What are landing pages, lead magnets, and lead products?
How do they work?
What makes a good landing page, lead magnet, and lead product?
Should I gate my content?
How does SEO factor in?
Not too long ago, a client approached us with a request. Their parent company’s IT department thought it would be a good idea for all subsidiaries to move to a headless CMS. This request seemed odd to me.
I had heard of headless CMSes, I knew what they were, but wasn’t really sure I understood why the client would make this request. Maybe I didn’t really understand the benefits of a headless CMS.
So I did what just about everyone would do in that situation: I Googled it. My search query was probably something like, “benefits of headless CMS,” and I’m sure it turned up dozens of pages explaining the concept, listing examples of headless CMSes, and discussing when and where they were most appropriate.
More than a few of these pages were on websites of headless CMS providers themselves. Some of them were quite clearly thinly veiled sales pitches. But many offered solid information answering the question I asked and the half-dozen related questions in my head.
These were incredibly useful pages for me as the searcher and I’m sure the companies who created them hoped I would consider their offering if I was deciding on which headless CMS to go with.
That’s a landing page.
I’ll define them—and lead magnets and lead products in more detail below. For now, the key attributes to keep in mind is that together, these are a special kind of content that can supercharge your marketing efforts. Landing pages, lead magnets, and lead products draw together the magic and power of your website with other marketing methods. Let’s dive in and take a closer look.
What Are Landing Pages, Lead Magnets, and Lead Products
Let’s begin by defining all three of these terms we’ve just introduced.
Landing Page
Landing pages get their name from the idea that they are the pages on which a prospect lands when you’ve attracted them via a marketing or advertising campaign. It’s really that simple.
They are frequently standalone pages but can also be a part of your website. When people talk about the difference, they sometimes confuse two different issues.
First, you can build a landing page completely separately from your website. There are any number of services and platforms you can use to create a landing page even if you don’t have a website. (As with other resources in the fast-paced digital marketing world, I’ll share these on my website so we can keep them updated as newer players emerge. You’ll find more information on this in the Resources chapter at the end of the book.)
So this is one way we might mean that a landing page is a standalone page. But you can also build that exact same page as part of your existing website.
Why you might choose one approach over the other will depend largely on the features and functionality built into your website and the capabilities of the team who is building the landing page.
Either way, there is another important element of good landing pages to be considered: they typically “stand alone” from your website in that they contain no—or very limited—navigation options.
In other words, your standard header and footer, each with a handful of links that can be clicked to go to other parts of the site are not present. The goal is to keep visitors focused on one thing and one thing only: the lead magnet and taking action to get it.
If you examine landing pages you’ll see that some truly are independent of a firm’s main website and some relate much more closely to their main sites, and may even be linked to from the main site.
That inbound link should be trackable, as should every other avenue into the landing page, since you’ll want to know what’s driving traffic for people interested in this particular topic.
Lead Magnet
“I’d pay for that. Maybe not cash, but I’ll give you a bit of my time and attention for it. That seems like a fair trade.”
In essence, that is what you are asking your audience for in exchange for providing them with something of value. We’ll discuss below in the section on gating content why this isn’t necessarily as straightforward as we’ll like it to be, but without that distraction we can say that your lead magnet needs to be information that will help your target audience better understand the issue they are trying to solve or the options available to them to solve it. You want it to work on a marketing level for your own purposes, of course, but without overcoming that bare minimum hurdle of value, it can’t work as marketing.
How-to guides, whether written or video
Templates
Free tools (assessments, calculators, planners)
Webinars
White papers
Self-evaluation tools
Assuming they are thoughtfully produced, all of these provide enough value that audiences will generally be willing to share their email address and invest their time since the payoff for them is more information on a topic of interest.
The question you should be asking when you consider lead magnets is, “Will this help my prospects improve their business in some way?” I’ll expand in this in more detail below in the What Makes a Good Lead Magnet section.
Lead Product
“I’d pay cash for that.”
If you are selling a high-ticket product or service, there is risk to the buyer in making the purchase. If it doesn’t work as intended, no matter the reason, they’ve lost the not insignificant financial investment but also time that could have been used to implement a better solution, as well as opportunities that may have been lost in the interim. (And that’s to say nothing of lost professional standing with peers and bosses. Nobody likes to be embarrassed publicly.)
In situations like that, a lead product can be an easy way to “de-risk” a purchase for a prospect. They are able to get a taste of what it’s like to work with you—or at least of what your approach looks like if the lead magnet is automated or hands-off. It can prove your concept for their specific situation.
Lead magnets, of course, have to provide a bit more value than lead magnets since you are charging cold, hard cash for them. They can be similar in nature to lead magnets, but will be more in-depth.
