7X Your Lead Magnet Engagement – S2E4

Travis Ketchum 0:03
You got to think backwards, oftentimes, and make sure that you have alignment and key value in helping them overcome key decisions at every step of the way.

Chris Bruno 0:12
Welcome to the all about digital marketing podcast, the show that dives into the best strategies, tactics and tools for entrepreneurs and marketers looking to exponentially increase their results online. Welcome back to another episode of The all about Digital Marketing podcast. I’m your co host, Chris, and I’m joined today by Travis. Hey, Travis, how’s it going?

Travis Ketchum 0:35
It’s going great man. Glad to be here, as always.

Chris Bruno 0:37
So we’ve winged this episode a little bit, I’m not gonna lie to our audience. But we were talking about what we wanted to really go into and what sort of we were looking at as a topic for today. And we’ve decided to talk a little bit about lead magnets. Now, lead magnets are I’m sure as most people understand and or, as most people see them are something that you use as a way to entice people to get involved with your brand, right. So it might be a PDF guide, it might be a free training course, it might be something. But today, we’re going to talk about something specific, because you’ve been playing around with this a lot recently. But you’ve basically found a way to do seven to eight times the actual engagement with a particular piece of content as a lead magnet. And I think we just need to dig into why how, where, what can people do to do something similar? So shall we jump into this?

Travis Ketchum 1:24
Yeah, yeah, I think we share me I think I’ve said in the past, I’m not really interested in 5% bombs, I want, you know, 5x, or 10x, or in this case, seven to 8x. The amount of engagement Those are, those are the kind of cheat codes that way because then you don’t have to be an amazing copywriter, you have to be world class, really anything, you’re just playing a different game altogether. And so that’s, that’s what I try to look for. But I think before we dig into that, though, we should probably talk about like, I know, you mentioned what lead magnets can be, they can be PDFs, it can be video series, they can be these various things. But that’s because we have been in the game. And we know that that’s an assumption that improves the quality of the lead and improves the conversion rate of the opt in to begin with, I think we should talk about even making that first step change, because what I’m about to reveal is kind of predicated on at least making that step. Because so often, I still think you will seem like subscribe to our newsletter. And that’s the end of the pitch, right? Bye. Do you need more emails in your inbox? Chris?

Chris Bruno 2:22
Yeah, I want as many more emails, especially from people, I don’t really remember why or what it was that I was doing. And especially that bring me to very little value. But I do think the other version of that is even worse, which is still free commerce brands and stuff like that, sign up and get 10%. That’s it. Like literally, that’s the entirety of it. And but

Travis Ketchum 2:41
but it does work. To be fair, though. I mean, people do sign up to get the 10%. But it makes it extremely transactional

Chris Bruno 2:48
100% works. When somebody’s ready to buy nobody that comes on your website, when they’re still in their research and their educational phases of what they’re looking for, is then going to go well, just in case, I’ll quickly Sign up now. And then I’ll keep this email in my inbox. Because again, how many emails do you keep in your inbox? I try and keep my inbox down to zero. Basically, the only ones that are there are basically things that I haven’t actually. So I’m not keeping hold of anything. I’m not going to remember later on, did I have a 10% voucher. So that really, for me is a transactional thing, you’d already decided to make your your jump and your purchase. I don’t know that that’s my biggest one. But anyway, my point is, I think I’m the same as you this idea of hey, sign up to my newsletter is just not enough.

