10 Interactive Forms Builders for Surveys & Lead Generation
If you’re looking for simple yet highly effective marketing strategies to help grow your business, turn your attention to lead magnets. They can be a great way to freshen up your marketing and reach a wider audience.
That’s why today we’ve decided to talk about lead magnets and how to create them, then go through 10 different types of lead magnets you might want to create. Let’s start with defining what a lead magnet is.
A lead magnet is an online incentive that marketers offer to prospective clients in exchange for their email addresses or other contact information.
These are usually a piece of downloadable digital content, such as an ebook, checklist, white paper or report. They can also be an opt-in offer for an email course, coupon or video.
And do lead magnets still work, you might ask? They sure do.
Lead magnets are great in both the B2B and B2C spaces. There’s just one important requirement – you should always offer a valuable piece of content.
As long as the lead is getting something positive out of it, a lead magnet strategy is a good idea.
But what is a lead magnet in marketing? Lead magnets are a key piece of lead generation strategies. Essentially, they help cover the top of the funnel.
Therefore your lead magnet funnels should be strategically positioned to attract leads, nurture and convert them to customers.
Here's the catch with lead magnet marketing. Once your potential clients sign up for the useful, relevant and high-quality freebie, you establish yourself as an expert and create a new customer relationship. It’s a win-win: you get new leads and people get highly valuable content or service.
Creating a lead magnet shouldn’t take much time and effort. In fact, with the right steps, it can be easy and fast. Here are the main steps to do it.
Your first step in creating a lead magnet is to identify your audience, or who your offer is targeting. Make sure that your magnet solves a certain problem, that it’s very specific, and has a high actual value for potential customers.
After you’ve determined the target audience for your lead magnet, it’s time to plan its distribution method. Here are the most popular ways to do this.
Website
Make a quick review of your website analytics to see which pages are the smartest option to place your lead magnet. Some common locations include:
Social Media
Share your lead magnet on social media in posts and videos that highlight the value you’re offering. Include the link to the landing page or sign up form, wherever the social channel permits it. It might be in the caption, on a sticker, or a button on a paid ad.
Create a social media campaign to promote your lead magnet in various formats. This will help attract your audience at the top of the funnel.
Blog
Your company blog is a wonderful marketing channel to distribute lead magnets. You can add them to the main blog page and to all the relevant posts. Blogs are also quite easy to administrate so you can change lead magnets as often as you need and experiment with what works best.
Email Campaign
You can create a specific email campaign and send it to your clients. Plus, think about partnering with other companies to be featured in their newsletters, or linking to your lead magnet landing page in your email signature.
Forums and Q&A Sites
Go through niche forums, communities, Slack groups and Quora to find the ones relevant to your topic and save them for later to publish your lead magnets there. Ideal options include:
Lead magnets come in many formats so choose the type of lead magnet that serves your business needs. Here are several options to consider.
If you want to educate the audience about your company and generate brand awareness, then choose ebooks and reports. Plus, you can create compelling checklists or cheat sheets that are useful for your prospective customers as well as interactive and fun to read.
In such cases, short lead capture forms where prospects don’t need to provide too many personal details are the best.
If your main goal is to establish yourself as an expert in your niche and show your audience that you have solutions to their problems, go with case studies, white papers, webinars or podcasts.
Here, you can qualify prospects better by asking for additional details beyond their name and email address.
And if you’re aspiring to make a lead magnet a star of your seasonal and holiday marketing, gift guides, coupons and discounts are exactly what you’re looking for.
You don’t have to be a professional designer to create beautiful lead magnets. Thanks to an abundance of easy-to-use tools you can start creating lead magnets right away. Just look through our list and choose the tool that is right for your business.
Visme
Visme is an online design and content authoring platform that helps you create engaging presentations, infographics, lead magnets, animations, product demonstrations and more. It’s an all-in-one tool to create, share and store your content.
With Visme, you can create lead magnet PDFs that aren’t just attractive but also engaging and inspiring.
Here are a few of the features Visme offers for brainstorming, planning, creating and tracking lead magnets.
FlippingBook
FlippingBook is a company that provides software and cloud service for creating professional online documents in a fast and easy way. If you want to craft an interactive lead magnet with a built-in lead capture form, that’s the tool that you need.
In just a few simple steps you can convert your PDF into a digital ebook, report, gift guide or white paper with a smooth page flip effect. And then turn them into a lead generation tool: insert videos on any page to engage new leads and add branding for trustworthy lead-generating content.
Moreover, FlippingBook allows you to set up a built-in lead capture form within your ebook to collect any lead data you need: names, emails, phone numbers and more.
