- If you do not have calls to action
to collect emails on your content marketing on your website,
you are missing out on probably two times more opportunity
than you have today.
(upbeat music)
Hey, everybody.
Dan Martell here,
serial entrepreneur, investor and creator of SaaS Academy.
In this episode, I'm gonna share with you exactly
how to build a beacon lead magnet.
It's my structure,
it's very unique to creating a lead magnet
to attract ready to buy customers
for your product off of your content marketing
or your website.
And be sure to stay to the end.
We're going to tell you how to download
my reactivation email template
to literally source new customers off any email lists
you may have today.
Let's get into it.
So I wanna start off by telling you a story
about a company I built called Flowtown.
Flowtown was a social email marketing platform
that we built back in 2009.
And one of the things that we did incredibly well
was our content marketing.
We had a blog that was generating
hundreds of thousands of views per month.
But the problem was is that
all we did was just blanket the blog post
and all around it with ads to our trial of our software,
we actually weren't collecting any emails.
We figured if we got traffic,
we want to send them straight to signing up for trial.
The problem was with that, that I've learned since then,
is that not everybody is ready to start a trial
with your product.
They're not ready to buy what you've got to sell.
And what you wanna do is instead
swap their contact information,
their email address for some value that you might have.
And the reason why is 'cause marketing is meant to take care
of your market until they're ready to buy.
So if you've done all the heavy lifting
to get somebody to come to your website,
then you need to give them something,
some bribe to collect an email address,
so you can continue the conversation,
continue to solve problems for them.
And at some point,
luckily, you'll have the opportunity
to sell them your solution.
And once we added lead magnets to our blog,
all of a sudden now there was this whole swath of visitors
that were cold that had no clue what Flowtown was
that weren't ready to buy,
that we started collecting emails.
And from that relationship we built,
we then converted them into trials.
So if you do not have calls to action to collect emails
on your content marketing on your website,
you are missing out on probably two times more opportunity
than you have today.
This was true back in the day for Tim Ferriss's blog.
Some people don't realise this,
but he was opposed to collecting emails
and emails marketing 'cause he didn't want to bug people.
And I think it was Ramit Sethi,
one of his good friends at finally convince them like,
"Tim, you get millions of views to your blog every month
and you're not building your email list."
Now he has a multi-million person email lists.
And even the other day, I was talking to a SaaS founder
that's in one of my programmes or new member
and we were doing a quick marketing audit.
And I noticed that they're at 7 million in ARR
and incredibly great built product.
And on their blog, they had no calls to action
to collect emails other than signing up for a demo
for their product.
So we wanna solve that and here's the way to do it.
Number one is we want our lead magnet,
what I call a beacon lead magnet to be SAGE.
I got this terminology from my friend, Taki Moore.
And SAGE stands for short, actionable,
goal-oriented, and easy.
This means that it's some kind of document.
Typically, it's a checklist, it's a blueprint,
it's a template, it's a script
that adds a tonne of value without asking the person
to do a lot of work.
Some people decide to do three-part video series
or a webinar to collect an email address.
But the truth is,
is you're asking that visitor to give you their time.
And for a lot of people,
their time is worth way more than their money
or their contact information.
So you wanna keep it short.
You wanna keep it goal-oriented.
You wanna focus on what is the problem
that your software solves that you can create a template
or checklist to connect with that person
that tells you that they also have that problem.
One of my favourite examples is a company called
ambition.com.
They're a software platform,
and they're not even a client,
although they should be 'cause I'd love to work with them.
That helps sales teams build leaderboards
and sales scorecards,
and really just try to get the most out of your sales team.
So if you go to ambition.com, they have a whole thing,
it's a resource section with templates and scorecards,
and they essentially have all these resources
that somebody that may not be ready to buy their software,
but has a small sales team can engage with
and download for an email address
so that they can continue the relationship onward.
That is the mentality,
the approach to thinking about what kind of lead magnet
would even start to attract a ready to buy potential buyer.
Number two, double aligned.
