are some examples of high value lead magnets.

Webinars:

Use webinars to educate your listeners as well as establish your authority on a subject.

Audits and analysis:

These are an in-depth form of consultation wherein you perform research on your prospect’s business and provide them with a customised report on how well they are doing and what can be improved.

Email course:

Offer a mini 3-day course to warm up your prospects by engaging them repeatedly over the next couple of days once they have given their contact information to you.

Guides and cheat sheets:

Give step-by-step instructions on how-to’s and make your offering more sticky by providing your prospects with tactical information.

White papers and ebooks:

Guide your prospect’s perspectives by exciting your thought leadership in the industry and increase chances of a prospect wanting to interest with you for more guidance and mentorship.

Lead Magnets Result In High-Quality Leads

With rightly designed lead magnets, you will have provided something of immense and immediate value to a prospect, and they will readily give up their contact information in exchange. Having a contact address, a phone number, even an email id, is crucial because that is the only way you get a chance to interact and engage, eventually persuading your prospects and turning them into customers. A visitor opting-in to your offer is more likely to consider you for hiring than a casual website browser, which is why lead magnets are a great tool in generating high-quality leads.

RoboAuditor is the lead capture site audit which fulfils all the characteristics needed for creating a powerful lead magnet and generates high-quality leads for an agency. Want to know how it works? Talk to us to know more.

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Lead Generation, SEO Audit

Is Your Blog’s Newsletter Sign-Up Form Delivering Lesser Leads? Here’s What You Must Know

By Rahul on

- Lead Generation, SEO Audit

The nature of the internet and technology makes disruption a daily norm, not just displacing the very elements that brought it fame, with something more better, faster and safer, but introducing better ones to make our lives easier. Combine technology and the web, and you get to run your blog today at price points that would have been laughed at a few years back.

But as the market expanded, so did the competition. Long before there were different channels like social media or video, email was the biggest battleground. In fact, today, it is still considered the most valued resource to create brand awareness and maintain brand recall. Studies by the DMA report, 72% of marketers feel email is a great channel to build loyal and active customers.

Yet, as different market forces are putting channels like email through the litmus test of user appeal and relevance, lead-generation strategies are undergoing a transition. If your newsletter sign-ups are taking a dip in performance, be it in form submissions or drop-offs. It’s good to consider the below points to understand fluctuations and forecasts you must prepare for. Let’s hop in.

Commercial Email Marketing Blues & Focus on Brand Loyalty

The email marketing story was scripted by Gary Thuerk, a marketing manager who sent the first commercial email to around 400 recipients promoting his company’s product back in 1978. That brought him about $13 million in sales, and as the history books say, there has been no turning back for email promotions ever since.

Fast forward ten years to the 1990s. The internet revolution started gripping the world, with email service providers offering personal email addresses to individuals while heralding the era of commercial emails that were cost-effective and result-oriented to the marketer. The flip side was the spate of unrestricted mass-blast emails marketers started inundating users’ inboxes with. These emails were sent with no regard to the relevance of the offers to the recipients.

Email as an industry took quite a beating, which led to regulation and numerous complaints from readers around. Marketers realised that they had to adopt email techniques that would foster loyalty, like newsletter sign-ups or segmented emailing. They also started to extract and use data to understand more about their recipient segments, fine-tuned their strategies, to increase open and click-through rates.

The State of Email Subscription Marketing Today

Emails sent in the 1980s had just plain text. In the 1990s, HTML was integrated followed by the 2000s where portability made email consumption on the mobile increase, leading up to an era today where email is visual, interactive, and segmented. There was a time when RSS feeds were the norm to follow updates from a website like a news portal, but the medium lacked the visual and the filtering appeal that email could offer.

The email could offer that with ease, and much more. Additionally, email marketing has empowered readers with multiple spam protocol layers and options for readers to block or mark irrelevant messages as spam. Although statistics show 57% of respondents think there are just too many email messages, targeting a subscription-based mode leads to subscribers showing a 3x likeliness to share email content on social media compared to visitors coming in through other channels (according to Quick Sprout).

Besides, consumers who purchase products through email spend 138% more than those who didn’t receive offers via email. It still shows the stickiness factor of email remains, but tapping it involves careful planning.

The Challenges In A Dynamic World

Compare the era when email was the only cost-effective and target-oriented medium for marketers to get their message across, to today, and you would notice a world of difference. Most of all, the players in your business offering similar services have a robust email play. It gives readers a vast pool of content to choose from, making the job tough for a particular brand to stand out with a lead management strategy like sign-up form engagement.

Besides, there are chances that readers would cater time to the leaders in the market, but the engagement game isn’t a walk in the park for the latter too. As a small or medium business, it is likely a tough ask to reach the Top 5 providers within a short span and command mindshare that is reducing every year. The challenges don’t end there.

Readers have only so much time to engage with your email and have become discerning in separating content customised to their requirements from content which isn’t. Email addresses have become virtual currencies, where exchange happens when the value is derived from both sides.