Travis Ketchum 3:32
Yeah, you got to have a real clear reason why. And the reason why has to be stronger than will send you email at some point in the future at a cadence that’s undisclosed. Like that’s, that’s not good enough. So that’s where the the idea of of a dedicated lead magnet, right, that’s where we should have the PDFs, the video series, some kind of specific outcome, because what you can do is you can highlight a specific pain point, give your specific solution with the expectation that they’re going to get it in a rapid amount of time. So, you know, hey, I have this core problem of email deliverability. Or I want to know, I want to download a PDF that shows me every image size that is being used on social media sites right now for banner images and profiling, like, like, basically a shortcut and express way to get my pain away for free that that’s an attractive lead magnet of some kind. And so that’s sort of step one. If you do that alone, you’re probably going to 10x your overall front end conversion rate people that decide to put in their email. But then the next lever is once they give you their email, their email address to send it to them. The problem that a lot of people run into is mentally, even if it hasn’t actually solved the problem because they haven’t gotten and consumed your content, solve the problem and executed on whatever you told them to do. Which is what you would rationally think a person would do. There’s this little part of a reptilian brain that goes I opted in for that thing. I’ve already completed it. Save it Do you have that life release? What’s really you find this even in true transactions to when people buy your product, or you know, whether it’s an E commerce product, digital product or whatever, that same reptilian part of their brain gets ticked of like, I’ve paid the money, therefore the problem has been solved. Right? We rationally know that that’s not the case. But emotionally in that back part of the amygdala, like you already think, like, Hey, I’ve done that. I’ve paid the money, I can come back to that whenever I want. And the reality is, most people never come back. Even if they paid you money, and even less come back if they didn’t pay you money. It’s the gym membership. Right? Exactly. Like like the gym model is perfected when everyone pays and no one actually shows up. Like that’s, that’s a gems like, you know, white whale that that’s what they want is they want everyone to pay and know what actually show up. But the problem is, is if you have a series of offers or engagement or things, you want to escalate people through a process, because the pain you’re solving, especially in a lead magnet, is usually step one of many could be step one of three, step one of 20, step one of 100, right. And we usually have this concept of ascension. So in order to ascend to start buying things from you to buy higher ticket things from you to become a super fan, there’s a process they have to go through. And if you’re losing them at that front end, because you don’t have a lead magnet, or you’re losing them once you have a lead magnet, because they’re not consuming it. These are two of the earliest pieces, and they affect the entire graph down the pipe. So we’ve solved number one by giving them a useful lead magnet. But now let’s figure out how to solve number two and make them actually freaking consumer. So I call this the lead magnet multiplier, right. And what I wanted to do as like I said, get more clicks, to actually consume the friggin thing, which not only leads to that ascension. But it also actually does a sneaky little thing and helps with email deliverability. Because, you know, we’re sort of known for email deliverability. And one of the things that we do now is that Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, all of them are judging us as a sender, based on the first interactions we have with someone. So not only am I setting the frame here for what they may potentially buy from us down the road. But I’m also setting the frame for how our emails, even inbox going forward, this is such a critical piece, which is why I put so much effort in trying to figure it out. And so what we did is we wanted to use the power of scarcity. When’s the last time that you hit something, Chris? And you’re like, Oh, I’ll I’ll buy a ticket to this course later, or, oh, you know, buy this thing later. It’s,

Chris Bruno 7:35
I hate to admit this, I have a whole folder of PDFs to read. Right? So it’s that moment where I see something and go, That sounds actually quite interesting. Yeah, I’ll give them my email address. Yeah, I’ll grab that PDF, and I’ll put it in the folder that says PDFs to read. That folders probably got a good dozen, maybe two dozen PDFs in there. Currently, I’ve stopped adding to it recently.