So to me,
the principle that I was kinda hinting on
is the idea of double aligned.
The lead magnet that you're building has to be aligned
with the problem that your product solves.
And it has to be aligned with where the customer is
in their awareness stage of the problem.
So, could you create a lead magnet
that would collect a bunch of emails from any visitor
on the internet?
If you were like, "Hey, I can help you make more money,
download this thing."
And all of a sudden,
every visitor to your website downloads the thing,
but that doesn't make them a perfect customer
for your software products.
See what I'm saying?
Is the lead magnet has to be aligned
with not only attracting the perfect ideal customer profile,
but also the problem your product solves
so that when you introduce your solution, it makes sense.
So for example, if I have a financial software,
one potential like,
especially if it helps with year-end planning
like kind of financial modelling or financial planning,
then a great template or tool I could give away
for their email address
would be a year-end planning checklist.
Like, "Here are the 27 things
and all the recommendations we have
for how you should do your year-end financial planning."
And that would be aligned,
especially if your product does that.
So look inside the software you've already built
or inside your solution, your product that you're selling
and ask yourself,
"What is the problem that somebody that's about to hire us
to solve for the solution that they're trying to fix first?"
So if I do camping trips.
Let's say, you wanna hike Mount Rainier.
One of the top mountains in the US.
A packing list for getting ready for Mount Rainier
would be a great lead magnet because anybody downloading,
that's telling you that they wanna go hike Mount Rainier.
So if you have a guide service to do that,
then that's a natural kind of process
that you could then say,
"Hey, if you want some help, you wanna get there safer,
you wanna get there faster, give us a call,
schedule a call so we can do a quick demo
to see if we'd be the right fit for you."
And that is what double aligned means.
Number three, test the name.
I can't tell you the amount of times
that I've been doing marketing coaching calls
with my clients,
and seeing their beacon lead magnets
and realising that what they've created as a name for it
is really just like a blog post title.
Like how to do your year-end planning
or seven steps to do your year-end planning.
That's not gonna make it interesting enough, right?
We need to give it a cool name.
Sometimes we got to just rename it to a scorecard
or a template,
or we wanna give it a cool name like modeller,
or, like I have the rocket demo builder
or the precision scorecard.
So you wanna make sure you test the name.
Here's how to test it is email a bunch of prospects,
maybe people on your marketing list if you have one,
and just ask them,
"Hey, I built this thing (name),
and I'm curious if you want a copy,
if so, just hit reply and I'll send it to you."
If you send that to a hundred people
and only two people reply asking for it,
there's probably a problem at your name
because it doesn't seem unique, powerful.
It doesn't seem SAGE enough.
So make sure that you test the name before you go build.
I literally will run marketing ads
against the beacon lead magnet before I ever build it.
Because if I'm not getting the click-through rates,
then why am I gonna spend the time and energy to build it?
So that is number three, test the name.
Number four, conversion flow.
This is literally the most important thing.
You can have the most amazing beacon lead magnet
and miss a huge opportunity to actually convert that traffic
into customers.
So here's the key.
Wherever I promote that lead magnet,
it could be on my blog,
it could be on my homepage,
it could be through ads.
When they download that beacon lead magnet
on the thank you page,
the page that shows up after they've downloaded.
In the header,
you will give them a link to download the thing
or tell them to check their inbox in seven minutes
'cause that's where it will be to download.
But the page they see is 100% above the fold.
Ambition, I'm looking at you.
Ambition.com, you guys don't do this.
Above the fold, you make the prompt for the demo.
You make a prompt for your trial.
You ask them if they wanna move forward.
Here's why.
If I think of open rates for most email address,
a good open rates about 20%, a click-through rates 2%.
So that means that if a hundred people downloaded
my lead magnet and I only got 20% open rates,
that means 20 people would open the email.
And then if I had a link to come back to sign up for a trial
or any information about the trial or demo,
then I'd only get 2% of the 20, which means four people.
So I'd get four people through the email funnel
that would come back to the page
that might have the information about
how they could purchase our product or learn more about it.
