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One of the biggest challenges for any sales team is getting enough leads to generate a sale. This is what lead magnets are meant to do: they generate a contact list of potential customers to do more product or service marketing.

A successful lead magnet is ultra-specific, provides immediate gratification, shifts relationships, and should offer both a high perceived and actual value to catch an audience’s attention. It should make them feel that they will be getting useful information rather than constant sales pitches. If you can do this and get enough conversions, then you will reap the gains of a successful lead magnet.

Definition of lead magnets and their benefits

Lead magnets, by definition, are incentives offered to potential customers in exchange for contact information such as email addresses or phone numbers. They consist of free and valuable content that you give your website visitors once they fill out a sign-up form and join your email or contact list. These incentives are used primarily for online marketing campaigns and offer various online resources that your audience can use.

The use of lead magnets means more to a marketing strategy than just the tabulation of a list of prospective clients. They also provide the following benefits to marketers:

• – They help generate early-stage leads. These marketing incentives attract not only clients who need the product or service today but also those who know they might need it in the future. It allows marketers to nurture and direct leads through various stages in the sales funnel.
• – They capture valuable information of your market. Lead magnets such as sign-up forms, surveys, and assessments can provide marketers with valuable data. Information on customers’ needs, concerns, and other marketing opportunities are among the valuable resources worth gathering.
• – They categorize leads. The information you get through forms, surveys, and assessments can be tailored for easy categorization and presentation to your audience. Questions such as their job title, role in the company, and the number of times they use a certain machine or process are good details to request in the survey.
• – They qualify leads. This marketing incentive qualifies a lead if it is for a receptive audience. This means these are visitors who have just recently viewed your website and demonstrated a meaningful engagement. Lead magnets validate which group of people should be targeted for more of your sales efforts.
• – They automate lead generation. Lead magnets work even if you don’t focus on them 24/7. Once set up and running, you can focus on other areas of your marketing strategy because the lead magnet can work on its own without the need for you to be immediately responsive.

Using several lead magnets to fill up your sales funnel can be a tiresome activity, especially with the numerous incentives that you can offer through them. As a manufacturing business, you’ll see the greatest benefit by finding and using the lead magnet that is most likely to generate sales. Here are some of the best lead magnets for manufacturing companies to use:

Design or buyer’s guide or report

As an expert on a specific manufacturing process, you can provide valuable information to engineers and your audience. These engineers may be new to the profession or have zero knowledge of your processes. You can produce downloadable PDF guides with data on limitations, tolerances, and process requirements. You can also create a report on the purpose and value of your particular manufacturing process.

Any of these can take the form of ebooks, white papers or case studies. When crafted carefully, guides and reports can be used to educate potential buyers both on the process and the reason to buy your products. These informative guides and reports also help in establishing trust and loyalty to your brand as you provide valuable information from which customers can base decisions and build business cases.

Toolkit or resource list

People love getting resources that make their work easier. Among the most useful lead magnets are toolkits and resources. These can come in the form of worksheet templates, spreadsheets with built-in calculations or activity logs. You can even create a cheat sheet that enumerates important points of a buyer’s guide or a workbook with complete instructions on the use of a product or process.

This type of marketing incentive can be consumed quickly and can deliver immediate value. You don’t have to create large and colorful pieces to make people want them, either. At the core, all that’s needed is a table, chart, or diagram with clear, practical, and useful information from your experts. Your toolkit’s utility is improved even more if you offer it not only online, but also in a printable format. Some people love ticking off boxes and printed checklists allow them to do just that.

Videos and webinars

Aside from being one of the best forms of content marketing, videos have also grown into some of the most popular lead magnets for manufacturing companies. Try providing a video tool demo, a tutorial on how to complete a process or even a narrated summary of a previous blog post.

Another option is to host a webinar in which you offer awareness training, not only on your services but also in other areas of interest in which you have some expertise. This lets you provide visuals like presentations or even interviews with subject matter experts (SMEs) in a manner that allows people to interact with you at the end of each session. After the webinar, remember to follow up with your audience and gather feedback for further improvement.

Videos and webinars are especially helpful in establishing your industry leadership when you’re able to provide valuable information to your audience. You must cover topics in detail and provide unique insights – customers will return if they’re getting good value out of the time spent.

Email courses

Another great lead magnet for industrial businesses is what is known as email courses. An email course is an automated series of emails that teach your audience about a tool or a problem. Instead of providing the entire course material to your readers at once, you can divide them into smaller lessons. This also allows you to distribute these courses as PDF downloads that they can view on or offline.

As a manufacturing company, you can offer expert advice to your audience in return for their email addresses. This approach helps build a relationship as the customer gets accustomed to receiving emails from you at specified and consistent intervals.

If your company is just getting started on lead magnets, you do not necessarily need to produce reams of new content right away. You can use existing case studies and blog posts to initiate your lead-generation campaign. Over time, however, it is recommended to develop other kinds of content as additional lead magnets to attract more potential customers. If you need help in this area, feel free to reach out to us for useful engineering content.