Step one:  Learn what your market wants and how they want to receive it

So who is your market? Be specific! The more specific, the more personal you appear. You want people to think/feel “That’s me!” Creating that understanding goes a long way in the “Know, Like and Trust” of relationships

By creating a profile of your ideal client group, commonalities arise and that makes it easier for you to communicate to the whole group.

Be wary of creating multiple groups as this will increase your marketing effort. Each group requires a specific message for them to feel/think “That’s me!”

On the flip side, you can provide information in different formats and topics to suit sub-groups.

Some of us are auditory, some of us are kinaesthetic, others’ are visionary.  What happens is that when we provide everything through text we limit our marketability.

The easiest way of finding what your market wants is to ask them. You can do this by interviewing them on the phone, face to face or in small groups depending upon your skills, time and resources. Interviews are great when you want to learn the language your market uses as well as more about them. If you have the evidence regarding language, then a questionnaire can be the quickest and easiest way.

And if you really don’t want to contact the market first hand, you can look at what’s been published on Amazon, Barnes & Noble and other bookstores. By seeing the numbers of books, the words and topics addressed gives you a good indication what’s been done and is popular.

Step Two:  Create the content to suit your market

The basic formats for Lead Magnets are Text, Audio, Video and the combinations.

The most common statement from small business owner clients is “But, I don’t have content. I don’t have enough to say” And, that is usually after they have spoken passionately about their business for thirty minutes.

It doesn’t matter weather you have a product based business or offer services. You have content.

Every business owner is an expert in their area. If not, then they won’t have a business that will last that long!

By concentrating on the themes arising from Step One, you have topics from which to add your perspective and stamp. This is important in the Know, Like and Trust cycle. If you appear to be little more than saying the “same ole”, there will be little to distinguish you from others. This is your opportunity to demonstrate your thought leadership, your perspective. By doing this, you increase your attractiveness and likeability to the market.

Step Three: Add the Lead Magnet to your webpage

This can be to the homepage of your site, your blog, or even create a mini-site that just has your lead magnet. Well, it could be on all – the essential ingredient is to have an email capture mechanism.

People have asked if Lead Magnets only work online. The answer is no – you can hand deliver the lead magnet. But to increase the effectiveness of your marketing, it is much better to have Lead Magnets online so people can get the material when it suits them.

All your offline promotion can direct people to your website/page with your lead magnet.

Too many websites are little more than brochures, they cost money to create and maintain but don’t actually work for your business. Lead Magnets helps you to redress the balance and start to turn your website into a profit centre rather than a drain on resources.

Step Four – Promote your Magnet

What if you just add it to your existing marketing?

Instantly you are open 24/7, 365 days a year.

You are no longer open 9-5 five days a week.

People can consume you whenever they want and what’s so great about this is that you know they are interested in what you have written about or what you recorded because they have downloaded it.

Then it is up to you to build that relationship up over time.

The big emphasis about adding a lead magnet to your marketing mix is that you know what they are interested in, you build up a relationship so that they know they like and trust you.  Once they trust you, they will open their wallet.

Just think about how you buy.  Do you buy from people who you don’t know?  You might if it’s a low cost, low risk transactional purchase. Great, if you are in this market?  But with selling services that can be quite expensive, we need know how we can build that relationship so people trust and are happy to part with their money.

Here are ten ways to promote your Lead Magnet

1. Business cards

   You could have your url on your business card pointing to your lead magnet.  That’s important.  How many business cards do you give away in a week?  What are people going to do?  The first thing they are going to do if they do anything from your business card is look at your website.

2. Articles

   Whether you’ve got online or offline articles or whether you post articles in special groups or directories you have an opportunity to put a link to your lead magnet.

3. Your blog post

   You could put a call to action at the bottom of your blog post that points to your lead magnet.

4. Networking

   Every time you go networking you can tell people that you have a lead magnet, something on your website that you can download.  Not only that but it makes it easier for your vendors and suppliers to be networking for you.  They’re not recommending you as a sale, they can say “Oh, I know Samantha, she does that sort of work and I know she’s got an e-book you can download/a video you can watch”.  That’s going to be worth a lot.  It’s going to have more traffic coming to your lead magnet.

5. Google Ad Words

   These are great but I don’t recommend you do it at the beginning, it’s a more advanced activity.  Do Google Ad Words when you’ve proven that your lead magnet is magnetic otherwise you’ll be spending money and not getting a return.

6. Press releases

   You can do online press releases as well as those to go into magazines and papers of your choice that are read by your market.

7. Public speaking

   You can structure your talk so people can get more information by downloading  your information.

8. You can give testimonials

   People talk about testimonials as getting them from people.  Actually giving testimonials is a great promotional tool.  It means you are seen by people who are not in your usual circle.

   You are able to show people the sort of business you are in the way to give testimonials. Also, you build up links form other sites with testimonials.

   If you give testimonials and you give freely, it will actually increase your promotions, particularly if you then put your web address linking back to the lead magnet.

9. Social networking

   Twitter, Linkedin, Facebook and all the other sites that you could be using that reaches your market. Each of these can be regarded as a distinct tool as they appeal to different groups of people and the way you present the material matters to each platform.

10. Inserts in magazines and newsletters

    That’s a bit like Google Ad Words, it will cost money and you want to make sure that your magnet is magnetic before you do that.

You don’t have to spend lots of money to market your business.  You do have to spend money on learning how to do it but not to deliver it.  If you’re spending lots of money, I suggest that you look at different ways of marketing your business.

Now you have the four steps. These are the same steps I use in my own business and with clients. If you would like to learn how to do, go to Lead Magnet Secrets. Training starts on 24th March 2010

So, what? Well, social media marketing isn’t quite as easy as it would first appear. There’s a shift from sales messages to marketing through content. Even though content is what businesses have in huge quantities – understanding what are the gems that entices interest and which are kept for paid services causes some consternation. Also,  the old adage of familiarity breeds contempt comes to mind.

Familiarity means what we take for granted as common sense can be the very things that others struggle with. Ah, content, so easy yet so hard!

What’s been a struggle with the development of the programme is not the content but making sure it can be delivered using social media tools…Now that has been tricky at times.

As with everything we do at havemoreclients.com, this will be shared with people on the programme so, they too, can have programmes like this easily and efficiently.

So, there’s a collective Ah! at the office today – we’ve done it!