Yet, you have 100% of the people
that after they downloaded your lead magnet,
there were still on the funnel.
They were still there ready for the impression.
And this is a plague.
It's 92%.
If you're not a coaching client of mine,
you probably don't do this.
All my coaching clients do it because it's a non-negotiable.
It's why we spend all this time generating traffic
to collect an email,
but not moving the opportunity forward for the customer.
I've always said that marketing for me is...
The difference sheet information in marketing
is that there's a next action item at each stage
of your marketing.
You have a clear next step for this person to go
so that they don't just say, "Oh, this is cool,
but what am I supposed to do with this?
Or how does this company help me?"
That is the conversion flow is everything.
Make sure that when you give them the thing,
tell them, they'll get it in their inbox in a few minutes.
That way they stay on the page
and then ask them if they want some more help
through your software, through a conversation
to move things forward and make sure it's clear,
and there's a direct call to action.
Number five, R&D.
So R&D stands for Robin Duplicate.
Look, I'm not telling you,
you should steal other people's things
and claim them as your own.
But I am saying you should do your research.
You should find out what the market is already engaging in.
Here's the coolest part about the world we live in
is you could literally go
and spy or review your competitor's lead magnets
and find out what's working really well for them.
So here's how you do it.
And this may change
'cause ad platforms change all the time.
But in Facebook,
if you go to your competitors or people in the market
that you know are doing really great marketing,
and you can do this from my Facebook page.
And you go to my business Facebook page
on the left side somewheres,
you're gonna find the Facebook Ad Library, okay?
So you can even go, I think it's ads...
Again, they change it all the time.
But search for Facebook Ad Library,
and you can search a company and then see all the ads
that they're running right now.
And you can see if they've got lead magnets
that they're offering the market
and go through their funnels.
Now, what I'm saying by R&D
is be inspired by their lead magnets.
If they're running three lead magnets,
and is this scorecard, this template and this script,
you don't have to reinvent the wheel.
You can just ask yourself,
"Do I have some unique thoughts
on what that should look like?
Do I have some existing content?
Do we have something in our product
that we're already doing that can help the person?"
And just use that to inspire your creative process
for creating lead magnets.
I believe that if you do it right
and you have a great beacon lead magnet,
you can have one beacon lead magnet,
and it could drive millions of dollars in new revenue.
But if you wanna get really advanced,
then you start to create maybe up to five,
hitting the five paying points
that your customer might be running into.
Or if you wanna be really advanced, kinda like I do,
then you might have dozens of them
depending on the type of content that you're talking about.
But for right now, go R&D one of your competitors,
find out what they're doing.
If they're running ads
and they've been running it for a while,
it's probably 'cause it's working.
And reverse engineer from their success,
how you can create a SAGE beacon lead magnet
to really help you collect some emails
and build that ready to buy audience of people
for your product.
So quick review on the five strategies
to build a beacon lead magnet
that attracts ready to buy buyers.
Number one, it has to be SAGE,
short, actionable, goal-oriented, and easy.
Number two, double aligned,
both the paying the customer has and the product you solve,
or the solution.
Number three, tests the name with an email list.
Four, your conversion flow.
Use the funnel.
Number five, R&D your competitors.
As I mentioned at the beginning,
I wanna share with you an exclusive resource
called the reactivation email,
or you click the link below to download your copy.
It's a template,
nine words, you send to your email list
that will help you harvest new opportunities,
customers with literally no effort.
Just send this email,
click the link below, download your copy.
It's my gift to you.
Especially if you're collecting emails
using the beacon lead magnet strategy,
you're gonna need this email template.
It's the first email you should be sending to them
after they download the lead magnet.
Click the link below to download your copy.
And if you liked this video, please subscribe,
leave a comment.
Let me know what the number one takeaway was for you
that helps the engagement in the channel.
It would mean a lot.
And as per usual,
I want to challenge you to live a bigger life
and a bigger business.
And I'll see you next week.
(upbeat music)