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You may have heard of lead magnets, opt-in offers, freebies, inbound lead generation, and other fancy words. The point of these is to get contact information in exchange for a free product.
By setting up a lead magnet on your chamber blog (or social media or elsewhere), you can collect the email addresses for either potential members, visitors, locals, or other demographics.
Having different lists means you can meet different goals, like gaining new members or promoting members to new people.
But to attract different people, you need different opt-ins to attract their attention.
Generic Types of Lead Magnets
- Checklist
- Template
- Toolkit / Resource List
- Tutorial, Audio Training
- eBook / Report / Whitepaper
- Infographic
- Planner / Calendar
- Strategy Session / Consultation
Lead Magnet Ideas for Chamber Websites
Solicit new opt-ins for your email marketing with a free downloadable content on your chamber blog or website.
Keep in mind what I said earlier about different audiences. Use these lead magnets to start or grow segmented email lists. Relocation Guides would be people new to or looking to move to your area. Info on how to start a business might be a potential member. Both are great audiences for chambers to have on hand.
- Ribbon Cutting or Grand Opening Checklist
- Shopping Map
- Email course on how to update their business listing on your website
- eBook on how create a business in your city
- PDF of your relocation guide or community resource guide
- How to promote their business for Small Business Saturday
- Presentation slides or notes
- Podcast transcript or notes
- A specific, skimmable article that’s not already on your website
- Printable checklist that compliments an existing blog post
- Survey Results
- Free Event Attendance (a 1-time invite for non-members)
- Annual community report
- Other Reports or PDFs that took a while for you to put together!
I recommend starting with the 1 or 2 that you already have part of ready. You want to start with whatever’s easiest for you and then grow from there!
What lead magnets do you offer on your blog? Comment your link below so we can all see & R&D!
Example: Ribbon Cutting Checklist
Here’s what my ad design looks like:
When people opt-in via Constant Contact, they get a simple 2-page PDF about planning a ribbon cutting & how the chamber can be involved.
This email segment is great for finding potential members I might not otherwise have talked to.
Example: Pumpkin Stencils
I’m working on creating a destination/locals email list at my chamber so I’m offering a free download to entice viewers that’s more fun and less business-y.
For this demographic, I created a seasonal offer for Pumpkin Stencils. These were made by yours truly with our community in mind. This was a quick and simple fun blog post that is sharable on social media.
Design explanation: we run both a shrimp festival and a crab festival. The third pumpkin is part of our logo with a witch, and the fourth is just our city name.
As a graphic designer, this was a pretty easy project as it was basically a black outline of an image, without any gaps/holes in it. If you decide to create a stencil, you could try an edit of your logo or any other icon that represents your community.
Why did I spend time on this?
This project cost only staff time and can result in new website traffic, raising our brand awareness. Additionally, this will increase our number of email subscribers, which has a direct impact on both event attendance and marketing campaigns run on behalf of members.
Better Lead Magnets
You don’t have to make something really fancy for it to be better. It’s the quality of the content that is most important. You want your lead magnet to be good & useful.
In fact, Digital Marketer says you want your lead magnet to:
- Be ultra-specific
- Be one specific thing
- Speak to a known desired end result
- Provide immediate gratification
- Shift your relationship
- Have a high perceived value
- Have a high actual value
- Be able to consumed/used quickly
So with that, a good example might be “Grand Opening Checklist for New Businesses to Open in City in 2 Weeks” where as a bad example might be “300-page Case Study on Hosting a Ribbon Cutting.” You might still get a few contacts, but not as many and they will be very different people. While these might be the same deliverable, try renaming it to communicate the value.
Recommended: Why Your Headline Matters & Free Analyzer
Next Step: How to Create Your Chamber’s First Lead Magnet & Deliver via ConstantContact
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