There’s some misunderstanding of what constitutes a lead magnet, and how to best use them, among many independent school websites.
What is a Lead Magnet?
A lead magnet is any piece of content–could be a blog post, case study, podcast, video, virtual experience, webinar, etc.–that your leads are searching for.
It’s a way to bring the leads into your website, by offering them exactly what they are looking for. This content helps to farm leads, by accepting contact information in exchange for access to the information your lead needs.
Using lead magnets to bring in new leads for your school
Step one:
Determine valuable content or experiences that your leads need. (Customer research!)
Step two:
Create valuable content or experiences that your leads need, if it doesn’t already exist.
Step three:
Add this piece of content, or access to this experience, onto your website. Create a landing page and a form, specific to this offer.
Step four:
Create a follow up email, that sends the content or instructions to access the experience, to the leads inbox.
Step five:
Automation. Create a workflow that automatically sends above email to whatever email address was entered in the form.
Step six:
Contextual outreach. Knowing what we know about this lead now (contact info, piece of content they are interested in) we can reach out with other relevant information or experiences.
Nudge them down the sales funnel… If they downloaded your brochure, maybe the next step is a virtual tour… If they’ve taken a virtual tour, maybe the next step is a phone call or an in-person meet… so forth.
I recommend automating this process as well. You can get as intricate as you want with this–basing future outreach on the responses you get throughout the email series…
Bonus:
Promotion. There are countless strategies for promoting your lead magnet. Paid ads on different platforms. Organic outreach. Cold outreach via email etc. SEO.
You’ll want to start by making it easy to access this lead magnet on your website. Create a button on your home page or your main navigation. Utilize a pop-up form on certain pages. Add CTAs to relevant blog posts, etc.
Next you can focus on building out a content environment that supports the SEO of this lead magnet.
DeMaio Digital Marketing 