3 Lead Magnets Growth Marketing Agencies Use to Drive Sales

Lead generation is one of the biggest pain points held by organizations seeking growth. Executing a top-of-funnel strategy that attracts searchers and converts them into leads requires a deep understanding of target buyer audiences. But this in of itself requires a careful market analysis, dissecting sales data, competitor research, and running SEO and paid media audits (among other things).

When brands partner with the best growth marketing agencies, a deep-dive discovery process is carried out to understand exactly how buyers engage industry-related content and how it impacts their purchasing decisions. Then a full-funnel strategy is created based on these findings with lead generation strategies fueling the overall marketing strategy.

Here are three lead magnets used by the top growth marketing agencies that generate high-quality leads likely to convert into buyers.

1. Growth Marketing Relies on SEO

Search engine optimization is by far the hardest digital marketing strategy to execute at a high level, and a vital part of any growth marketing strategy. It requires a comprehensive understanding of Google’s algorithm, marketing psychology, buyer behavior, advanced research, and writing skills. In addition, it requires an understanding of other marketing strategies because SEO works with inbound marketing to generate sales, and other strategic strands of a growth marketing operative.

When it comes to growth marketing, blogs and landing pages are engineered to organically rank high up in the SERPs and funnel readers to a desired action. This action could entail downloading a guide, clicking through to more content that addresses precise topics, or to a shopping cart page.

SEO that isn’t sales focused is worthless. After all, companies don’t want to simply rank for the hell of it. Instead they want their content to both rank well to attract readers, but it must be created in a way to generate leads. This means the content needs to serve as the tip of the iceberg that leads people through a careful nurturing process. If the SEO empowered content doesn’t thrill and delight readers, no leads will come from it.

A growth-driven SEO strategy pulls from a variety of sub-organic search strategies customized to make sense in light of the client’s goals. These often include:

Blogging
On-site web page optimization
Backlinks
Social media

Blogging is often the core to any SEO strategy. When performed at an experts level by growth marketing agencies, blogs can rank organically in the SERPs, empower a website’s overall ranking, and improve the site’s domain authority. Growth marketing agencies use the cluster model of blogging. This involved creating a set number of blogs that each address a unique topic using a precise context appropriate to buyer needs. They link internally to one another to increase SEO and to provide a better user experience (which also empowers SEO efforts). Each blog then links to a pillar page. This is usually the home page or primary product / service page. Multiple studies prove that this strategy significantly improves SEO results across multiple industries.

On site page optimization helps set an ideal environment for SEO to thrive. Think of it as preparing healthy soil for seeds to germinate and grow into vegetables. Page level SEO creates an ideal environment for Google to crawl content and decipher its purpose, subject matter, and target audiences. Page level SEO includes:

Page titles
H tags
URL structure
Meta descriptions
Navigation
Rich snipets (aka structured data or Schema)
Image ALTs

When the appropriate keywords and context are implemented into the above points, SEO significantly improves.

Backlinks are achieved by placing strategically written content on referring domains with links pointed back to a web page with SEO focus. The link’s anchor text must contain the right keyword or search phrase, have follow attributes, and love on a domain with content relevant to the website’s it is pointing at. Creating a healthy backlink portfolio improves domain authority and rankings across the board.

Finally, social media marketing exists as a separate entity, but it can be used to enhance SEO strategies. When blogs are shared on social platforms, any engagement they receive creates powerful social signals that bounce back to the site. Google notices these, and awards websites that garner a significant amount of them.

2. Paid Media and PPC

Paid media is another component of a growth marketing strategy and powerful lead magnet that attracts top-of-funnel traffic. Unlike SEO, paid media is more instantaneous in results while SEO is a process. As technology, consumer intent, and audience targeting for paid media continue to evolve, an agile paid search strategy and campaign execution should always be performed by a highly skilled team with PPC and paid media as a specialty skill.

In order for a paid media campaign to be profitable, its framework and architecture must be perfect. Running a paid media audit and analyzing past performance will enable growth marketing teams to set the ideal stage for generating leads that convert into paying customers.

Unfortunately, converting paid traffic into converted leads is often lacking in the services offered by many digital marketing agencies. A true growth marketing expert will treat driving traffic as the first step. Then they will optimize the rate in which it takes for a click to turn into a lead. Analytics, heat maps and usability all play into creating audience-targeted messaging that turns paid clicks into high-value leads.

3. Email Marketing

Another powerful lead magnet in any serious growth marketing strategy is email marketing. But this is far from blindly blasting out offers to your contacts. Growth marketing agencies segment their contacts according to buyer personas with specific pain points, and create highly targeted content that shows them an ideal solution to their needs. Not all contacts are leads. You will have multiple contacts at each stage of the buyer’s journey that require a number of steps before they convert. When people opt in, they become a lead. So when they engage an email’s content by clicking on an offer or downloading a guide, they have just entered the lead stage.

Growth marketing agencies have the best CRMs and marketing automation platforms that allow for nurturing each lead in a timely and cost-effective manner. Technology plays a big role in growth marketing, and even provides data used by marketers to fine-tune the messaging sent to each lead in a customized manner. Without these technology pieces, email marketing done correctly would be extremely time-consuming, expensive, and garner little results.