Author: Franz Malten Buemann

The quality of your CRM data impacts your entire organization, bottom to top.
Your marketing teams rely on quality data to segment contacts, personalize messaging, and create targeted campaigns.
Your sales teams require accurate data to speak to your prospects’ biggest concerns.
Your customer support team needs accurate data for context in conversations with customers. Finance teams need accurate customer data for forecasting. Even your executive team relies on accurate CRM data for strategic decision-making.
Most organizations know this. Yet, bad data costs U.S. companies as much as $3 trillion per year, and up to 60% of organizations do not calculate the true cost of their bad data.
That signals that there is a lot of room for improvement in data maintenance in many companies. Companies of any size would be impacted by that much inaccurate data in their customer database, although they may be unaware of just how painful the impact may be, with many of the day-to-day issues flying under the radar.
That much “bad” data represents a huge problem for your marketing teams in particular. How do you speak to your customers’ biggest concerns if you can’t be sure that you know exactly who they are and what they care about? You need accurate, reliable data to be confident in your assertions.
Today, companies often lean too heavily on manual work to fix data issues, which can be extremely time-consuming and draining for your teams. Relying on your employees to export data, fix it in Excel using complicated formulas, and import it back into your CRM issue-free is a big ask.
Let’s consider how poor data quality impacts your marketing teams, slowing them down and giving them less creative options when launching new campaigns.

Impact of Data Quality On Your Marketing Efforts
While the impact of poor customer data quality is felt throughout your organization, it has an especially volatile impact on your marketing teams.
Everything that a marketing team does — every strategy employed, campaign launched, messaging delivered, & creative produced — is influenced by customer data. Or at least it should be.
That’s what great marketing teams do — understand their customers deeply and speak directly to them in a way that resonates. You can’t do that if you don’t know them, and you can’t be sure that you know them if you can’t rely on your data.
Let’s look at some of the specific ways that data issues and low-quality data can impact your marketing teams.
Segmentation
A big piece of any marketer’s job is segmentation. Or, the practice of analyzing long lists of customers and breaking them down into smaller lists so that you can more reliably speak to each segment’s concerns.
You wouldn’t market your B2B software product in the same way to both CEOs and Marketing Managers, even though both might be targeted buyer personas for your product. They have different needs and concerns. If you try, the language that you use will never fully resonate with both.
So you break things down. You make the list of people that you are speaking to smaller and more manageable. Then, you can use specific language that will resonate with that segment. But if your data isn’t reliable, you can’t effectively segment it down into those smaller groups.
Marketers cannot properly segment contacts with inconsistent data. With inconsistencies, creating even basic campaigns becomes a complicated analysis effort that requires experts on hand that understand all of the nuances. As a result, it prevents marketers from creating effective campaigns and impedes their ability to execute quickly.
Let’s consider an example. Let’s say you’re a B2B software company, and you want to send out an email campaign to CEOs in your HubSpot CRM.
If you aren’t regularly standardizing and formatting your job title field data, you’ll find that CEOs are listed in your database in many different ways:

CEO
C.E.O.
Chief Executive Officer
Founder/CEO
Founder & CEO
Owner and CEO
Etc.