Adobe InDesign CC
Adobe InDesign CC is professional-level layout and design software for PC and Mac. It’s the most famous and widely used software for creating multi-page layouts and the first choice for many marketers, designers, and publishers.
It allows you to create beautiful graphic designs with typography from the world's top industries and imagery from Adobe Stock. InDesign has everything you need to create and publish books, digital magazines, ebooks, lead magnets, posters, interactive PDFs and more.
Canva
Canva is an easy web-design app that enables you to make digital content such as magazines, ebooks, lead magnets and reports without much effort. It offers you a big library of templates, and all you have to do is to choose the one you like and customize it according to your needs.
Choose from millions of images, edit your photos using engaging filters, add free icons and modern-looking fonts to create branded online content.
Venngage
Venngage is a visual content and design app that is mostly centered around various types of infographics, charts, tutorials and more. So if you have a lot of data to share, Venngage helps you turn complex research into easy-to-understand and clean-looking brochures, lead magnets and pamphlets.
Captivating content and design play a big role in creating a great impression of your products and services.
Here is a quick how-to for creating and sharing a lead magnet with Visme
Now you’re ready to share your lead magnet with the world. Download your lead magnet in multiple formats–PDF, JPG/PNG, HTML, PPTX, etc or share online via an live link. Also you can generate an embed code that can be placed in your website or landing pages.
Promote your new lead magnet according to the distribution strategy you’ve determined and don’t forget to share your lead magnet via social media platforms right inside Visme
Plus, think about leveraging paid advertising and co-marketing partnerships that will help you promote your lead magnet to a new audience.
Not sure exactly what type of lead magnet is best for your business? Check out our ideas for creating lead magnets and get inspired to start crafting lead magnets in no time.
In this video, we've also covered the five best lead magnet examples your business should be using to attract and convert more leads.
The most effective lead magnet ideas offer things that can be used immediately. Lead magnet checklists are exactly like this: easy to make, easy to use. They condense everything that the user needs to know into one, actionable list.
Lead magnets like this are super quick to create. For example, you can summarize your popular blog posts, videos or ebooks as a checklist, and you’re ready to go.
Cheat sheets have a similar purpose as checklists but contain more thorough information. Instead of simply showing steps, a cheat sheet will usually have background information on a specific topic—for when you need to see it right away.
For instance, it can be a list of guidelines or a process that people can follow over and over again to achieve a specific goal.
A roadmap can pretty much be called a very detailed and thorough cheat sheet. This high-level document is a visual representation of a strategy, business plan or step-by-step guide as it shows the milestones along the way as you carry out your plan.
This type of lead magnet can be very useful for many businesses. Create one in document, infographic or presentation form, keeping visual task management in mind throughout your roadmap's design.
Whether you are a small business or a large corporation, a gift guide can play a leading role in promotions for your target audience or for seasonal and holiday activities.
During the holiday season, people often need a little help making purchases for their loved ones so holiday guides from your company might be exactly what they’re waiting for. It’s a great idea for a successful lead magnet.
Do you know how to generate leads easily and quickly? Create an ebook.
An ebook is one of the most traditional ideas for lead magnets. And it’s still worth creating especially if you have valuable knowledge and expertise for your niche or have found solutions for specific problems your audience has.
You’ll get an amazing piece of promotional and lead-generating content that will bring you many benefits and work for you for days and even months.
Plus, you can create an interactive ebook to share online. Visme gives you the ability to email-gate your online content, making this the perfect lead magnet distribution tactic.
Industry trends and benchmarks are essential for many businesses. If you have such valuable data, then you can offer it in the form of a report, making it a powerful lead magnet.
Plus, you can pull together data from various sources into one comprehensive report, saving your colleagues hours of browsing through numerous articles and stats.
Planners can be helpful for both businesses and their clients as time management and crafting plans can never be out of trend. Simply put, it’s a plan that you’ve mapped out for someone on a daily, weekly or monthly basis.
Your lead magnet can even be a blank planner that the reader fills out with their own plan. These blank planners are really useful too because they make it easier for people to organize themselves.
One of the simplest ways to create a lead magnet is to offer a sample of your online course. It helps people understand if your course is what they need, thus building trust and putting your course in front of the right audience.
Coupons and discounts can be an effective way to collect email addresses—and sometimes convert them directly into customers. This type of lead magnet suits ecommerce businesses the most.
If your customers are interested in a product but not convinced, a coupon might be just the push they need to actually take action and sign up or make a purchase.
White papers are reports or guides that inform readers concisely about a complex issue. They’re meant to help readers understand an issue, solve a problem or make a decision.
Workbooks are helpful tools for your audience. They’re guides to solving a business problem that the audience is in need of.