Travis Ketchum 7:57
Yeah, well, the unfortunate reality is, most people don’t wake up. Even if they do have a pain. Most people don’t wake up as our number one priority to consume your stuff, to attend your webinar, to listen to your podcast episode a year in which I know pains us both equally. Thank you for listening, right? Yes, thank you. Thank you, for those that are here. You have to give them a reason. And one of the most powerful reasons you can give someone is scarcity, right? Sometimes with live events, like concerts, comedians, webinars, right? The scarcity is automatic, because it’s a hard set day and time. Other times you’ll see leading up to that to help pump sales because scarcity is so powerful, you’ll see an escalating price as you get closer to the time of the event. We see this all the time with plane tickets, right? As you get closer to actually flying, there are a higher risk of not selling it or having empty seats, so they’re actually going to keep jacking their price to make sure they extract as much value as possible. So the earlier you buy, the cheaper it is. And if you come back a week later price a little bit higher, a little bit higher, and that’s going to force you to actually commit and do the action. So scarcity is is hyper powerful thing that’s present in all parts of our lives. And so I thought, Okay, well how do we apply that same superpowered mechanism to lead magnets make them actually open click in view our freakin content. That is the goal. So we’ve got some cool technology inside of Campion refinery that allows us to retroactively change links event for someone has already received an email and to do it programmatically. So what we do is someone opts in Hey, I’m cool. I’m I want to download this lead magnet, I want to solve this problem. Thank You page. It’s like great, you’re getting this hyper valuable thing, but there’s a catch to why it’s free. So now we’ve we’ve price anchored and reinforced that it’s a valuable thing. And then then they go, Oh, what’s the catch? And the catch is, if you Don’t go open, click and view that content in the next 10 minutes, I’m going to retro actively remove it from your inbox. Now some of you are probably screaming your marketing bastard. And I hate you already. But it has some phenomenal results. Because if you look at an average lead magnet, and because we’re an email platform, we get to see a lot of lead magnets that are the standard, hey, we send you the PDF, please go read it. And the average lead magnet may have a 40 to 50% open rate on that email, and a five to 10% click rate. So only five to 10% of those who opened right. So you’re down to only like, what two ish percent of every email you send, actually gets clicked. pretty ridiculous, right? Compared to what I just described, where it’s just hey, if you don’t go open and click this in the next 10 minutes, we’re going to remove access, we have an over 75% open rate. So it’s already a 50%. More people are opening that first email. But the key is, of those who open 72% of them are clicking and consuming our lead magnet. Which means way more than half of every email that we ever send to anyone who requests it are not just opening the email, but they’re clicking and viewing the freaking content. And so we know at that point, they’ve had to look at the at the at the lead magnet, they’ve had to actually view it, they can retain access forever Once they’ve done that. And then what did we do? We waited just a little bit. And then we started triggering our next series, the ascension, right? Here’s some social proof, here’s how you can take what I’ve just showed you and take it to the next level, here’s how you can work with us. Here’s additional content, you can you can build with us, right like it starts breaking down that rabbit hole because now they’ve they’ve already done those micro commits to say yes, and it’s super powerful. And we can track. You know how much revenue we’re getting out of this funnel. And it is so much higher, like astronomically higher. Compared to our previously names we had before which were this which were the typical, grab this PDF, we hope you We hope you love it, we hope you read it, just because the reality is people just don’t. But he has found

Chris Bruno 12:12
or what I do like there is that there is a slight reason why we also can talk about this today, which is we have in fact implemented this. And I think this is a really nice way for people to see it firsthand and also show a little bit of support for the show if you are listening. So we have put in our co host tech stack, that we identified our top favourite three tools for three different categories, I believe. So tools that we couldn’t live without, must have apps on our iPhone and our collaboration tools that we use with our teams to run our businesses. And we’ve set this all up, I say we, I am using the royal we you set this all up for us. And it’s all been set up so that people can actually run through this. And they can see how this works. Live basically for themselves. Right. So it’s all about digital marketing.co.uk forward slash tech hyphen stack. And that will allow you to actually see how this process works. So you’ll get this awesome, our guide to all our tools, our favourite tools, but you’ll also get to see this in practice. And this I’m hoping is going to trigger some people with some good ideas as to how they can do this as well, right? Because this will work for pretty much every business and regardless of what the lead magnet might be.

Travis Ketchum 13:20
Yeah, I mean, obviously works best if it’s a digital thing, right. But it works just as well, if it’s a PDF, or a video series, or a one off video, it even works if it links out to a freaking Google Doc, right? Like it can be whatever you want it to be the key is that you have a state of action takers and a URL that they have. And a state for non action takers. And you’re all they have. And as long as you can set them as two different things. It can be really powerful, because then you can actually tell the system, hey, when that timer expires, if they haven’t clicked yet. So next time they actually come back and click, it’s not going to go to what they asked for because they didn’t do it fast enough. And I think the key to make this what you know, more well received, you’ll see this when he goes with the flow and the tech stack. You have to give them some compelling reasons, which are some psychological triggers in there to, in my opinion, about why you’re doing it and why it’s important not only for them, but like why it’s important, like what it means to your relationship with them. And I think I think you get some of that sort of subconscious Yes, like, Okay, I’m going to follow through that because I think inherently as humans, if we have a problem want to be seen as trustworthy as following through on what we said we’re going to do as people who accomplish things that people who talk about things, right. So I think a lot of that is sort of inherent and so if you can reinforce those traits along the way, that’s where you can take someone who may be like, Yeah, I’ve got this pain and I kind of want it to go away to like out Damn, my knee really hurts and I will do anything it takes to make my knees start hurting. The big shift

