If you build it, they will come – but is that really true?
You create a great digital product(s) – downloadable pdf, guide, checklist, ebook or even a course. But the challenge is getting visibility and traffic for the lead magnets and paid products.
For many entrepreneurs and small businesses, it’s this step that proves to be the most daunting – how to promote and convert.
Leading entrepreneurs and industry pros share their best tips for getting eyes on your offering. Whether your goal is building your email list, capturing a larger audience or selling your products, attention to this blueprint is sure to take you ahead.
Are you adopting these 10 proven strategies to promote your lead magnets and digital products?
‘Offer and sell’ on your Website
James Pollard, Owner at TheAdvisorCoach.com who has worked on his own digital content as well as helped others build and market theirs, emphasizes sharing your offers everywhere.
“Put your lead magnet on every single page of your website. Put it at the top of your website (in the form of a scrolling bar) and put it at the bottom of your content.
When someone reads one of your blogs and scrolls all the way to the end, you want to present them with an opportunity to get your lead magnet. If they’re interested enough to consume your content, they might get your lead magnet too. I’ve also found that doing it this way tends to give you higher quality leads than social media or paid advertising because people are interacting with your content first.”
He also recommends dedicated landing pages. “Create a resource page if you have more than 1 lead magnet and add related links or ‘also see’ content to cross sell.”
Check out these 2 examples of persuasive landing pages – address a problem, how you solve it, who it is for and why it rocks!
Free Guide on how to create your standout LinkedIn Profile.
Grab this eBook on 30 Instagram for Business Hacks (that no one tells you)
Create content to boost your digital products!
Akshay Bansal, the Founder at Heuro recommends a content led approach to selling your digital products.
“Blog around the problem your lead magnet (and ultimately, your business) serves. Optimise your social accounts and website for at least 5-10 keywords around your problem, so the people desperately looking for the solution will come to your website or page and become the member of your community!
Become the master of the forums like Quora and Reddit by solving the queries of the people with your expertise! Similar to guest blogging, reach out to other bloggers to share your infographics and tools in their articles as a resource.”
Learn these 15 tactics on how to use content smartly to grow your organic leads.
Steven Page, VP of Digital Strategy at Giant Partners believes that just because you made something great, no one will see it unless you promote it.
His company generated 5,000 leads per month promoting infographics, ebooks and webinars through email, social advertising and manual outreach.
“Leverage content to gain links to your website. E.g. if you create a helpful infographic, guide, checklist and share it with other website owners that would find it helpful, they would gladly link to your website. These links are extremely valuable when it comes to ranking in Google over your competition.”
Find the best content insipration and learn how to market with content!
Build a marketing plan around each opt-in
Jim Woodhead from A For Agency likens digital content to a hub of a wheel with lots of spokes. “The more spokes you have, the more tools you have to reach your intended users. Great content should be evergreen, so you can afford to think about it in the long term. Keep promoting it and driving customers towards it.”
Start with social
“Get on to your own social media channels and promote and sell your product. Don’t be afraid of posting more than once, particularly on social networks. The trick is to talk around your topic. Don’t just push the one tool.
Pick out the topics that your new piece of content addresses and create an opt-in about those issues, not your solution.
Tell people about it
If you have a CRM database of customers and prospects, tell them about your new piece of content and ask for their opinions and thoughts.
Sites like Quora or Digg are great platforms for sharing content and posts. Find out what people are asking on those platforms and answer their questions, with a link back to your online content. That can work wonders.
Find influencers
Have a look around for questions being asked by journalists and bloggers and use your content to address their needs and questions. If an influencer retweets your online content or a high domain website links to it, it can bump up your reach big time. So make it a concerted strategy to engage with influencers via email and social.”
Alison Haselden, from the SEO and digital marketing team at CanIRank works with small businesses and startups, helping them with their marketing campaigns to drive traffic and growth.