The template below, for example, is a branding workbook that a prospect can use to start branding their business. If a prospect acquires this free workbook from a branding company, they might feel inclined to hire them for the actual design of the brand.
Recipe books are great lead magnets for food and health-oriented blogs, brands or nutritionists. By sharing a free resource with prospects, they can put their brand front and center and show what they can do for a client.
Recipe books are especially good for transmitting brand voice, values and how much you care for your clients’ health and overall well-being. Don’t forget to add a page where you share how much more you can offer when they buy your product or service.
Any ecommerce or retail store can have a gift guide as a lead magnet. Not only can they collect leads for every download, but they can also promote their products in the guide. If the gift guide is digital, then each item can be linked to its sales page.
Highlight products in shaped image frames or go for another look and use the Visme background remover to create cutouts of your products. Decorate the guide with holiday colors or your brand theme.
Professionals are always on the look out for data, statistics and metrics about their industry. Make it easy for them by conducting research into your industry and creating “state of” reports. Offer this lead magnet in a dedicated landing page and promote it all over social media. Not only will you collect leads, but you’ll also gain thought leadership clout while you’re at it.
Offer your product or service catalog as a downloadable lead magnet on your website. Don’t ask for too much information from prospects; just their email is fine. Catalogs are often offered for free download so if you make yours a lead magnet, make it super easy for them.
If you take this route, take advantage of Visme’s interactive features and create a digital catalog that prospects can buy from by clicking on products and being directed to the product page.
Offering surveys in exchange for emails is another lead magnet idea for your brand. Find a relevant set of questions that you can ask a visitor on your website or your physical store, and ask them to please answer them. Make sure that they feel that they are helping, making a difference, or feeling reciprocated. For filling in surveys, you might want to offer an extra perk like a discount code or coupon.
Use Visme to create your survey documents by linking your Visme account to Survey Monkey or Jotform. Embed your surveys in a Visme template and collect answers on your survey platform.
Offer a free trial for your service or product by asking for contact information in return. Even if the prospect doesn’t continue with the paid subscription after the trial is over, you still have their email to entice them to return later on.
Another way to gather leads is to invite them to a private community managed by your social media and community management team. Not only will you gather a lead, but you’ll also have the immediate opportunity to engage with them inside the community.
The final lead magnet example is webinar registrations. Your free webinars need an audience; ask each participant to leave their email in order to get an invitation and reminder about the webinar. Use a popup form on your website or a dedicated webinars page like we do at Visme.
Lead magnets are most definitely worth it. According to Backlinko, offering a lead magnet can boost conversions by up to 785%.
In a survey conducted by GetResponse, 47% of marketers revealed that video and text-based lead magnets were the most effective opt-in incentives. In the same study, 58.6% of marketers said short-form written content – like checklist newsletters and ebooks had the highest conversion rates.
On the other hand, 41.4% of respondents reported that long-form written content, such as guides or reports, generated the best results as lead magnets.
A good lead magnet covers a number of essential characteristics; relevance, value, trustworthiness, shareability and incentive. Let’s break them down.
Here’s a great example of a good lead magnet: The Visme online presentation course. In exchange for your email, you get a comprehensive course on presentation design. To promote the lead magnet, we have a dedicated landing page where we share tidbits like how to use visual communication to inform, captivate, inspire or persuade your audience.
The course is free for anyone who signs up for it. When we collect that lead, it gets added to the newsletter list. From there it goes into a funnel where we share plenty of value to our prospects.
Lead magnets are typically free, yes. But do they have to be? Not necessarily. If not free, though, they must be inexpensive or optionally free. Some platforms offer a lead magnet system where the prospect can download it for free or pay a minimal fee for it.
The reason why most lead magnets are free is so prospects can feel they are getting value in exchange for their contact information. They don’t lose anything; they only gain.
We use Visme. In essence, the best lead magnets are created with software that’s easy to use and offers lots of design solutions like templates, design elements and easy sharing options. Higher up in this guide we share a list of tools that you can use to create lead magnets.
Try Visme to create your lead magnet and let us know what you think on social media.
So you see, lead magnets aren’t as difficult to create and promote as they may seem. The most essential thing is to spend some time diving deep into what your customers want and what they don’t want to ensure that your lead magnet is a success.
Lead magnets can play a leading part in digital marketing because they help build email lists, promote content, develop customer relationships and increase sales. Just start with a lead magnet template and customize it to fit your brand and your needs.
With Visme forms you can create high converting lead magnet forms and popups. Plus, it comes with integrated analytics to track and gather the emails from the prospects getting the lead magnets.
Leverage the power of Visme's design tool and form builder to generate quality leads fast.
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