And there are likely to be many other variations as well.
To run a thorough campaign, you need to bring all of these different job titles together, as they are all effectively the same title. To do this, you’ll need to either run some creative Excel formulas, create complicated search filters to “catch” all the relevant titles, or enlist the help of a developer. Either way, you are still unlikely to catch every single error in the field.
This doesn’t even include typos and other errors in your data, either. Some people might be listed as “CEOn” or have job titles listed that include other data issues. And these standardization and data quality issues can potentially impact your entire database.
For instance, this standardization problem wouldn’t only affect CEOs, but every job title in your database. Or, what if you wanted to segment your CRM contacts by city, country, area code, or years of experience? Data issues are present in every field.
Every data point in your database has a host of potential issues that could impact your ability to segment your contacts and deliver effective campaigns that meet your KPI goals.
Data issues make your segmentation efforts complicated and unreliable. Ultimately your marketing teams will be forced to segment less often and less creatively until the issues are rectified.
Personalization
Data issues will also impact your ability to personalize your messaging as well. And personalized messages are critical for successful campaigns.
80% of consumers are more likely to purchase a brand that provides personalized experiences. 72% of consumers say they only engage with personalized messaging.
Your ability to personalize messaging is critical and relies on high-quality, consistent data in your CRM. Have you ever received an email and had your name uncapitalized, or been mistakenly referred to by your last name?
Inherently, you probably know that this is a simple data oversight. They didn’t mean to refer to you by your last name. But it does still impact your feelings about the company in question, doesn’t it? Maybe it’s not intentionally rude, but it’s unprofessional to keep your customer data in disarray.
And it’s not just about {FirstName} or {JobTitle} either, although those are important. True, deep personalization may not reference the data so directly, but use conclusions drawn from that data to guide your messaging.
For example, one common personalization issue that arises out of CRM data problems comes from associations. In HubSpot CRM, your B2B contacts are associated with companies.
If that association was missing and a portion of your contacts were free-floating, that would make it impossible to execute account-based marketing strategies. Additionally, personalizing the message based on account engagement becomes difficult when you are missing data.
Inconsistent associations also contribute to inaccurate lead scores in account-based marketing. Because scores are applied on the account level, based on variables for the independent contacts within the account, missing contacts will impact the account scores. Ultimately, the difference in lead scoring could affect the lifecycle stage of the entire account, slowing its movement through your pipeline and potentially derailing a deal.  
Customer Experience
Issues with segmentation and personalization ultimately impact the experience that customers have during their customer journey. With less specific marketing messaging that is less likely to resonate, their experiences and opinion of your brand will suffer.
92% of marketing professionals see personalization as a “crucial” element of the customer experience. And personalization often relies on your ability to segment customer data effectively to deliver relevant messaging. All of these impacts are interconnected, hurting your entire marketing operation.
Duplicate data, for instance, presents a customer experience issue that can potentially harm your brand reputation. If you don’t regularly merge duplicates, many of your customers will receive your messaging multiple times. This drives up the costs of your campaigns, harms your brand reputation, and makes your reporting less reliable.
Deduplication helps achieve a single customer view, which is when your data on your contacts and accounts can all be reliably found in one system. Having one single ‘record of truth’ means that your marketing teams can effectively segment and personalize communications. A single customer view provides your teams with faith in your data, allowing them to focus their attention on other areas.
The quality of your data impacts customers every step of the way. Without reliable data, each of those touchpoints is cheapened. Less data, or less reliable data, limits what can be used and what your teams know about each contact. Across months and dozens of touchpoints, that adds up.  
The only way for companies to fix these issues is to recognize and embrace data management strategy and regular CRM data maintenance.
What is CRM data maintenance?
CRM data maintenance is the ongoing process of auditing your CRM data, identifying issues, and fixing those issues within your database.
The larger process of maintaining your CRM data can be broken down into numerous focus areas, including:

Data Quality
Data Cleansing
Data Operations
Data Deduplication
Data Purging
Data Monitoring and KPIs

Data Quality
Data quality refers to data that is accessible, consistent, and relevant. Your entire organization is impacted by the quality of your data — from individual campaigns through larger strategic decisions.
Accessible means not only that the data is accurate, but that the right people within your organization can access it when they need it. Siloed data creates bureaucratic redundancies that slow your organization down.
Data consistency largely refers to how consistently data is formatted and standardized in your database. Are your phone numbers formatted uniformly? Are your job titles standardized? Are your contact names appropriately capitalized? Consistency allows you to slice and dice data in interesting ways.
Then there is relevance. It doesn’t matter if you have a million perfectly accurate records in your CRM if none of them are in your target market. The data that you collect must be relevant to be useful.
Data quality is achieved through other data maintenance processes like data cleansing.
Data Cleansing
Data cleansing is the process of fixing or removing incorrect, improperly formatted, duplicate, or incomplete data within your CRM.