Possible Alternatives To Differentiate Your Blog?

The positives of email cannot be discounted. You can be sure that your email is sent and your reader definitely sees the subject line unless he chooses to filter it out of your inbox or block it downright. It then shows that you haven’t offered enough value by not using the available date. But if you talk about value, what if you were able to offer more than just value via content through the blogs your share?

Could it be possible that you could review your client’s website performance for free with a site audit tool? That could be your persuasion tool during the sign-up form phase, getting a definite buy-in from them to share their contact with you, and allowing your brand to occupy differentiated mindshare. In their mind? Growth Robotics, for example, offers an easy-to-embed auditing tool called RoboAuditor that performs an analysis of 70 factors, giving your clients valuable insights into the strengths and weaknesses of their site’s performance.

But what if this went even better? What if you could offer this tool to your clients, to embed it on their website with a simple line of code, so they could use it to build leads of their own through their audience? This is again possible with the RoboAuditor tool, that is similar to Hubspot’s Website Grader, allowing you to target, offer value, and secure leads at a reasonable cost that someone would find it hard to believe. Get a lead over your competitors by adopting new approaches to help you grow your business faster.

RoboAuditor is an Embeddable SEO Audit tool which generates 4X more leads with the traffic you already have.

SEO

5 Easy Steps Every Blogger Should Follow to Monetize Their Blog

By Rahul on

- SEO

You must have probably heard podcasts or read articles on how people earn money by just blogging for a few hours a week from a home office at a quaint location. You must have rubbished it as a gimmick. But guess what…

With a smart strategy and original content, you can make your blog the primary source of your income. Don’t you believe us? Well, look at these examples and statistics:

A few days ago, Neil Patel, the co-founder of Crazy Egg and Kissmetrics and a well-known marketing blogger spoke about how blogging has helped him get leads for his company Crazy Egg and mould himself into a personal brand.

Tom Dupuis is an SEO expert who regularly writes tutorials about WordPress plugins and Siteground hosting in his blogs. He generates $7000 every month through his blog. Over 1,500 people read his tutorials every day!.

There are over *hold your breath* 84.6 million blog posts every month on WordPress, and let this sink in…WordPress is just one of the many popular platforms used by bloggers to write blogs.

A survey conducted by ConvertKit last year showed that the net income earned by not-yet-pro bloggers in 2017 was around $9,497 and that earned by pro bloggers was about $138,064.

According to HubSpot, companies that blog receive 55% more traffic, and 434% indexed pages than the ones that don’t.

Do you see the impact?

Blogging has come a long way from being a platform to share personal opinions to become an income generator.

And going by the trend, it looks like blogging will continue to dominate the space for the years to come.

So, what makes blogging so popular?

Blogs are informative: From generic blogs on fashion to niche blogs on Artificial Intelligence and data science, blogs have replaced traditional media to become a credible source of information.

Blogs help in networking with like-minded people: Blogging is an excellent platform to interact with people belonging to your niche and exchanging ideas, and thoughts about the trends in the industry. It can also serve as a platform to build a close-knit community to help and collaborate with each other.

Blogs can get traffic to your website: According to HubSpot, there are four stages of converting a stranger into a customer or promoter of your business – attract, convert, close and delight. The first step, which attracts, involves writing blogs to create awareness about what you do and to drive traffic to your website. The final steps will ensue once you attract and engage the visitors with your blogs.

Blogs establish you as a thought leader in the industry: When you write detailed, informative blog posts related to your expertise, you automatically become a thought leader. It also opens up new avenues for other sources of income. For example, you can do e-learning courses, conduct podcasts, take guest lectures, or even write a book using nuggets from your blog!

So, if you are contemplating to quit your job and blog full-time, then sure, go ahead.

However, before you hit that send button on your resignation letter, read ahead to know how you can monetise your blog to make it your full-time job.

Because blogging requires as much planning as other businesses.

So, read on…

Introducing the five steps to monetise your blog

Step 1: Pick your niche

The good part of blogging as we said before is you can write on a topic of your interest. However, if you are planning to make it into a business, then you have to pick a niche that you can write about confidently. It can be about marketing, about startups, about being a new mom, the list goes on. Introspect about what you love to write about and start blogging.

Step 2: Get first 1,000 visitors to your blog

The first milestone of a successful blog is when you get your first 1,000 visitors. To be able to monetise your blog, you have to show that your blog receives enough traffic to be considered for business collaboration. Now, getting the first 1,000 visitors to the blog can be quite a challenge.

There are so many blogs related to your niche, published on a daily basis. So, grabbing the attention of your readers is going to be a herculean task. However, we have some easy tips to help you fix that.

Boost your blog posts: Once you have started your blog and written an amazing blog post, remember to share it with your target readers. The first obvious way is to share on social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn. The glitch here is the post will be seen by your family, friends, followers, and acquaintances only.

No matter how many people share your blog, you are not likely to reach your target readers. That’s when you need to resort to paid promotion. Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn enable you to add money, segment your target audience according to demography, interests, hobbies etc. and promote your post.

