Lead Magnets are a Marketing Must

What is a Lead Magnet?

A lead magnet is a free resource you can offer to your target audience encouraging them to provide you with their contact details (or a social media follow) in exchange for the resource. It is a common marketing strategy and helps you build a stronger following as a coach. Lead magnets are particularly valuable to help drive more traffic to your website and interest in your coaching services.

Lead magnets should be something your target audience considers valuable and which also demonstrates the value of the services you provide.

How Using Lead Magnets Helps Build Your Coaching Business

Offering something of value for free can benefit your coaching business in several ways:

• Not to be underestimated, giving away something of value helps build a strong reputation for your coaching services. It demonstrates your desire to help others and provides you an opportunity to share helpful knowledge. Simply being a giving person, whether it be informational blogs and newsletter, posting helpful advice, or, in this case, offering a free resource, is an important way to project excellence.
• A lead magnet is a great way to help you build rapport with potential clients and athletes and is an excellent way to help them get to know you better. It’s an opportunity to provide them a glimpse into your services and coaching knowledge and builds essential trust. The more a potential athlete knows about you, connects with you, and trusts you, the more likely they will seek your services.
• When someone responds to your offering of a free resource, it demonstrates a positive level of interest in what you have to offer as a coach. Having a growing email list of interested potential athletes is an essential aspect of marketing and makes your communication much more effective. You build a strong list of leads and create a more attentive audience for other types of communication such as newsletters, blogs, and podcasts.
• Providing lead magnets can positively impact all of your marketing channels. It drives traffic to your website where visitors can then explore who you are and what you offer, and it can drive traffic to your social media channels as well.

Endurance Sports Lead Magnet Ideas

There are many different types of lead magnets that you can create – or, if you’re a ThryvHive member, you can utilize our growing Lead Magnet and Funnel library for done-for-you content.

If you’re looking to create your own lead magnets, here are a few ideas to get you started:

• “Ultimate Guide” E-book PDFs that provide the “ultimate guide” to just about anything related to endurance sports. Examples: Ultimate Guide to your Fastest Marathon, Ultimate Guide to Ultrarunning Nutrition, Ultimate Guide to Your Best 5K, Ultimate Guide to Effective Triathlon Transitions.
• “How-To” E-book PDFs that provide advice on how to do something. Examples: How to Improve Your Open Water Swimming, How to Use Poles in Trail Running, The Best Warm Up for Runners.
• A free sample training plan such as an 8 Week 5k Training Plan for New Runners, a 12 week Half Marathon Training Plan for Experienced Runners.
• Free consultation or “discovery” call – this one is a must and can easily be done via a booking calendar link on your website.
• Offer a Challenge that includes some type of guidance or even better, includes opportunities for communication and engagement (such as within a facebook group). Examples: 30 Day Diet Clean Up, 30 day Supported Training Streak, 30 Day Start Your Running Habit.
• A live webinar of social media Live event where you discuss a trending topic. An example of this is to host a Facebook Live where you discuss How to Navigate Training Data.

There really is no limit to what you can create, do, and offer as a free resource and over time you’ll begin to tap into trending topics and learn more about what your target audience is really interested in.

Where and How to Use Your Lead Magnets

Ultimately the goal with using lead magnets is to gain more customers (clients, athletes). Placing your lead magnet on your website ensures visits to your site. Not only will you be able to collect contact information when someone opts in to receive your free resource offering, but they also may decide to look around your website a bit and learn more about you. That’s always a win.

To display your lead magnet on your website, you will want to create an Opt-in form that visitors to your site can fill out. Creating automation behind your opt-in form then allows your communication to go out to your new lead, as well as automatically send the resource to them. Below is a great example of an opt-in form for a lead magnet using ThryvHive:

In ThryvHive™, because the website integrates all the site features, the opt-in form submission automatically creates the new lead as a contact in your CRM (customer relationship management system) and additional tasks are automated within the associated funnel. The funnel can automate just about any action you’d like to have happen with the new lead, but most importantly, it will automate a fulfillment of the free resource. It’s effective and an efficient use of your time since it all happens automatically.

Once your lead magnet is set up on your website (and keep in mind it can be included on more than one page of your website), you can then market your new lead magnet on your social media channels. Include a link to your website in your social media profiles and on your posts to increase traffic to your website and advertise your free offering.

Summary

Just like any business, growing your coaching business requires smart and strategic marketing and using lead magnets is one of the best ways to build a list of interested leads. The idea is to both provide something of value that also demonstrates your coaching skills so they learn a bit more about you and your services, while also earning their contact information so you can continue to earn their trust with respectful and responsible follow-up marketing.

We believe in this critical marketing strategy so much that we include a done-for-you lead magnet library (and associated marketing funnels) as part of a ThryvHive™ subscription. We continue to add new lead magnet to make marketing easier and more efficient for our members.