Fixing first and last name capitalization issues (jane vs. Jane)
Standardizing addresses and phone numbers (1234567890 vs 123-456-7890)
Standardizing Job titles (CEO vs. C.E.O vs. Chief Executive Officer)
Removing redundant data
Removing incorrect and fake data
Removing special characters
Identifying and fixing outlying issues

The process of cleansing data can be time-consuming. Often it involves breaking out chunks of your database and assigning fixes and tasks to members of your team. Then, they will load the data into Excel and use VLOOKUP and complicated formulas to identify and fix errors in your data. Once complete, the data has to be reimported back into your CRM.
It’s a non-exact process. Unless you have a true Excel wizard on your team, you’re likely to miss many issues and still require ongoing help from developers to update data in bulk.
Data Deduplication
All companies deal with duplicate data. Duplicate contact or company records might be created through manual entry, either by your customers into forms or by your team through your backend CRM. Or, they may be created through data imports or integrations with other software.
No matter how duplicate records are created, they can be a thorn in the side of your marketing team.
Duplicate data leads to increased campaign costs and lost productivity. As your teams spend time ironing out data issues instead of focusing on other areas, leading to missed opportunities. Every second they spend sifting through records to identify the “correct” or most complete record is wasted time. Duplicate data shatters your single customer view, as there is no single ‘source of truth’ that can be relied on.
When you have high duplication rates, your marketing teams will always be aware of that fact. They know that they will have to deduplicate any list of prospects or customers before new campaigns go out, adding a new task to every campaign launch.
Most critically, duplicate data harms the customer experience. Not just because they are likely to receive mixed messages and redundant messaging. But because your ability to understand them will be halved throughout the customer lifecycle, leading to less fulfilling interactions over and over again.
Data Operations
Data operations encompasses the ongoing day-to-day tasks that are required to maintain your CRM data and ensure the usability of that data across your organization.
Data operations tasks include day-to-day bulk updating of data, consolidating fields and redundant data, migrating free-text fields to picklists, importing data (from events or third-party sources), and other tasks.
These tasks are a necessity for high-quality data, and for putting your data in a position where data cleansing can be as effective as possible.
Data Purging
Data purging encompasses the removal of garbage data, outdated data, redundant data, and low-quality data that will only serve to clutter up your database and negatively impact your reputation and email open rates.
There are many types of data issues that could potentially make records a good candidate for purging. Examples include:

Undelivered emails
Clearly fake data
Outdated records
Unqualified prospects
Bad records from integrations
Incomplete Contact Data
Free and role-based email addresses
Unengaged contacts
Unqualified contacts
Duplicate contacts

Purging this data is critical for improving the usability of your CRM data as a whole. Without having to continually sift through and remove garbage data for campaigns, your productivity will improve.
Without clutter, you’ll be able to keep costs down on data storage and contact-based CRM fees, along with the time that your teams would usually spend dealing with the purged records.
Without low-quality data dragging down your email delivery and open rates, you’ll avoid being penalized and enjoy an improved sender reputation.
Data Monitoring and KPIs
To fix issues in your CRM database, you’ll need to be able to identify where those issues lie. Between the different data issues that you’ll find in your database, understanding what those issues are and what kind of issues there are helps you to prioritize fixing the most impactful problems.
Of course, you could monitor your KPIs and generate reports manually. But that involves running reports or exporting data to Excel and analyzing it. However, some tools can automate diagnostics and collections KPIs.
For example, the CRM Data Grader is a tool that connects directly to HubSpot, analyzes the CRM database, and surfaces specific issues that you need to fix. This ensures you have visibility into the quality of your data and actionable insights for dealing with those issues.  
Having a clear key performance indicator, such as the percentage of clean records in your database, allows you to track your progress and quickly assess the overall health of your customer data.
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Differences Data Maintenance and Standard Cleanup Projects
Standard data cleanup projects are short-term and tactical. You find a fire, you put it out. Data cleanup projects are reactive because they have to be. Sometimes unexpected data issues can grind things to a halt and need to be fixed immediately. Those needs will always be there, but less often with a data maintenance strategy.
Unlike one-off cleanup projects, data maintenance is an ongoing strategy. It requires consistent investment and attention, but with the help of modern data management tools you can automate a majority of your data maintenance tasks, improving operations across your teams.
As your customer data grows, management of that data becomes more complicated. It requires more focus and planning to ensure your data is accessible, consistent, and relevant.
As this happens, companies tend to move through several stages on their way toward true data maintenance optimization:

Undefined and chaotic. No understanding of issues and no processes in place to deal with them.

