On this week’s episode of The Engaging Marketer, I’m going to be talking about how you can completely waste your time with a website and not get any business through it, because that’s what most people do.
You see, I’ve been building websites for a very, very, very, very long time—since the ’90s, in fact. When I built my first website back in, I think it was ’98, I used a free website hosting platform at the time called 20m.com. The ‘M’ stood for megabytes, and it was called 20m.com because you got 20 megabytes of free hosting to put your website on.
Much like some of the online platforms work today that are free, it put a banner ad on the website advertising, so you get the website for free, they put adverts on it, everyone’s a winner. It wasn’t like today’s advertising websites where you can basically drag and drop and build a website, and it’s really easy, and anybody can do it. It was for nerds. It was for proper nerds, and I was a nerd, learning to build websites back in about ’98.
On 20m.com, I created probably about half a dozen, maybe up to 10 different websites. I know one of them was transformers.2m.com—you could get your own subdomains—so I had He-Man.2m.com, that kind of thing. I had to hand code them in HTML, images and JavaScript to basically build these websites. Proper nerdy stuff.
But one of the things I quickly cottoned on to is that you really need to build up a list of people—a list of fans or followers that can come back to your website when you send them a message. You know, something like, “I’ve got a new image for you to look at” or “I’ve added a new WAV file”—because there weren’t MP3s at the time—or “a new MPEG file”.
The way we did the emails was using, I think it was Perl as a scripting language, and there was a box for people to put their email address in. They’d write their email, you know, johnsmith@hotmail.com, pop it in, and it would go into a text file—a .txt file sat on the server—which was probably the least secure way of storing email addresses because anybody could access it. But remember, this was 1998. On one of these websites, the transformers.2m.com, I had a text file where people put their email addresses in, and it registered 2,000 email addresses in about a year and a half, maybe two years tops.
So I had 2,000 email addresses of people interested in Transformers who wanted to hear more information about them. Because back then, it was easy. Anybody could stick a form on a website and say, “Subscribe to my newsletter, and I’ll send you something,” and people signed up for it because that’s how it worked. Now, 26 years later, it doesn’t work like that. You can’t put a form on a website and say, “Subscribe to my newsletter” and expect people to do it.
I gave an example at a talk last week. One of our clients—this is a recent statistic from July 2024—had thousands of visitors per month to the website, but I do remember the stats for the mailer signups and inquiries. He has a newsletter form on his website because he wanted one—a lot of people in his industry have one. During July, he had zero people, none, squat, diddly, put their email address in and sign up for the newsletter. He has a “request a callback” button on the website where people can put their phone number in, click the button, and he can phone them back. Throughout July, he had none, zero, diddly squat people fill that in.
Because people don’t want to hear from you; they don’t want you to phone them up. I’m sorry if you’re a salesperson or a business owner and you’re thinking, “Where are all these people going to send me my information? Are they going to send me their details so I can phone them up and sell to them, and they can become my clients?” People don’t care about that. It’s not going to work.
So, what DOES work?
Well, he did have—and this is the important thing—89 people subscribe to his database, 89 people subscribe to his email campaign, using MailChimp. He had 89 people go into his database as leads with their phone number, yet nobody signed up for the newsletter, nobody requested a callback, but 89 people still went into the database, and 89 people went onto his newsletter, and 89 people gave him their phone number. How did that happen?
Well, it’s quite simple, and this is the difference between the websites that are successful and those that are not. It’s something called a lead magnet—a very simple concept. A lead magnet, if you’ve never heard the phrase before, is something of perceived value. It doesn’t have to be actual value, it doesn’t have to be monetary value, it doesn’t have to cost your business anything. It’s something of perceived value that your ideal target customer—and that’s important as well, it has to be your ideal target customer, not somebody that you don’t actually want to work with or can’t work with—will give you their contact details for, whether that’s an email address or phone number or both, in exchange for this item of perceived value.
Now, again, that’s where a lot of businesses get it wrong. They don’t understand the perceived value; they don’t understand what a lead magnet really is. A lot of people—and you may be thinking this yourself—think that a lead magnet is your brochure, your catalogue of products, or your brochure of services. All the stuff that you do—that is not a bloody lead magnet! Nobody actually wants that. Yeah, they may download it, but they don’t want it. It doesn’t create a need or a desire; it doesn’t solve a problem for them.
Here’s what your lead magnet needs to do
Your lead magnet has to solve a problem, or at least say it solves a problem. It doesn’t actually have to solve the problem, because with the greatest will in the world, most people that download your lead magnet probably aren’t even going to read it anyway. They’re not. They want the instant gratification of, “I’ve downloaded this lead magnet, therefore I now know how to do this, I now know how to solve this problem.” But the reality is they’re not going to, so they don’t. The way they solve the problem is actually by contacting you, so you can sell them your service or product, whatever it is that you do. I don’t know who you are, but that’s how they solve the problem, not by downloading the lead magnet. That’s just a signal of intent that they have this problem, and they need someone to solve it for them, and yes, you can do that.
