Lead Magnets: The Fundamental Element Today’s Greatest Tech Companies Have Been Built On

If you stick with me, I’ll help you see lead generation and lead magnets in a way that could change your business forever. In fact, it could help your business to reach new levels in 2021.

Because, believe it or not, the greatest tech companies today have been built using lead magnets.

In order for you to understand what I mean, you first need to see lead magnets on a deeper level than most people do.

So, let me give you a new way to think of lead magnets.

My Definition of a Lead Magnet

Most of us have such a limited and basic view of lead magnets that we are missing out on how powerful they are and will be in 2021.

When most people think about lead magnets, they think about them on just the simplest level. They mainly think of a lead magnet as a PDF that attracts your ideal prospects and causes them to exchange their email address for access to it.

Don’t get me wrong.

This is a very effective way to use a lead magnet.
But you can think of that understanding of a lead magnet as the white belt version of a lead magnet compared to the black belt level.

Today, I want to give you that “black belt” level of understanding. 🙂

I don’t want you to think of lead magnets in the usual way.
I want you to think of them in the unusual way.

I think of a lead magnet at a deeper level than most people. ..

My Definition of a Lead Magnet: A lead magnet is something valuable that you offer to your ideal prospects in exchange for something of theirs that you consider valuable (usually information of some kind).

To get the most from my definition, you must understand some important things about lead magnets.

The 2 Things You Must Understand to Take Your Understanding of Lead Magnets to the Next Level

Here are the two things you must understand to use lead magnets at a “black belt” level:

1. You need to realize that a lead magnet can be much more than just a PDF file.
2. You must understand that prospects possess things of much greater value that they can exchange with you, besides just an email address.

When you truly grasp these two truths,  you’ll start to realize that lead magnets are all around us.

Lead Magnets: The Fundamental Element Today’s Greatest Companies Have Been Built On

As I mentioned at the beginning of this article, lead magnets are the fundamental element that the greatest tech companies of our day have harnessed to build their empires.

Yes, lead magnets are the primary method that successful companies employ to capture the attention of prospects (the 1st marketing fundamental) and attract them (the 2nd marketing fundamental).

That means that when you understand lead magnets in this deeper way, you’ll realize that the right lead magnet is worth millions, if not billions of dollars.

I’m not exaggerating.

Let me give you an example that I bet you’ve never noticed before, to prove it to you…

Facebook Was Built on This Greater Understanding of Lead Magnets

When you see lead magnets in the way I’m trying to get you to see them, you’ll realize that Facebook’s success was built on having an “unusual” lead magnet.

Once you see this and realize this is just one of many “unusual” lead magnets that great tech companies have been built on, you’re going to get more excited about lead magnets and their ability to help you attract prospects in 2021.

Facebook’s 3-Step Lead Generation Strategy That Led to Their Incredible Success

(IMPORTANT: Everything I’m about to share with you about their strategy is just from observations I’ve made as an outsider. I have no insider information.)

What was Facebook’s lead generation strategy?
Their strategy took place in three powerful, progressive stages.

Stage 1: The opportunity to connect with friends and family

The lead magnet they offered to us was not a simple PDF.
Here’s how the first stage of their strategy worked…

1. Give us your email address and we’ll connect you with friends and family.
Their marketing promise to us was simple but powerful.

Notice that Facebook didn’t just provide an initial connection with certain friends and family. They continued to provide new connection suggestions. But they didn’t stop there.

2. They allowed users to share pictures (information) in exchange for likes, comments, etc.

Think about this. Facebook was allowing its users to create content that they could share with other people on their platform (aka leads creating content for other leads).

IMPORTANT INSIGHT: All great lead generation strategies have a follow-up system that provides continual value – that way your prospect doesn’t just take your lead magnet and run.

Facebook took care of this need for a follow-up system by allowing their own leads to create value for each other (aka user-generated content).

3. Then they enabled their users to share videos (more information) in exchange for a chance to gain more likes, comments, etc.

This also offered a way for users to gain an audience and have a voice.

At each stage, they continued to offer users more functions/tools so that we could exchange much more than just our email addresses with them.

This first stage enabled Facebook to attract a massive amount of prospects. But they were just getting started.

Their next stage enabled them to set the stage to begin monetizing the whole thing. Watch what they did next…

Stage 2: The opportunity for businesses to connect with prospects and customers.

1. After attracting a significant amount of individuals with the offer of connecting with friends and family, they began to offer businesses and companies the chance to connect with prospects and customers.

2. To do that, they encouraged businesses to create their own pages where they could attract likes, comments, and followers. And they even encouraged businesses to create content.

Now think about how ingenious this was. By doing this, they accomplished two powerful things:

• They now had more content on their platform. This gave the users on the platform more reasons to keep coming back to Facebook and to stay on Facebook (more user-generated content for their follow-up system).
• They now had business owners who had self-identified themselves. That meant it’d be much easier to target them for the next stage – stage 3.

Stage 3: Finally, Facebook offered these business owners and companies a chance to advertise to the users (aka leads) they had gathered together on their platform.

It was at this point that Facebook began to make money on a level that they never did before.

I won’t get into this in this article, but you should also notice something important. Facebook chose to make money from the leads it had gathered in a much different way than most companies typically do.

Now don’t forget, this all began with a deeper, more “unusual” way of thinking of a lead magnet than most people do.

But even as different as it is, it’s still the same fundamental definition that I shared with you at the beginning…

“A lead magnet is something valuable that you offer to your ideal prospects in exchange for something of theirs that you consider valuable (usually information of some kind).“

Facebook’s Example Applied to My Lead Magnet Definition

Let’s take my definition and plug in Facebook’s example to help you see their whole strategy more clearly and simply:

• Something valuable that you offer your ideal prospects: Facebook offered this in the form of connection with family and friends or a connection with prospects and customers.
• In exchange for something of theirs that you consider valuable: Facebook got the user’s email address, but they got much more than that. They were able to build databases of users. A database that was valuable not only to Facebook but also to other companies.

What I’m NOT Suggesting

Over the years, Facebook has done some things with its user information that have gotten some people upset. (I’m not saying that they’ve actually done anything wrong. I’m just saying that some people have gotten upset with them.)

I’m NOT suggesting that you do things that make some of your leads feel uncomfortable or cause them to get upset with you.

You can actually use this basic led gen model that Facebook used without getting people upset.

In fact, many other social media platforms have used this same lead generation model effectively without seeing their users get upset.

I shared the example of Facebook with you today because I wanted you to see that this successful company really did build its business model off of a fundamental marketing strategy.

And it’s that basic lead magnet strategy that has brought them success in the past. It will bring other companies who use the same model success in 2021.

This is just ONE business model I’ve discovered after thinking of lead generation and lead magnets in an “unusual” way.

There are 11 other very successful tech companies I’ve documented that have used lead generation and lead magnets in an “unusual” way to build their company.

Many of them have built completely different business models off of this fundamental marketing strategy. And others have simply added their own variations to the different models.

If I had time to walk you through this list of companies and show you each business model or variation, you’d be amazed at how much opportunity there is for your company in 2021.

I, unfortunately, don’t have time to do that. I do want to show you another example of how you can use lead magnets in an “unusual” way.

I’ll do that in a couple of days. But first, I need to make sure you really understand why lead magnets are such a vital way to leverage the second marketing fundamental.

Stay tuned.

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