“Unfortunately, you could have the best content in the world but it won’t matter if no one is engaging with it. My rule with my clients is to spend 10% of time creating content and 90% of my time promoting it. The best approach to promotion is typically a combination of tactics. Social media, guest posts on blogs, inclusion in a roundup or aggregator, and ensuring your website and content is highly optimized for SEO! It takes time, but is well worth the effort!”
Focus on the funnel
Jomel Alos, Online PR Lead for Spiralytics Performance Marketing feels that downloading an ebook or using a free tool are indications that your target audience is ready to move down the content marketing funnel.
“Sometimes, there are those that need a little more push (or in this case, pull). To nudge them a bit to give us information, we create multiple pieces of digital content that would help understand their situation better. They might be in any of the awareness, consideration, or decision stage. ”
Be findable – use SEO effectively
Kristina Oates, Co-Owner of Tidy Touch TC recommends using the keywords and phrases that align with your offering.
“Sprinkle some of those words and phrases into your landing page. Then, answer every single question you can think of that someone might be asking that would encourage them towards taking your course.”
Finally, get out there and let some of the other sites in your industry know about what you’ve created and get them to link to it! Page ranking on Google – there are few better ways to get free leads.
Kyle Strong, a marketing coordinator at Tradogram also focuses on SEO.
“One really effective approach we’ve been using alongside our paid online advertising and remarketing is the development of an SEO strategy. While paid ads are certainly effective, we’ve been getting just as much (if not more) traffic just by improving our company’s visibility on search engines.
SEO is a strategy that can be used by companies of all sizes, and is especially useful for businesses that offer online services. It’s also very effective for taking existing efforts that your company is dedicating towards content creation, and amplifying the effects of those efforts many times over. SEO can seem intimidating at first, a few hours of research about “on-page” SEO in particular can yield some incredible effects for companies of all sizes.”
Get ahead in your business with Pro Tools!
100+ Tools & Freebies on social media, design, business strategy, productivity and more!
Check out these awesome digital products for Entrepreneurs!
Leverage Multiple Channels
Casey Hill of Musings of Entrepreneurship recommends a multi-channel approach.
Press
“You need to be doing brand building (reaching out to newspapers, getting on to podcasts, trying to book interviews, trying to get written features).
You also need to be involved in niche specific communities on Facebook on Linkedin and Reddit. And any other communities your following is a part of. Be a known name.
Next, effective ads, my favorite medium is Facebook, is critical to getting the right eyes on your lead magnet. Make sure to not only select an audience with the right interests, but use narrow further and exclude to add additional stipulations. Real Estate agents who use ‘likely to buy’ AND an income narrowing group AND exclude: Mortgage Brokers as an example, will get a dramatically more relevant ad and better traffic than someone who just runs an ad targeting a geographic area.”
She also recommends focusing on actionable lead magnets that offer a tangible benefit.
Grab this awesome, free checklist to Find out if your lead magnet rocks
Page also suggests that sending new resources to your current marketing list is a must. you should be sure to send your list something new every month, every week if possible.
You can also target writers, influencers and bloggers in your industry with ads to hopefully get them to share your resource or product on their website.
Build before they come!
Jason Scott, the Digital Marketing Specialist at Archway Cards
“In my experience, building an audience before launching a digital product is much more effective than launching one and then trying to find an audience. The issue with launching and promoting is that you often fall victim to hard-selling your product rather than trying to provide value. When you offer valuable content for free first, you then stand a much better chance of successfully selling your product later on. This is because you will have built trust with them. If you go out to market without an audience, you’re always fighting an uphill battle to try and build trust.
Explore audio and bots
Sharlrita J Deloatch, CEO at SJD Enterprises LLC believes in the newer marketing channels.
“Host your very own podcast. This has worked for me with growing my email list. I cater my podcast subject to my freebie and give some tips and strategies so that my email list is always growing. I would highly recommend to podcast weekly to give consistency.
Facebook Messenger Bots aren’t new but are a great way to grow not only your messenger list but your email list. Once your customer opts into your list, you can offer more value.
