In a previous article on the Customer Decision-Making Journey (CDMP), we covered that almost NOBODY buys a high-value services ($2,000+) on their first site visit.

They need time to go away, as they gauge your experience, expertise, authority and trustworthiness.

A lead magnet is your best shot at kicking off an ongoing relationship with your site/social visitors. Specifically, the type of relationship that keeps you on their radar, and not lost in the abyss of their 42 open tabs from three weeks ago.

This is the first of a two part series I’m drafting on lead magnets.

1. Today we’ll cover what they are, how to select one and why they’re important

2. Next we’ll cover the how: I’ll step you through what a good lead magnet funnel actually looks like and how to set it up

But what is a lead magnet - exactly?

Lead magnet definition

A lead magnet is a free, valuable resource you offer to visitors (to solve an immediate need or pain-point) in exchange for their email address.

It’s kind of like a digital handshake - something that helps your potential customers take one small, useful step towards their dream outcomes, while you earn the right to stay in touch (usually via email) and nurture them towards ‘ready to buy’.

You’ve seen them everywhere.

1. Free Checklist

2. Free Guides

3. Free Whitepaper

4. Webinars & Pre-Recorded Live Training

5. Email Mini-Course

6. Free Templates

7. Quiz or Self-Assessment

8. Exclusive Report or Benchmark Study

🤔 Why Should I Bother Creating a Lead Magnet

✅ Better Sales Odds / Conversion Rates

• You create Reciprocity. When leads feel genuine gratitude for the help you’ve already given, they convert at a measurably higher rate.

• They leave confident you’re the right person to solve the bigger, costlier problems.

✅ Reduce the Time to Sale

• You’re fast-tracking a visitor’s progress through their buyer journey towards becoming a paid customer of yours.

✅ Better-educated leads == Less Selling Required

• You’re helping your audience clearly articulate the pain points you can fix - often ones they didn’t realise existed.

• Example: if someone says “Our sales calls go great but then leads disappear,” the real issue is usually an unoptimised CRM and internal sales process. That same root problem also fuels revenue volatility, bad data, wasted effort, client frustration, and poor retention.

✅ [If Applicable] They outperform plain ‘Subscribe to our Newsletter’ CTAs

• Privacy concerns are rising daily in parallel with AI. People are becoming increasingly careful about mindlessly giving away their names and emails.

• So unless you’re an eCommerce business who can offer some kind of upfront incentive (i.e. ‘50% off your first order for new subscribers”) - it might be time to replace those “Subscribe to my newsletter” sections across your website with Lead Magnet CTAs instead.

📩 Common Misconception: You Need a Blog / Newsletter Strategy to Nurture Leads

Let’s just nip this in the bud right now. A Newsletter/Blog strategy IS perhaps one of the most powerful ‘middle of the funnel’ levers you can pull for your business. HOWEVER, a lead magnet strategy doesn’t require a formal newsletter strategy.

Common Alternatives include:

• Automated email ‘welcome sequence’. This is a series of (usually) five, pre-programmed emails which get sent out over (usually) two weeks. These are literally designed to warm people from information-searchers to primed and ready-to-buy. I’ll be drafting another guide on welcome sequences shortly.

• Organic, personalised email follow-ups

• If your sales cycle is long, monthly or even quarterly email updates might be all you need.

Why Most Lead Magnets Suck, and How to Make Sure Yours Doesn't.

Lead magnets strive to solve a real pain point for a real person. A lot of businesses understand this, but quit the critical thinking there, start brainstorm what they CAN build, and just start building. Inevitably, this leads to magnets that underperform.

I do not want this for you. So before we dive into solutions mode, let’s look deeper at the problems we’re trying to solve here and the key features of good/bad magnets.

❌ Why Most Lead Magnets Fail

• Too long - your audience has limited attention. We’re aiming to give them a 10-minute win, not a 2 week project.

• Too hard to complete - they demand too much time or effort.

• Vague & Unclear Promises/Outcomes - people don’t generally trade their email for things they don’t understand.