Visibility. Aware of data-related problems have visibility into the specific problems in their database, with reporting generated automatically regularly.

Standardization. Established data quality standards and alignment among cross-functional teams about data expectations and goals. To execute effectively, standards need to be enforced automatically.

Optimization. Employ automation to proactively cleanse and maintain data, avoid repetitive manual work, streamline data corrections and collaboration, alert about exceptions.

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Data maintenance isn’t something that you do once and then never again. This process is something that you’ll need to do over and over again. You need accurate documentation and processes in place to minimize your time investment.
New data is always flowing into your CRM database, and with that data will come a range of issues and errors that have the potential to slow down nearly every team in your organization. Tools like Insycle help you to audit your existing data, identify common data issues, and fix them on an automated set schedule.
Improving your CRM data maintenance processes enable your marketing teams to produce more marketing qualified leads through improved segmentation, personalization, and nurturing.
Quality data means that you can represent your brand professionally in all communications with customers while improving their experience throughout the customer lifecycle.

If you’re a blogger looking to start doing more sponsored posts, you may want to check out the different blogging networks. These websites offer a place to apply for sponsored post opportunities in an easy way. While you may only secure a few of the many opportunities you apply for, it can be a great way to get your foot in the door with sponsored content. You have control over the topic of the posts and the way they are promoted through the blog. The website has the tools you need to create a content piece, and have a good understanding of the search engine best practices that are in place. For those of you looking for a place to run your own paid campaigns, these platforms do a good job of helping you set up a budget. Most of the blogging networks allow you to control the keywords and how they are displayed in the campaign. This makes your campaign easier to manage and it gives you a good foundation to build from. These are all great opportunities to make money online without having to worry about getting your sponsored posts approved or running ads. All of these sites offer you their tools and resources, so you can build your own campaign or create an existing one. Some allow you to create unlimited campaigns, this will give you the control you need. All of these websites also offer you tools to help you research your audience and the competition. These are all great opportunities to find the best traffic generation method for your site. As you run your paid campaign on these sites, the resources will help you track your results so you can keep track of your leads, conversions and sales. There are many blog networks available, and you can use some of these sites to create your own resources. You can use these resources to publish articles, videos, embed tweets and more. All of these will help you build a resource website that can help you in your quest to build back links and revenue online. One of these websites will offer you the tools you need to develop an article website, and you can use this to post your resources on other sites. These sites will give you the tools to run an advertising campaign and publish your resources in the network. Again you will have the opportunity to track your results and publish reports online. A blogging network is also a great place to make money by writing and publishing ads. You can create a landing page that links to your resources and publish your ads to the network. This will get your ads indexed quickly, and you will have access to paid ad placement. Once you post your ads, you will be indexed and ranked in the search engines. Your ad will also be published on the page of the blog network that you are posting ads to. Your ads will be indexed and ranked on that page. Your resources will be published on every blog in the network. You will get exposure and traffic to your resources. This tactic works, but requires a lot of effort. This is a more manual process. You may also want to consider outsourcing this process. You can get services to post your resources to other blog networks or to article sites. There are a number of tactics for building your resources. Many of these can be automated so you can focus on other aspects of your business. You can automate these tasks to get your resources out on the web. In these instances you may prefer to pay a service that will manage your resources. Again this is something you will need to consider in your business. The most important thing is that you make sure you build and have published your resources on high ranking sites. These are high ranking because they are published in the network, and they will help you in your quest to build back links. It’s important that you build links to your resources and articles and videos. Your resource may have a higher Page rank because they are published on a page that has a high Page rank. Page rank helps you get more traffic to your resources and resources can help you get more traffic to your website. Again you want to be sure that your resources and articles are published in the right networks and that they are published with the right anchor text links. These links are also helpful for your on page optimization and for your search engine optimization. Your resources and your articles need to be good quality. There should be a good volume of high quality backlinks to your resources and to your website. This is the way to get better search rankings. Page rank is important to your business because it’s the measure by which you will get more traffic to your website. It’s important to your business to have a higher Page rank. Your website needs to be a good resource. You want to get links from high Page rank sites. If you are not a high Page rank site then you don’t get many backlinks from that site. The more backlinks that you get the better you will be in the search engines. Google will assign more weight to your back links from a page that is a high Page rank. Your website needs to be a good resource. You want to make sure that your resources and your articles are good quality. The content of your resources needs to be good quality. This is very important. This will help you in getting links from high Page rank sites. And the link between your website and those high Page rank sites will be very good. Page rank is important in any online business and it is important to see that your website is good quality. When you are doing SEO you want your website to be indexed well by Google. Your website needs to be good quality. When you are doing SEO you want your article to be optimized well. You want your website to be a good resource. P.S. My goal is to help provide the best information I can. I do not participate in spam an always look to improve. If this was any help please feel free to join our newsletter for all up to date content. Join here
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Magnets, in marketing, are an effective technique for gaining a prospect’s contact information.
The problem is these magnets can take a lot of time and energy to produce. Podcasts, e-learning courses, video series, and contests all sound great – but who has time to create them all?