Grab some growth focused inspiration!
Use the free tools
Uber Suggest
Roy Harmon, owner of Advertoscope, a lead generation marketing agency. recommends using Ubersuggest to find keywords with less competition that you can rank the page for.
Google Adwords
Marialuisa Curran, Chief Strategist at Infinite Owl Marketing and Design Studio says, “I tell my clients not to put all their eggs in one basket. We are not all the same, we do not consume content the same – there are common trends depending on your target. But for the most part, every entrepreneur should have a well-planned marketing mix with diverse channels.
Today, you can always track, test, observe and adjust as your campaigns progress. Start with inbound or organic channels: your website, your blog, social media, and emailing the contacts you have. Social media has been very successful in allowing good content to be seen. You can be strategic in who you follow, like and engage with – relevant content will be shared and passed along on social. It can be re-posted several times with different quotes, graphics or tidbits. Paid ads are always a helpful boost too. The other channels do not have a hard cost necessarily, but a minor budget allocation to AdWords or social media ads could offer good conversions.
Did we mention that it’s FREE!
Spend when you have exhausted the free
Stacy Caprio, Accelerated Growth Marketing finds Google Adwords paid ads to be the most effective traffic method.
“They are best for getting specific, relevant eyeballs that will have a high percentage of purchasers. The Adwords platform is great because it allows you to target specific keywords for people actively looking, with high purchase intent.”
Mike Khorev, Growth Lead at Nine Peaks Media suggests Google Adwords Remarketing.
“The best way to market on a budget is through AdWords remarketing. This offers the ability to target those who have visited certain websites (including your own and your competitors’). It also includes those using specific queries and keywords.
So, you can show your ads to people who visited your and your competitors’ sites. You can use Google Keyword Planner to help you find keywords and trends.
There are two main benefits of this remarketing campaign over ‘traditional’ ads. For one thing, it is (currently) significantly cheaper than search ads targeting the same keywords or display ads. Second, since it targets an audience who have shown interest, it will be more cost-efficient with a higher conversion rate.
Also ensure your landing page is optimized for conversions (having fewer fields to fill, optimized CTAs, etc.) Also, obviously the success of this campaign will be determined by the quality of the offered content. Make sure you are offering something valuable and free of charge (at least, offer a free sample).”
Conclusion
A big part of promoting your lead magnets and digital products is to start with placing them in the right places and making them irresistible. Distributing them extensively across your channels and where your audience is key to visibility and conversion. Share your strategies and hacks for getting visibility for your lead magnets and email list building products
Pooja Krishna is an Entrepreneur, Business Mentor and Mom. She has worked both in large corporates and managed startups over the last 20+ years.
She’s a co-founder at Maroon Oak, and is founded Win Thinks, where she writes, speaks and teaches about Digital Media, Brand Building and Future Ready Businesses. A day trader for over a decade, Pooja launched Trading Paces to educate amateur and pro stock traders. As a classroom mentor, Pooja loves teaching students across the U.S. about job skills and entrepreneurship. Read about her on Huffington Post and Forbes.
A trivia buff and yoga & hula hoop enthusiast, she’s discovering the pleasure of drawing Zentangle patterns for ‘creative mindfulness.’
or 
These are great tips. I am always putting a lot of effort in promoting my leads, I never knew there can be a lot of ways to do so. Thank you so much!
It can be hard to even come up with the good lead magnet promoting it is the same.
Very helpful tips you have here. As a blogger, promoting my freebies and premium content is a top priority for me. I’ll follow your tips and hopefully, I do great. Thanks for sharing!
I think that these are very helpful and brilliant ideas. Thank you so much for sharing this amazing tips!
This article is so helpful, thanks for sharing it. I would definitely share it with my friends.
What good tips for those who are interested in promoting their leads!
Great tips and ideas, knowing where your best bet and strength is, is sure to help with your promoting.