I produced two lead magnets. One was 7x more effective than the other.
(This was first published in my newsletter, in September 2019. Sign up now to get this content when it’s fresh.)
Quick reminder: a lead magnet is content that you won't let someone download unless they give you something in exchange - usually an email address and an agreement to hear from you. You may well be on this mailing list because of the lead magnets I've produced over the last few months.
I wrote two lead magnets and promoted them on social media. The first was an in-depth-guide on how to outsource your content writing. Six people have signed up to my mailing list to get this guide. Ouch.
The second was a short cheat sheet to help people with their case study interviews. So far, 45 people have signed up to the mailing list to get this guide. That's more than 7x as many contacts, for something that I spent much less time putting together.
This is not a perfect experiment. Once it became clear that very few people were clicking through to the outsourced content writing guide, I shifted its budget to the much more effective cheat sheet ads. But I didn't spend 7 times more money on the cheat sheet ads! There was something intrinsic about the cheat sheet that made people more interested in downloading it than the outsourced content writing guide.
So what was it?
The main difference between the two bits of content is that the guide is long, in-depth and high-level, while the cheat sheet is short, bite-sized and practical. Rather than assist with a fairly large strategic decision, it helps you solve a specific problem, today.
This makes sense, because gated content is actually asking for more than an email address. It also asks for someone's time. Reading a 20 page guide is a big time commitment to make to someone you've never heard of before. How do you know the content is worth reading?
What I've been downloading
This made even more sense when I thought about the last few things I've given up my email address in exchange for:
An email series about building a copywriting business
A set of lead nurturing email templates
A number of different templated spreadsheets for things like content planning and capturing results from customer research
These were either practical, easy to consume, or both. In fact, I don't think I've signed up for a single guide - even though guides are by far the most frequent bit of gated content that social media ads push in front of me. I never click them.
A better way to gate your guides
If you're using long guides as your lead magnets at the moment, give this a try: turn it into an email series. If you have a guide out there at the moment with 5 different subsections, just copy and paste each of those into its own email.
This does three things:
It shrinks the size of the commitment you're asking people to make.
It gives you more touch points. It's easy to download a guide, then forget about it. It's hard to do that with five emails.
You're more likely to immediately add value if one of your emails solves a specific problem.
Then, run ads for your bite-sized lead magnet alongside your longer form guides. I reckon your bite sized content is going to have better uptake than the long-form guides, because it's more practical and easier to consume.
Anyway, that's my experience with lead magnets and long-form guides. Let me know how you're using gated content at the moment. Are your results similar to mine? Or have I just misread demand for this specific guide? Or have I made another mistake entirely? Drop me a line and let me know.