In this article, I’ll reveal 19 lead magnet ideas you can create today by repurposing content you already have.
Before I share lead magnet examples, let’s quickly review the conversion path that turns website visitors into leads – and the role email marketing plays in this process:

Call to Action (CTA): This is the button that website visitors click to access the resource you’re offering.

Landing Page: This is where your lead magnet captures information provided by the visitor. Once visitors click on the CTA, they’re brought to a landing page where they fill out a form with their name, email address, and any other relevant information you’ve deemed important.

Thank-You Page: The visitor-turned-lead now lands on a thank-you page with information on where to access their resource and is added to your mailing list.

Kickback Email: The kickback email is your follow-up message to the lead a short time after the exchange takes place. This email marketing campaign starts a conversation with the lead to keep them engaged with your business.

Every blog post in your archive has the potential to generate new leads for your company, so let’s make sure that your blog is a lead-generating machine.
1. Figure out who you’re targeting and what they want.
The goal of a lead magnet is to offer something your audience wants in exchange for their contact information.
To do this, you have to know what user persona you’re targeting and what offer would entice them.
You may have one to three personas with different needs and pain points. That means one lead magnet likely won’t appeal to all three personas.
For instance, let’s say you are an influencer marketing agency. You may have two personas, each facing these issues:

Influencer #1 doesn’t fully understand the inner workings of an influencer-brand relationship. They don’t have all the tools to brand themselves and foster relationships.
Influencer #2 is overrun with brand partnerships and has reached a point in their success where they are so busy with managing administrative tasks that they have limited time to create content.

Knowing this, the agency could create knowledge-based lead magnets for influencer #1, focusing on ebooks and knowledge libraries. For influencer #2, the agency may offer resource-based magnets, such as templates and tools.
During this process, you can also get some ideas from your competitors. What offers are they creating? What are they including in their offers? Use that as your starting point.
In addition, look at your current content library. What has your audience responded most to? Are they asking questions on a particular topic? Are they more engaged in videos or blog posts? This can be a big indicator of what they’ll want in a content offer.
2. Create, design, and name your lead magnet.
Now that you know what your offer will be, it’s production time. You have to create and design your lead magnet.
If you don’t have an in-house designer, you can utilize a platform like Canva. Their platform offers hundreds of templates that you can customize to build your lead magnet, everything from books and presentation slides to worksheets and reports.
You can also outsource the work using an independent contractor with the skills to produce a high-quality offer.
Once the design work is done, name your lead magnet.
Think of something catchy that will pull in your audience and highlight its benefits, like “The Ultimate Worksheet Every Influencer Needs,” and “101 Ways to Monetize Your Brand.”
3. Build your conversion path.
The next step is building your conversion path, which must include your landing page, thank-you page, form, and email sequence.
Starting with your landing page, there are a few best practices to improve conversions:

Have a dedicated landing page that doesn’t include a navigation bar. This will keep users’ focus on your offer and not the other pages on your website.

Write a clear call to action. Your CTA should be clear, short, and to the point. It should also use words that will appeal most to your audience.

Consider eye scanning patterns. Users in Western cultures typically follow F- and Z- reading patterns, which is why most landing pages are designed with key elements placed in those zones.

Add social proof. Adding reviews and testimonials to your landing pages adds credibility to your offer and can increase your conversion rate.