The laser-sharp segmentation will help you reach the right audience and get the right type of visitors you want to your blog. Once the pattern of promoting blogs become consistent, it becomes easier to get consistent followers.

Push notifications: So, your target reader has reached your blog, read it, shared it and went away. How do you re-engage with them when you publish the next blog? The answer is to push notification. Push notifications are a great way to ensure that your reader is aware of the latest updates in your blog.

Embedding a push notification code in your blog is easy. If you have a blog on WordPress, you can use a plugin such as one signal to send push notifications to people. The challenge is to ensure that readers click on the ‘Allow notification’ option. This can be resolved by directing the readers to one of your best blogs. If the blog manages to engross them, then they will be willing to click on the allow notification option.

Step 3: Convert Visitors into Subscribers

This is the second step of the inbound marketing strategy. Once your visitors start engaging with your content, it’s time to convert them into avid followers of your blog. There are multiple ways to do it. The most common method used is the subscribe to email option. Yes, that static form where people enter their details to subscribe to your blog.

In most cases, your visitors might choose not to fill in the form and rather read it whenever you share it on the social media platforms. Now, email is a crucial way to connect with your subscriber and inform them of any new initiatives that you begin in the future. Without subscriber database, it can get difficult for you to track your subscribers and report them of your initiatives. So, the other way to get subscribers is by using interactive forms.

Interactive forms: In one of our previous blogs titled ‘Are Contact Forms Dead?’, we wrote about how a survey by Formstack showed that only 3% of the website visitors fill the static forms. Users usually avoid static form because of the one-way communication and its intrusive format.

Interactive forms, on the other hand, are fun to fill up and keeps the user engaged on the website for more time. It also provides value to the user as it can provide a solution to a specific problem of the user. Your interactive forms can vary according to the theme of your blog.

For example, we, at Growth Robotics, provide white label SEO tool called RoboAuditor, which you can embed in your blog with a simple code. When a visitor reaches your blog and realises that there is an option to check the performance of their website, they will be encouraged to enter their email id for a detailed report.

Once the RoboAuditor receives the email id, an automated email with the health report of the website will be sent to them within minutes, and you will have a new e-mail ID added to your database. If your niche lies in writing marketing blogs, this could be a non-intrusive and unique way of getting subscribers and even leads. That’s exa
ctly how Neil Patel was able to generate leads for his business.

Step 4: Affiliate programs

Do you know how Tom Luipuis generates $7,000 through blogging? He writes detailed tutorials on WordPress plugins such as Yoast and SiteGround Hosting, and that earns him revenue from those companies. Affiliate marketing is a way of earning a commission on each product sold by a company by promoting it on your blog.

People buy products when it is recommended by someone they trust or know personally. So, once you have achieved the first 1000 visitors, you can monetise your blog by using affiliate marketing. Affiliate marketing can be done in various ways – you can write tutorials about how to use the product or review it.

While affiliate marketing has become a popular way of earning passive income, we recommend that you approach only those companies that are aligned with your niche. Also, as a thumb rule, ensure that you do not indulge in false advertising and promote the products subtly. Overt affiliate marketing can break the trust of your visitors, whom you earned with great difficulty.

So, be careful of the thin line between promoting a product and not sounding spammy.

Step 5: Market your freelancing skills

Want to make an extra income besides blogging? The easiest way is to expand your expertise to freelance with organisations in your niche. HubSpot inbound methodology of Attract, Convert, Close, Delight is not only beneficial for companies but freelancers too. Your target clients need to be aware of your expertise.

The best way to do it is by blogging about your area of expertise and promoting it on networking sites such as LinkedIn and Facebook. Blogging can be a great way to find clients and generate income by acquiring new projects. To ensure that your target client is invested in your blogs, you can send them an invitation to follow your blog and take it forward by collaborating on new projects.

What’s next?

Now, that you have understood the ways of monetising the blog, we recommend that you spare some time to mull over how you would go about this new business. Here are a few things that we urge you to do to build a robust, money-generating blog:

Start a blog: That’s the first step you must take. Choose the right blogging platform, a basic theme to begin with, and a unique name for your blog.

Write consistently: No matter what strategies you apply to monetise your blog, it will fail if you do not write blogs consistently. If time is a constraint, stick to writing one blog every week. But, stick to a schedule and write diligently. Regular blogging will also help you in ranking your blog on the top.

Respond to your followers: Neil Patel says that the best way to engage with your readers is to respond to their comments on your blog. Be proactive in responding to your reader’s comments. This will encourage them to follow your blog and engage with it further. Avoid getting involved in unnecessary arguments and furnish facts wherever possible to prove your point. This will help you gain respect among the blogger community.

RoboAuditor is an Embeddable SEO Audit Tool which generates 4X more leads with the traffic you already have.

We hope you found these tips useful. If you have any questions about blogging, please leave your concerns in our comment section below. We will be happy to answer your questions.

Are you planning to embed RoboAuditor on your website? Please contact us at <[email protected]>, and we will help you with the process.