#003: The 7-Minute Lead Magnet

Read Time: 8 min

Thanks for reading the AI for Marketing newsletter, a daily series where I’ll share actionable, AI-powered strategies, news, and prompts that organizations can use to build better marketing campaigns and client attraction systems (while saving 20+ hours a week and thousands of dollars).

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Here’s what you can expect in today’s article:

1. Real case studies of massively successful lead magnets
2. How to create your own lead magnet in about 7 minutes using ChatGPT (prompts included)
3. How to build a complete lead magnet funnel campaign, complete with sales copy, a landing page, and automated email follow-up sequence.

In yesterday’s edition of the AI in Marketing newsletter, I discussed the importance of controlling your content distribution, primarily through building an email database of your ideal customers.

Today, I’m going to share a powerful strategy that you can use to grow that email list significantly faster, while creating goodwill in the marketplace, and driving more leads and sales directly to you.

The Lead Magnet

Now, lead magnets are not new.

They’ve been around for decades, and they are used by some of the most successful companies.

You’re likely familiar with using them in your own business, or being a consumer of one.

However, the common problem with lead magnets is they can take a lot of time to create, especially if you are developing a written guide or e-book (which are most common).

But not anymore!

In this article, I’ll show you how you can create a lead magnet with ChatGPT in less time than it takes to make it through the Chick Fil-A drive thru at 6pm.

If you are not familiar with lead magnets, here’s a quick definition and how they are used:

A lead magnet is a marketing tool or incentive that is offered to potential customers in exchange for their contact information or other details. The purpose of a lead magnet is to attract and capture the interest of potential customers and to convert them into leads. Examples of lead magnets include free e-books, whitepapers, webinars, trials, consultations, and other downloadable resources. The idea is to provide value to the potential customer, and in exchange, the marketer gains a valuable lead that can be further nurtured and potentially converted into a customer.

So if you’ve noticed everyone under the sun giving away free guides, templates, and resources lately, it’s because they work.

If you want to see a masterclass in how to use a lead magnet, check out Fisher Investments.

They manage over $170 billion in client assets, and they were able to do that on the back of great content marketing and lead magnets.

Here’s just one of many examples from them:

In fact, last year they spent over $100 million in advertising, with a significant amount of that traffic going directly to their lead magnet page.

While most investment companies are using bland, boring advertising that sounds like everyone else, Fisher Investments is actively building their database of prospective clients, and continuing to dominate their market with their lead magnets.

(You’d think everyone else would catch on by now, right!?)

Now, you don’t need to be Fisher Investments or have a $100 million ad budget to make this work.

Here’s a simplistic view of how to make it work for you via social media:

1. Someone scrolls by and sees your content
2. They go to their bio to learn more
3. They see a link for a free guide
4. They signup and get a ton of value

Now, you have a warm lead, contact info (email address), and a reason to nurture them until they are ready to buy from you.

Before we dive into actually creating a lead magnet, let me just share a few more examples for inspiration.

Lead Magnet Ideas and Examples

Many people think that you have to create a written guide or e-book for a lead magnet. That’s just one of many ways to create a lead magnet.

For me personally, when it comes to turning a lead into a customer, I rarely have much success doing that with e-books.

My favorite, and most successful, lead magnet campaigns have been centered around webinars (yes, a free webinar can be a lead magnet), quizzes, and self-assessments.

Here are some examples:

Self-Assessment (The Swift School)

The Swift School is for children with dyslexia.

Naturally, before enrolling at the school, one of the most important questions that parents have is, “Is my child dyslexic?”

At ISM Digital Solutions, we helped Swift create a self-assessment to help parents determine if their child is dyslexic.

Here’s how we are helping them do that.

To drive awareness to the assessment, we are using a sticky pop-up bar on their site using a tool called Optinmonster.

Clicking the “Take the Free Assessment” button will lead them to the assessment page

After completing the 14 question assessment, they are prompted to opt-in to view their results.

After entering their details, they are then taken to a confirmation page, encouraging them to connect with the Admissions Team to learn more about Swift.

In short, this has been one of the most successful campaigns we’ve run for any school.

Quizzes (Revolution Golf)

Revolution Golf used a simple, yet highly effective, quiz funnel to direct golfers to various training programs based on the answers to the survey.

This quiz was such a great lead magnet, it not only propelled Revolution Golf to over 8 figures in revenue, they had a massive exit, selling to the Golf Channel in 2017.