For your form, the two pieces of information you’ll want to include are name and email. Everything else is optional. However, keep in mind that the more fields you include, the higher the chance a user may abandon the form.
Next up, your email sequence: Once you’ve acquired your lead, you can add them to a nurturing sequence that will lead them further down the funnel. This can include additional resources, such as webinars and newsletters.
Lastly, make sure to set up tracking on your conversion path to see how users are behaving on it and identify optimization opportunities.
4. Set a schedule to update regularly.
Depending on the type of lead magnet you create, you may need to update it every six months to a year.
For instance, let’s say you created a report on 2021 data science salaries. As you get closer to 2022, you’ll need to update the information on the report to reflect current data. Otherwise, your offer may no longer be valuable to your audience.
In addition, if you conduct feedback surveys on your offers, sift through your leads’ comments. Their comments could give you ideas on how to improve your current offer.
Lead Magnet Examples
1. The Sales Evangelist

The Sales Evangelist is a sales coaching and training business designed to help sales managers and their teams thrive.
The company offers a free ebook titled “How to Transform Your Small Business Sales,” which offers insights on how to generate more sales.

What’s clear is that this particular offer targets small business owners who may not have the proper sales process in place to make sales consistently.
The copy addresses the user’s pain point, provides the potential reasons, and leads into why this offer will help resolve it – a classic and effective formula for landing page copy.
2. Karmen Kendrick Creative

When you think of a lead magnet, you probably think of an ebook.
But here’s another quick and easy lead magnet you can develop that will only take you a few hours (at most): a quiz.

In this example, this brand, which offers WordPress maintenance services, tests its audience with their WordPress knowledge.
After answering a few questions, they must enter their email address to view the full results. Then, you land on a landing page with your knowledge level and the option to share your results on social media.
As a maintenance service, this is a great lead magnet strategy. It can serve as a signal to users who are considering outsourcing this service that they may not have the knowledge to manage their site on their own. And it’s interactive, which is already a win.
In addition, this quiz will require little to no maintenance, as all the questions are based on historical facts – making it a simple but effective lead magnet.
3. HubSpot

Another interactive lead magnet you can consider is a grader or calculator.
HubSpot offers a website grader, which takes seconds to scan your website and provides a score based on performance, mobile experience, SEO, and security.

After providing your email and website, you get a detailed report about your website’s performance along with a corresponding course based on your results.
What works well: The grader helps you identify potential issues with your website and offers a solution to resolve them.
4. Clever Girl Finance

Clever Girl Finance is a personal finance platform that empowers women to take charge of their finances.
Among the host of free resources on their site, this one, in particular, stands out.

It’s a video library filled with recordings from personal finance coaching calls and when users sign up, they gain access to past and future recordings.
What’s great about this tactic is it answers a need.
Clever Girl Finance’s target audience likely wants a community in which to discuss financial topics, get their questions answered, and hear directly from experts. This lead magnet does just that.
It’s also one of those one-and-done magnets that require little maintenance beyond uploading new recordings.
The team can then repurpose the content of those recordings for future blogs, video snippets, and more.
15 Additional Lead Magnet Ideas to Try
1. Ebooks
The ebook is perfect when you have a series of blog posts about a related subject.
For example, if you were running an online pet store, you might pick out the following five posts from your blog to combine into an ebook:

“The 5 Pieces of Equipment That Every Puppy Needs”
“The Ultimate Guide To Housetraining a Puppy”
“The First 6 Months: What You Can Expect From Your New Puppy”
“The Puppy Nutrition Guide: What Your Dog Should and Shouldn’t Eat”
“The 7 Things You Should Never Do When Training a Puppy”

These posts could be logically compiled into an ebook entitled: “The Puppy Planner: Everything You Need To Know To Prepare for Your First Puppy.”
This type of ebook is effective because you’re making the lives of your website visitors easier – which should be the goal of any lead magnet you create. Rather than asking them to find all this content one article at a time, you’re packing it up into a convenient bundle that they can keep and refer back to.
The most successful lead magnets offer an irresistible and instant reward to your visitors, and the ebook checks off that box.
Featured Resource: 18 Free Ebook Templates

2. Guides
If you’re in an industry that is already well established, it can be hard to come up with original content.
Sometimes other people have covered a subject in such detail that it’s almost impossible to add extra value. In this situation, I’d recommend producing an ultimate guide.
An ultimate guide is a comprehensive collection of the best articles about a particular subject. The main difference between this and an ebook? You’re not recycling posts from your blog; you’re linking directly to other sites.
It’s important that you don’t copy and paste someone else’s content into your guide, but rather include a link back to the original article.
In the example below, Brian Dean from Backlinko.com produced “Link Building: The Definitive Guide.”