Chris Bruno 15:00
There’s a lot to be said about this. And I think for I literally had a conversation today with somebody who’s probably from a little bit more of a traditional publishing background, but they were talking about, like, we really want to create this new website, it’s gonna have tonnes of really good content. They’re working with some fantastic X journalists and really like high level people. So I know the content, etc, is going to be great. But one of the key things that they said he said to me was, what we’re really trying to do is build up as many newsletter email signups as we can. So my question to him was, why would anyone sign up? He’s like that, because the content is amazing, so that they’re getting access to the content, right? It’s all on the website. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. And you’re like that? Yeah. Are you trying to build a newsletter? And you want people to sign up? Because that’s how they get their exclusive content? Are you trying to build a normal publishing website, which is going to have a tonne of content and people can read that? And you can make money through ads whichever way you want to do it. I think a lot of people miss understand what misunderstanding maybe the wrong word. They miss align their goals with what they actually end up doing online? There’s a lot of Do you find that as well, like you, you meet people along the way, I’ve heard about I need to do a lead magnet. So I’ll just quickly knock out a lead magnet, and it may not even link to what they actually sell directly in like, it’s not one of the steps along the way. Have you found that a little bit? Or is it just me that gets really unlucky? With some of the conversations I have? I think

Travis Ketchum 16:25
there’s a couple different buckets of people, right? Because I think it’s really easy to over generalise an entire market. But you know, one of the things that sticks out to me is like, Okay, are you doing this? Because it’s just shiny object syndrome? Or are you sort of just throwing it out there, and it’s, it doesn’t have alignment, because you have fought all the way through. And those aren’t necessarily the same people. So like, like, like, when I want to generate a lead magnet, I think about okay, if my ideal avatar, right, we talked about this in the past, but if your ideal avatar has these traits, and they look like this, what do you look like the step before? They’re my perfect prospect, and they’re ready to buy? Okay, what about the step before that? The step before that, and what are they searching for before they even want to talk to anyone. And if you can back that down, that actually can frame up and lay out your entire funnel for you, like you may have a core offer, but you may start realising there’s something that will be easier to sell at an earlier stage of their pain. And then there’s still yet something easier than that, to sell at an even earlier stage and go all the way down to discovery. And what is a lead magnet, do this kind of stand out from the crowd, have a you know, completely Zig whenever else’s zagging kind of approach that makes it obvious that this is different. And so therefore, this may actually solve my, my, my perceived problem right now, even if it’s not the core thing you sell, but it needs to have a clear path on how to get there as you can add, because oftentimes, you’re educating the prospect as much about their problem as you are about your solution. Right. Like, for instance, in 2018, we were trying to redo our roof right. And it was like, because it was the the person who bought the house from had it installed incorrectly. It’s like, I’m not a roofer. But there was so much I had to learn about roofing and roof materials and design and the pitch of your roof and what that means and do you do you know all these like, if this then that kind of statements that I had to understand, before I was ready to plunk down like 50k on like, reframing, you know, reshooting totally different roof solution, knocking out the chimney that was old and decrepit, and all these things, right. But like, there was an education process I had to go through far before I was ready to spend any considerable amount of money. And then all sudden, I’m now I felt educated. And I had some affinity towards those who educated me to be able to plunk down the real money for the big prize, right? And so you got to think back backwards, oftentimes, and make sure that you have alignment, and key value and helping them overcome key decisions at every step of the way. That’s my personal philosophy.

Chris Bruno 19:07
Gang. I don’t know why I’ve got this idea in my head now of what we should actually try and do for a few episodes is to something like this and actually create something so we can actually show in one of the videos. Look, this is how we’ve broken this down and give people a little sense of what goes into this. And again, I think this is quite nice that we’ve got this lead magnet up now and that we’ve explained to people what it is. So there is no witchcraft and Hocus Pocus, really hopefully everyone will feel like we’ve been pretty upfront and clear about it. But I’m wondering whether or not we could actually replicate this with a couple of other themes and maybe help people with, you know, maybe a breakdown of like, I’m in the process of doing some work on the the avatars and stuff from my side whether or not we could break that down and actually showcase a little bit how we do this. And then also some of the tricks and techniques that we use when we’re talking about these things even internally like to each other as well as to our team. Things like the five why’s and odds and ends like that, that we use a lot, but actually, yeah, maybe, maybe that’s something that we could do for a few episodes.