How-to guides tailored to a specific tool/solution
Templates tailored to a specific industry
Evaluation tools with your expert input
How Do Landing Pages, Lead Magnets, and Lead Products Work?
Too often we hear people talk about “list building” being the value of landing pages and lead magnets. As if the goal of your marketing is to add people’s email addresses to a database on a server somewhere.
Obviously, that in and of itself doesn’t get you far. Your goal is to create engagement! And from engagement, you create trust between you and your prospect and develop comfort. Adding an email address to your database won’t accomplish that, though it is a step in the right direction. Getting them engaged is what turns the key.
The tools we’re talking about create engagement by providing value to your audience, same as any content marketing.
That engagement helps you create new relationships and also helps you nurture and strengthen existing relationships. As a bonus, you also gain valuable information about each prospect’s intent and interests.
If you compare that to your standard email subscription form, it’s easy to see the value. When someone subscribes to your email newsletter, you know that someone finds what you’re doing interesting enough to learn more. You don’t know much more than that, so unless all you sell is large, raspberry lollipops—no other sizes, no other colors, no other candy—you can’t tailor your message to the specific features of your work that interest them.
(However, it is possible to build some marketing smarts into your website, and tease out what page a prospect was on and what kind of content they were consuming when they signed up. This can be a helpful data point.)
A landing page/lead magnet combination takes that a step further since you will build these with a focus on specific topics. In my firm’s case, anyone who has signed up for our, “Top 10 Content Marketing Mistakes and How Not to Make Them,” lead magnet will receive follow-up materials focused on content marketing rather than on, say, website development, which is another service we offer.
The specificity of your landing pages can have SEO value, as well, and they can help you attract a larger audience of prospects interested in that specific topic.
What Makes a Good Landing Page
Strong landing pages are focused on one thing and one thing only: getting a prospect to take action.
Nothing should distract visitors from completing the call to action. There shouldn’t be options or decisions to make. They can complete the CTA or they can leave the page.
And the copy, images, and layout should all be created with this in mind. Of course, there’s as much art as science in writing compelling copy and creating engaging graphics. Don’t get too hung up in trying to build the perfect page. Your chances of succeeding are fleetingly slim.
A more productive approach is to apply these best practices and then test, test, test. You won’t know what copy or imagery will be more effective until you compare it to other options. Optimization tools like Google Optimize can help you do simultaneous side-by-side tests with pages on your own website. (And those tests aren’t limited to just your landing pages. You can optimize your entire site.)
If you have created landing pages on a dedicated landing page platform, they will typically have testing tools built in. (Though they may not be available on the lowest priced service tiers.)
Post about it on social media
Highlight in email marketing
Include it in your email sig
Refer people to it individually if they’ve expressed an interest in the topic
What Makes a Good Lead Magnet
Obviously, it has to provide value and that value has to be, well, obvious to anyone who might be considering downloading it. Typically that value has to be in some actionable form.
It’s great to make your audience smarter—a fair amount of your content will likely do that—and help them run their business better. But lead magnets have to hit a slightly higher bar. Since the folks who are likely to be interested in them are almost certainly actively working to solve a problem, the best value you can provide is a tip, trick, or tool that helps them do so.
Another type of value you can provide is clarity. If your lead magnet helps them better understand the specific issue they are facing, they will also likely be willing to exchange their email address for the information.
Ideally, your lead magnet also makes clear the value proposition of your services and how what you offer can add value. It should paint a picture of your experience and expertise, as well. The best way to do that, of course, is by demonstration. You want your prospects’ reaction to be, “Hey, these folks really know what they’re talking about,” without your lead magnet—or any of your content marketing—saying so explicitly. In other words, make the impression, not the claim.
What Makes a Good Lead Product
Everything above, but more of it.
Since you’re now asking them to dig into their pocket to pay you, value and utility must be even more clear. However, your prospects may have a different perspective on value vs. cost.
There will certainly be some who view this as they would any other purchase. Will this, in and of itself, provide as much or more value than I’m shelling out?
Others will be comfortable with a broader definition that recognizes the value in giving you and your work a low-cost, low-risk trial run.
That idea of lowered risk is critical. It is something we talk about with prospects frequently during the sales process. We want them to understand that our position is to share risk equitably.
Nobody enters into a business relationship expecting it to fail, but sometimes they do. Sometimes there is clearly one party or the other who is at fault. More frequently, what one party heard isn’t what the other party said. Expectations are misaligned and outcomes that feel reasonable and expected by one side are not at all acceptable to the other. Your agreements and working arrangements should be equitable in spreading the risk. Any contracts you sign should reinforce that equity.
When you hit a stalemate, offering a lead product as an initial step—a sort or “phase 0” of the larger project under discussion—is a great way to demonstrate that shared risk. You’ve immediately lowered their risk by lowering investment, but you both still have skin in the game and a shared interest in completing the work successfully.