Link building is a complicated and broad subject. Dean’s definitive guide saves his audience a lot of time looking for this content.
And because so many other experts have written fantastic content about link building, Dean also saved himself the time of competing with content that already exists.
Rather than just listing the links, Dean adds extra value to his audience by categorizing them and including a brief introduction for each category.
This guide has also been well designed, reiterating that this is a valuable resource that should be kept and referred back to.
Do you work in an industry that is already bursting with quality content? Think about making your own ultimate guide.
Do you work in an industry that is already bursting with quality content? Think about making your own Ultimate Guide.
3. Bonus Packs
Offering additional content that is not included in the original blog post is the perfect way to reward readers who opt-in.
If you have an article titled, “The 5 Pieces of Equipment That Every Puppy Needs,” you could offer readers an exclusive PDF with a few more pieces of equipment that may have come on the market since the original post was published.
In his article, “How to Go From One Facebook Ad to $197 in Less Than 60 Seconds,” blogger Bryan Harris took this one step further and combined a PDF version of the article along with five links that weren’t in the original post – people only received these bonuses when they subscribed.
4. Resource Libraries
If you’ve already written a strategic blog post, consider offering a resource library or guide as a lead magnet.
A resource library is a collection of tools that help people achieve results.
David Dean from Backlinko used this strategy in his post, “SEO Tools: The Complete List.” He offered a free download that detailed the 153 tools featured in his post – the perfect resource for a reader to keep and refer to whenever they need.
This library could be as simple as a list of five books or apps that you recommend.
What resources could you recommend to a potential customer that would help them to achieve better results?
5. Checklists
Instructional blog posts are just waiting to be turned into checklists – and they couldn’t be easier to create.
Just take your blog post and simplify it into a series of bullet points. Next, remove any points that don’t contain actionable advice. Split the list into several numbered steps to make the outcome more achievable.
Bonus points if you offer the checklist in a printable format so people can physically tick off each item on the list as they complete it. This sense of achievement is a great feeling that people will attribute back to your business.

The “Ultimate Webinar Checklist” from HubSpot above is a valuable lead magnet because of how practical it is.
Hosting a webinar involves balancing a lot of different tasks coming together at the same time. This checklist informs you about everything you need to watch out for, from pre- to post-webinar.
6. Workbooks
In its simplest form, a workbook is a download-and-complete resource that helps people to apply the principles of your blog post to their own business.
The goal of a workbook is to have the participant learn by doing. As the teacher in this scenario, you’re positioning your business as an expert on the subject matter at hand.
With that in mind, you’ll want to choose the exercises included in your workbook carefully. Tease information out of the participant gradually, so that at the end of the workbook they can combine their short answers into a comprehensive piece of work.
A workbook is the perfect stepping stone to your premium products or services, so be sure to include a strong call to action at the end that tells the participant how you can help them to apply their newfound knowledge.
Is there a particular subject that you could help your audience understand more clearly with a workbook?
7. Case Studies
Case studies depend on very specific types of content, but the successes they reveal can entice a site visitor to take action.
If you have a blog post or interview clip that spotlights a real customer you’ve worked with, package this content into a written case study that expands on the need the client came in with and the metrics of their success.
Then, gate this case study behind a form that website visitors can fill out with their name and email address to access.
Keep in mind that you’ll need permission and approval from the client on which you’d like to create a case study.
Once you receive this approval, however, it’s a perfect lead magnet to host content that tells your readers about a customer success story.
Featured Resource: 3 Free Case Study Templates