So, this client’s business, for example, had 89 people go into his database, onto his mailing list—89 leads that he can call back, 89 people that can be re-targeted or re-marketed to become clients, and many of them do. They took a trial of his product, a module of his course. It was one module, a video module, completely free, about 90 minutes long. They put in their details, it gets sent to them, it’s all automated, doesn’t cost him a penny because it’s recorded anyway, it exists anyway. It’s really just for them to see whether they like it, whether it’s something for them. It’s for them to see, “What’s it going to be like when I start working with this person? Am I going to enjoy it? Is this the kind of thing that I’m going to want to do? Can I get a sense of it before I commit anything to paying money, before I even say, ‘Yeah, give me a call’?”
That is a fantastic lead magnet. Free trials, free demos, free setups—great lead magnets. But also ways that you solve problems, ways that you fix problems for people.
Now, I mentioned before that not everybody understands the concept of a lead magnet. They think it can be anything. It has to be something that people actually desire, something that people actually need, want. So if, for example, you are—I’m going to be careful what I say here because there are real examples of this—if, for example, you are a plumber, and your lead magnet on your website is, “150 different legal ramifications of plumbing” or “100 different questions you should ask your plumber before they start working with you” or “These are all the different types of bolts and joints that you can use in plumbing.” I’m getting a bit sarcastic now, but you get the idea—something really intricate that nobody really gives a toss about—that’s not actually going to work.
But if you give somebody something that they’re going to want, maybe, I don’t know, let’s say, “Seven different ways you can reduce your water bill” or “Seven methods you can use to increase the value of your property,” or “Seven ways you can sell your house faster,” and they’re all plumbing-related, such as bathrooms, kitchens, wet rooms, shower rooms, that kind of thing. That’s the stuff that people are going to want, people are going to desire, because it offers them something that’s actually valuable to them, something that they’re going to need. And then they go into your database, and then they can potentially become your customer. That’s how a lead magnet works.
Now, it’s important that you know why this happens because if you just have a website and all you have on it is a contact form, a “subscribe to my newsletter,” or a phone number, you’re leaving money on the table. People will be Googling you, they will be landing on your website, they will be visiting your website, but they will not be inquiring with you, and you’ll be losing business. You’ll be losing clients, you’ll be losing customers, you’ll be losing leads. If you do not have a lead magnet—and I cannot stress this enough—it is costing you money. But it has to be a lead magnet that people want, and it doesn’t just have to be one single lead magnet. You can have multiple lead magnets on the website, multiple lead magnets for different services.
An example of an effective lead magnet
For example, with Engage Web, we have several services on our website that we offer. Facebook advertising, content, social media—we’ve got lead magnets for all of them. If someone is on a social media page, they might get the offer of our social media calendar, our content marketing calendar, where they can plan their content in advance. If they’re on our search engine optimisation pages, marketing pages—we do this on most of the pages because this is the one we want to push people down—they’ll have our free SEO analysis. So, check out your own website, pop your email, pop your phone number, pop your web address into here, and it will give you an instant look at your website from an SEO perspective. It will give you all of the things that are wrong with it, and it’ll give you a checklist for how you can fix it. It does a technical audit of your website instantly and emails you the report.
That’s the kind of lead magnet that people want because it’s something of value that they get for free. If they were reading about SEO on our website and thought, “Oh, I’m interested in that, I’d like to know what mine does, but I certainly don’t want to phone up Engage Web and ask about it because some salesman is just going to try and talk to me about SEO and try and sell SEO to me, and I don’t want that to happen,” they can just pop their website link in here, and it’s going to email them a report instantly. Done. On their website. That’s of interest because they don’t have to speak to anyone, they can do it at 9:00 in the evening or 3:00 in the morning—it doesn’t really matter.
That’s what works, and we get far more people doing that, far more people filling that in, than we do filling in our contact form or phoning us up out of the blue. “Ah, I found you on Google; I’m interested in SEO with you.” They don’t do that. I mean, it does happen, but most of the leads we get via the website come through the SEO audit. Such as this, and you can try it yourself on our website—happy for you to have a look at it. Go to engageweb.co, look at any page on our website, and you’ll see in the bottom right-hand corner, there will be a “Take your own free SEO audit right now.” Pop a website in there, pop your details in there, and it will send you an audit of your website. It will tell you what is wrong with your website, and it’s instant. It uses really clever software, looks at all the tags on your website, looks at what you’re doing, and sends you a list of what’s wrong so that you can fix it yourself.
That’s what a quality lead magnet does. So, take a look at that, see what you think, and let me know in the comments. And please, make sure you set up your own lead magnets, and don’t leave leads on the table because it’s costing you business, and I will catch you on the next podcast.
About your host:
Darren has worked within digital marketing since the last century, and was the first in-house web designer for video games retailer GAME in the UK, known as Electronics Boutique in the States. After co-founding his own agency, Engage Web, in 2009, Darren has worked with clients around the world, including Australia, Canada and the USA.
iTunes: https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/engaging-marketeer/id1612454837
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/darrenjamieson/
Engaging Marketeer: https://engagingmarketeer.com
Engage Web: https://www.engageweb.co.uk