• Too generic. If 50 other comparable sellers are offering the same magnet, you’re going to get friend-zoned.

• Untrustworthy brand image. Let’s say your site looks clunky and your logo is pixelated:

  • At best, people assume you don’t have your s**t together.

  • At worst, they’re suspicious you’ll spam them.

  • Either way, they aren’t going to trust you to handle their email address

Bad magnets feel like HOMEWORK. Terrible magnets make leave people feeling confused, lost and overwhelmed.

👍 What Makes a Good Lead Magnet

A good lead magnet is:

• Short - quick to read or use.

  • If it’s a guide, keep it to MAX 10-13 pages. No longer.

  • Ideally, the person should get value in under 10 minutes, or within a few hours at most.

• Easy to implement - because you wouldn’t ask a tradie to learn JavaScript.

• Actionable and practical – the person can implement it immediately without needing extra tools or training.

• Tangible – tied to a clear, measurable outcome. “Get X result in Y time” or “Achieve Z% improvement in just one sitting.”

👌 How Killer Lead Magnets Make People Feel

The reaction we’re going for is as follows:

‘Wow. If they’re giving this away to me for free, imagine what their paid service delivers.’

“Okay that actually helped - what else can they do for me?”

In that sense, the holy grail for a lead magnet is to

1. Solve an immediate need quickly and painlessly.

2. Instil a desire for more.

The feeling you’re targeting is a sense of momentum - which is a mix of gratitude, relief, confidence, curiosity, and quiet excitement.

Section 2: Get Started | How to Plan Your Lead Magnets

1️⃣ Finding Lead Magnet Inspiration

🔬 Do the Goddamn Research!

Lead magnets take time and effort to build. So, before you build anything, make sure your lead magnet actually connects your audience’s pain with your business goals.

The goal of the lead magnet ultimately, is sales. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, a good lead magnet progresses someone through their Buyer’s journey, across one or many of the following stages: Problem Identification > Information Search > Alternative Evaluation > Purchase Decision.

So if you haven’t mapped your ideal customer’s buyer journey, that’s a REALLY IMPORTANT PLACE TO START! If you need a template to get started, you can use this.

Some examples for you to consider

1. Fractional CFO: A “Cash Conversion Cycle Scorecard” that helps founders see where profit disappears before it hits the bank. It moves them from vague cash stress (problem awareness) to understanding the operational levers a CFO can fix (alternative evaluation).

• Employment Lawyer / HR Consultant: A “Performance & Termination Risk Mini-Audit” that shows managers how to spot and document high-risk staff situations. It shifts them from thinking they have a “people issue” to realising they have an exposure issue (problem aware) only a legal professional can resolve (alternative evaluation).

• Commercial Lawyer: A “Contract Red-Flag Checklist” that highlights clauses founders routinely overlook in supplier agreements. It moves them from blaming bad vendors to recognising they need contract architecture support (problem awareness → information search).

💬 Literally Ask Your Audience!

If you want a shortcut to something sticky, no better place than literally asking your audiences what their real pain points are.

Invite replies. Run quick polls. Ask what they’re struggling with. This feedback fuels your content and engagement and will do wonders to your longer-term conversions.

🍑 Choose Something that Sounds Irresistibly SEXY

We live in an attention economy. Hence, your Lead Magnet Title/Hook needs to be POWERFUL enough to STOP PEOPLE SCROLLING!

This is why we need to focus our hooks and messaging around specific, measurable OUTCOMES, instead of outputs.

• Output: ‘Implement a Welcome Sequence’

• Outcome: ‘Improved Rates’

• Irresistibly SEXY and MEASURABLE Outcome: ‘The 5-Step Welcome Email Blueprint to 2X's Your Conversions in <2hours’

In fact, there’s a very strong argument to simply choose your lead magnets based on which idea offers the most powerful HOOK. The more specific the promise, the stronger the pull.