Here are some more lead magnet examples to use as inspiration:

Ready to Build Your Lead Magnet?

Now, to build a lead magnet like the ones you see above, it would either take a lot of time (if you do it yourself), or money (if you want to pay someone to do it).

But with the help of ChatGPT, time and money are no longer an obstacle!

Let’s do it together right now.

Pick a Lead Magnet format

If you need help getting ideas for a lead magnet, just use ChatGPT.

Go to ChatGPT and search:

Give me 10 lead magnet ideas for [your niche].

For example purposes, let’s say you have a web design agency. Let’s see what ChatGPT comes up with:

Not bad!

Let’s go with option 2, Website Design Checklist. But instead of a checklist for building a site from scratch, let’s tell ChatGPT we want a checklist to help website owners self assess their own site.

Again, not bad! Let’s take it one step further, and turn this into a true self-assessment with a grading scale. Multiple screenshots incoming…

Ok, that’s not bad, right!?

Now, you may certainly want to modify the questions, adjust the grading scale, or adjust the point values to better suite your audience and goals.

But I just created that in 2 minutes. The longest part of this process was taking screenshots and inserting into this article.

Even if you want to make edits, if this gets you 90% of the way there, you just saved yourself days, or even weeks, putting something like this together.

Make it Pretty

Now, to take this from plain text and transform it into a beautiful PDF to give away, you have a few options:

1. Use design software, like Canva, to build the PDF yourself
2. Go to Fiverr and pay someone $20 or less to do it for you

I’d just spend 5 minutes and pay someone on Fiverr to get this done.

So in about 7 minutes, we created a lead magnet. Congratulations!

But let’s not stop there. Let’s build the rest of the campaign so that you can have a full working funnel in less than an hour.

Build the Landing Page

Next, we need a landing page to collect the information. There are so many landing page builders out there these days.

For speed purposes, my preference is Clickfunnels.

First, let’s use ChatGPT for the landing page copy, then we’ll build the page.

Let’s choose headline 2, “Is Your Website Losing Customers? Take This Free Assessment to Find Out”

Now, let’s create a sub-headline

Let’s go with subheadline #1, “Discover the hidden flaws that are driving potential customers away from your website.”

Now, I want to add 3-5 persuasive bullet points about the self assessment.

This is gold!

Now, let’s use Clickfunnels to build the landing page using the copy that ChatGPT provided.

The Follow-Up

One last piece…the automated email follow up after someone subscribes.

We did this yesterday!

Head over to edition 002 of this newsletter, and towards the bottom of the article, I provided you with a ChatGPT prompt to create an automated email sequence after you receive a subscriber.

Voila, done!

Recap

Let’s do a quick recap of how long this actually took to build:

1. Create the lead magnet draft (2 minutes)
2. Design the lead magnet (5 minutes to pay a freelancer $20 on Fiverr)
3. Write the landing page copy (3 minutes)
4. Build the landing page in Clickfunnels (5 minutes)
5. Write the email sequence (10 minutes)
6. Finishing tasks (15 minutes)

• Upload the guide
• Setup the form
• Create a simple thank you page using a Clickfunnels template

In less than 1 hour of work, you have a full lead magnet funnel!

Just a few final reminders about using ChatGPT

• Don’t expect ChatGPT to write perfect copy (though I think it did a pretty damn good job on the lead magnet above). Use it as a starting point and to generate ideas.
• Be specific about the outputs you want (pain points, beliefs, awareness level)
• If you aren’t a master of prompt engineering yet, be careful with using it to create long-form content (ie. a guide or ebook). The content can be generic.

If you want to get better at prompt engineering, this newsletter will help you, so continue reading each day 😉.

Again, I can’t tell you how many workshop attendees and clients have come up to me and said, “I love the idea of lead magnets, I just don’t have the time to create them.”

I get it, but now there’s no excuse!

Let’s get to work.

Go create your first, or next, lead magnet and let me know how it goes.

P.S. If you have any questions, or get stuck with any of the set up, comment or direct message me and I’m happy to help!

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I have presented at in-person workshops, virtual workshops and speaking engagements at a number of companies, conferences, and private events on the following topics:

• Inbound Marketing
• Social Media
• Digital Advertising
• ChatGPT and AI Technology
• Copywriting
• Conversion Optimization

These events have ranged from 60 minute sessions to multi-day engagements.

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