Travis Ketchum 20:05
Yeah, for sure. I mean, so I guess it’s worth noting that I did make a micro training about exactly how to do like this particular lead magnet process, which is why I have a name for it lead magnet multiplayer. So I have a link for that if you want to embed it in the show notes that that’d be cool. It’s it’s free yoing the only catches you got to actually use it.

Chris Bruno 20:24
I was about to ask, let me guess if they don’t click on it within the first 10 minutes, they don’t get to actually access the training.

Travis Ketchum 20:31
Not quite like that. But it’s kinda like that. And you’ll see it’s a it’s a different twist. But what could be interesting, I think, is if maybe in the future, if we do some live tear downs of other businesses that maybe have, I don’t want to put anyone on the spot per se, but like, sort of like a lead magnet makeovers or something where we say, Okay, here’s a page, here’s what we think their core offer is, here’s what we think their lead magnet is, if we were to attack this, this is how we would structure a lead magnet, this is how we would build it. And then this is how we would actually reverse engineer a funnel to get them from where we think their core early stage pain point is, to their actual like, I’m ready to spend real money and become a brand evangelist and how we would work to maybe try to get them there, that can be fun.

Chris Bruno 21:17
Well, I tell you what actually, if you’re listening to this, if you’re watching this, Hi. Leave us a note, like literally you can get in touch. It’s all about digital marketing dot code at UK, or you’ll find us on most of the social platforms as all about digital, if you just get in touch with us. And you’d like us to spend a bit of time looking at some of your stuff. As part of an episode, I am saying this, this isn’t a free. This is also not a sales pitch. By the way, this is a very much a free thing. But it will become an episode, we would happily take a look at your online marketing, go through your website very quickly have a look at what you’re trying to do to engage people and how you’re trying to convert people through a lead magnet, for example. And yeah, I think that’d be an amazing idea if you’d like that. And again, you’re just getting free advice from to marketers that have been around for way too long. Now. We’re getting hold, but But we’d happily do that and actually have a look. So if you’re hearing this and you like the sound of that, please do drop us a line, we’ll definitely do that, if not in the show notes, we will have a link to our co host tech stack lead magnet. So you can see how that works, as well as the lead magnet multiplier, just down below. So you can have a look at those as well. Travis, I think we’re going to wrap that up there. I think we’ve said everything that we need to say again, I’m just gonna finish with seven to 8x the results for a lead magnet, which I think is absolutely insane. And again, this is what this show we’re going to try and do all this all season. We’re gonna have to find some some very big new wins for us to keep this up all year.

Travis Ketchum 22:41
Yeah, I’m not sure I’ve got that much wood behind my marketing arrow to top that every time but I’m always happy to share when I have to try. Yeah, I’m always happy to share when I find really I think fun wins like this, because it’s a you know, there’s a whole white paper I read back in 2010 about local maximums and how Google obsesses about what you Yeah, you could do 500,000 variations of your button colour, but you may be finding a local maximum, what you need to do is actually blow the whole page up and do a completely different design. And you may find a more true maximum. And so those kinds of experiments, I think are hopefully a part of the process people can enjoy. Because if you can’t enjoy Pat, marketing isn’t a lot of fun. So, yeah, it’s just part of the deal. But this was fun.

Chris Bruno 23:25
That’s probably a conversation there for us to have was another another day, which is actually testing. I don’t think enough people do enough testing. And I include myself in that, by the way, like I’m quite bad when it comes to as like a marketer just like the cobblers children don’t have shoes kind of idea. When it comes to marketing, we’re so busy doing stuff for other people where we do tests or we do try different things that actually internally for ourselves, we don’t always do as much so there might be a whole conversation to be had.

Travis Ketchum 23:52
Yeah, fast forward 20 years from now we may be having automated multivariate tests that are creating content using AI and you basically just you know, hit the button make the money as I always joke about right and let it let it run this blood test get the traffic in and let it optimise itself so you’re

Chris Bruno 24:08
saying in 20 years maybe all those all those videos on YouTube promising a really quick win and get rich quick scheme could actually be real.

Travis Ketchum 24:16
Yeah, it can be really could be a total Sham, or we can be living in Huawei. Who knows? Let’s see where it takes us.

Chris Bruno 24:22
Jarvis thanks for your time.

Travis Ketchum 24:24
Sounds good man. Next week

Transcribed by https://otter.ai