8. Webinars
Webinars don’t have to be long, collaborative presentations with multiple colleagues or partners.
If you’ve got a blog post that merely touches on a subject you’re an expert in, use this blog post as a springboard into a live talk hosted by you and a coworker.
If you’ve written an article about the latest IOS cookie restrictions, for example, convert this article into a slide presentation and present it through a live conferencing platform, using helpful visuals.
You should also provide insight that listeners wouldn’t have gotten from just the blog post.
As a bonus, you can use the webinar recording as an additional offer.
9. Cheatsheets
If your blog post covers a complicated topic, it might be a good idea to offer readers a one-page sheet that they can refer back to when they need to refresh their memory. This could be a glossary of terms or just a summary of some key points.
This type of download-and-keep resource takes the pressure off readers so they don’t have to memorize or implement your strategy immediately. It does compel readers to opt-in to your list though, which is the ultimate goal.
In addition, the compact format means that people can quickly glance at it while they are going through the editing process. It’s a complementary tool for an existing process.
10. Guestbooks
Guest blogging is a terrific backlink strategy, but those who use it typically agree to not republish that particular post on their own blog.
This is fairly common, as Google punishes sites that duplicate content onto two publications – it’s in nobody’s interest to do so.
What you can do, though, is compile all these guest posts into a book format.
Since the content will be gated behind a lead capture form, there is no risk of Google flagging it as duplicate content and you get to squeeze a little bit of extra value from that content you worked so hard on.
11. Whitepapers
Have an interesting survey that your team recently ran? Or perhaps you know your audience is looking for specific information to inform their future strategy?
If so, leverage this knowledge to create downloadable reports based on your team’s research.
You may have talked about these findings in a blog post or a recent webinar. Repurpose that content for a detailed report.
This will position you as a credible resource in your industry and bring you that much closer to converting your target audience.
12. Templates
Templates are some of the most popular lead magnets out there.
Why? Because they help users streamline their processes and save time. But at the core of it, it solves the problem many of us have: creating and designing from scratch.
You can create templates for just about anything:

Emails
Social media
Spreadsheets
Graphic designs

It’s all about tapping into what your audience needs the most and creating that for them. Plus, it’s another low-maintenance magnet.
13. Email Course
Companies offer online courses all the time, but they’re not the only place to launch a course.
A 2019 Statista survey found that most people (over 80%) check their emails every few hours including outside of normal business hours.
We also know that email newsletters are very popular, with just about every company sending its top insights to your inbox every day.
With this in mind, starting an email course is a great lead magnet option.
An email course is a series of emails that can be anywhere from three to 10+ emails that cover a topic in depth.
The benefit for you? It’s a format most users are familiar with and it’s quick to launch.
In addition, you have multiple opportunities to nurture your audience and guide them down the buyer’s journey, compared to a one-and-done ebook that a user may or may not read.
14.Access to a Private Group
As a business, community management is a key aspect in gaining brand loyalists. It can also be an effective way to generate leads.
Platforms like Slack, Facebook Group, and LinkedIn allow you to do both.
For many businesses, their target audiences value community and want a space to discuss topics relating to their needs, goals, and challenges.
Creating that space will help you generate leads and get to know your audience better.
15. Behind-The-Scenes or “Secret” Insights
One of the best lead magnets I’ve ever seen was produced by Tim Soulo. It was so effective that I immediately opted-in without thinking twice. Suolo had written a blog post about sending an outreach email to well-known SEO expert Rand Fishkin. His call-to-action was the following:

This call-to-action was pitch perfect because it got me curious. I just had to know what the email subject was.
I also knew that it would be a relatively short read so I wouldn’t have to commit to a lengthy ebook – lazy, I know, but that’s human nature sometimes.

Suolo’s lead magnet is just one page and was made using a standard word processor. There was no point in spending time or money on the design in this case because the secret is the only thing that matters.
I blurred out the tell-tale image and text in the above screenshot – if you want to know Suolo’s secret, you’ll just have to download the lead magnet!
Do you have any behind-the-scenes insights to a blog post that are compelling enough to offer as a downloadable secret?
There you have it, 19 ways to recycle your existing content into lead-generating assets. You already have the blog content – all you have to do is implement lead magnets and an email campaign that gets them into your contact database.
Editor’s note: This piece was originally published in May 2018 and has been updated for comprehensiveness.