2️⃣ Oddball Tactics That (Surprisingly) Work for Professional-Services Firms

If you’re in law, accounting, or consulting, “creative marketing” - here are a few less-intuitive concepts you might want to consider

📝 Diagnostic Quizzes | Help them Name their Own Pain

In the professional-services world, clients often know they have a problem but can't articulate what it is. Diagnostic quizzes are the solution. They flip the script: instead of giving away an eBook about your services, you give the lead a tool to understand their situation.

Quizzes work because they force the lead to engage and provide you with data that makes them easier to sell to.

• Example 1: Fractional CFO A quiz titled "Is Your Cash Flow an Asset or a Crisis? Your 5-Minute Finance Health Check". This diagnoses the founder's stress is coming from Accounts Receivable, Inventory, or Margin Pressure. The founder feels relieved because they finally have a name for their problem, and the fractional CFO immediately knows which high-value service to offer in the welcome sequence.

• Example 2: A Health Clinic Active Health Clinic (AHC), which deals with complex invisible illnesses (like Long COVID or Chronic Fatigue), offers the "Missing Diagnosis Questionnaire (MDQ)." The quiz helps users piece together their scattered symptom profile. The lead is instantly given a detailed PDF showing potential symptom categories, which brings them immense clarity and relief. AHC's staff can then use this pre-existing profile data to conduct a highly efficient, targeted first consultation, dramatically increasing the chance of conversion.

🪜The “First Step” Framework

The First Step Framework is a strategy that uses a lead magnet to illuminate the complex scope of the lead’s broader, systemic problem. Its primary goal is to shift the prospect’s attention from the minor pain point they’ve just fixed toward the much bigger, high-stakes challenges that require your advanced solutions.

Examples

• A Business Coach providing a "Revenue Leak Diagnostic" that quickly reveals where $$5,000 vanished last month, but immediately shows the client the full, unchecked scope of their annual profit erosion.

• A Fractional CMO providing a "Social Media Audit Template" that helps the client improve one platform's performance/metrics, thereby revealing the complete lack of a cohesive, profitable cross-channel strategy.

🏗️ The “Useful but Incomplete” Resource

This principle involves giving prospects the valuable "what" and "why," but deliberately leaving room for the "how" - which is your paid service. You provide a genuine framework or powerful insight that builds trust without ever giving away the entire, high-friction implementation playbook.

• A Content Strategist offering a "3-Part SEO Keyword Formula" that clearly defines which keywords to target, but leaves the client needing the deep dive, customised strategy for how to rank for them.

• A Leadership Consultant sharing a "One-Page Conflict Resolution Framework" that names the four stages of conflict, but saves the live role-playing and tailored communication scripts for their paid workshop.

📟 ‘Lighter’ Tools Drive Higher Completion Rates

'Lighter' tools (quizzes, checklists, small calculators) are conversion powerhouses because they feel inherently 'doable'. This low initial commitment leads to high completion rates and quickly initiates momentum, which dramatically accelerates awareness of the larger challenge and the need for your solution.

📍 Localised Guides & Resources

Providing localised lead magnets can do wonders for local search-pack results, while instantly demonstrating that you are a true local expert. However, it needs to make sense.

Examples:

• A Commercial Lawyer offers the "CBD Office Lease Audit Checklist" detailing three non-negotiable clauses unique to New South Wales commercial tenancy laws.

• A Fractional CFO provides a "Local Council Grant Tracker"—a live, updatable spreadsheet that monitors and summarises all current and upcoming NSW State and local business funding opportunities.

This Article Was Just Slightly Too Long, So I Quite Simply Did Not Bother To Read It

Bland freebies drain your time, waste your energy, and water down the impact of your messaging and brand reputation.

A good lead magnet isn’t about showing off your expertise - it’s about helping someone make measurable progress toward solving a real problem.

Start small, focus on one clear win, and make it sound too good to scroll past. Do that, and you won’t just collect more emails - you’ll sell more, to more people, and faster.

I hope you’ve found this guide useful! Stay tuned, because in the next article, I’ll show you the ins and outs of HOW to create a lead magnet funnel.