In that way, lead products have value beyond your website, email, and social media marketing. They become part of your toolkit for closing deals. You may want to keep that in mind as you develop lead products.
This last use case is the one most susceptible to the “overdeliver syndrome.” In fact, unless they are fully automated, lead products are always ripe for this misguided attempt to win a prospect over.
First, clients typically have a pretty good sense of value. They are likely to recognize that you are delivering them value way out of line with the price they are paying. This may be welcome news to them, particularly if the lead product is as far as they intend to go in their relationship with you. But if they really are giving you a test run, over delivering can make them wonder what’s really at play. Is there some kind of bait and switch going on? When does the other shoe drop? Avoid that by pricing your lead products sustainably. They should deliver great value at a low price, not too-good-to-be-true value.
In a similar vein, be careful how your lead products are structured, particularly any that include assessments or evaluations. If your lead product concludes that surprise, surprise, the prospect should hire you to provide your services, they will rightly question whether the evaluation is of any value.
You are much better off making your results more general and let the prospect connect the dots on their own.
Even if you don’t mention your product or service by name, that doesn’t mean you aren’t guiding the prospect in your direction. Your description of the best-fit solution can outline the attributes they should be looking for—and those attributes can align nicely with the strengths you have that your competitors may not. Here again, a softer approach is important. Don’t borrow or quote language from your product descriptions to use in your evaluation results.
The Question of Gating
Gating is the practice of requiring prospects to sign up for your email list in order to get the valuable information you have promised them.
Not too long ago it was nearly universally considered the only effective way to expand your reach and build relationships over time. More recently, the conversation around gating has gotten more nuanced.
The problem with gating is, in part, its popularity. Something approaching 100% of marketers are using gating in some part of the digital efforts, and not all are using it well. Others are not using it in good faith.
So at some point your prospects have found themselves having offered up their email addresses only to have received a thinly veiled sales pitch with little or no value or an out-and-out hard sell that simply isn’t what lead magnets, lead products, and content marketing in general are all about. They are much less likely to make that bad bargain again.
That’s not your fault, but it’s important to understand how gating impacts your ability to create engagement. You may be trading quantity for quality. Or you may simply be losing quantity for no real gain.
One rule of thumb worth following is that if the content you are offering is likely to warrant personal follow-up from you or your team, gating is appropriate. Anyone who wants dedicated time from you should be comfortable at least sharing their email address.
Another rule to follow: if you aren’t using the data you are collecting via gating, reconsider whether to gate that content.
Gating can help you get not only a prospect’s email address but, as we’ve discussed, a bit of a glimpse into their interests and motivations based on the content they are downloading. That’s a worthwhile goal since having a smaller list of prospects who you know something about is generally going to be more productive than a larger pool of nearly anonymous prospects. In fact, after you’ve added enough information to the profile, it’s fair to say that you now have a list of leads and not just a list of prospects.
If you aren’t using the information you’re gathering, don’t gather it. It will increase your reach and also eliminate some of the noise you have to sift through to find the insights in your data.
Removing gating also has SEO advantages, as ungated content can be indexed by the search engines. It’s probably pretty close to impossible to determine whether the extra SEO juice will replace all of the prospects you lose by not gating, but it is certainly something to consider when deciding on which content should be gated or remain gated. For most marketers, a mix of gated and undated content is likely the best approach.
SEO Considerations
To continue with the SEO conversation, we’ve already talked about the difference between very broad search terms—insurance, for example—and long-tail search terms, like “workers comp insurance for small businesses in New York State.”
Even with the lead magnet or lead product gated, landing pages can help your SEO results if their content is created with keywords in mind—particularly long-tail keyword phrases.
At this point in the discussion is where you’ll often hear marketing consultants remind you not to let the keyword tail wag the content dog, or some similarly folksy phrase.
I agree with them, but would caution you to define this narrowly, with the focus on the more mechanical rules of SEO—no keyword stuffing, no awkward phrases to make the keyword phrases fit, and so on.
But in terms of who is wagging what, if your keyword research shows you data that says the landing page you want to create simply isn’t searched for, you might reconsider either your topic or the language you’re using to talk about it. Beautifully written, thoughtfully presented content isn’t of any value to you if nobody is looking for it.
Key Takeaways
Landing pages are a great way to create connection with a particular segment of your audience. They also have great SEO value.
Lead magnets create engagement that helps you build relationships and move prospects to leads and leads to clients.
Lead products give your prospects a taste of your approach and a small sample of the value you provide. They also reduce risk and can also be helpful as closing tools when a lead isn’t quite sure they’re ready to make the commitment.
Lead magnets and lead products must provide value and clarity while also demonstrating your experience and expertise.
Your marketing should probably include a balance of gated and ungated content in order to maximize reach and engagement.