Effective Lead Magnets for Your Staffing Firm

Our digital marketing agency has successfully worked with various staffing agencies in Canada to help them solve a diverse set of digital marketing challenges regarding attracting candidates and business clients. Ultimately, staffing agencies are constantly on the hunt for new leads in both categories, but it can be challenging to find the most profitable channels through which these leads can be acquired.

That’s where effective digital lead magnets come into play. Lead magnets are one of the fasted and most cost-effective ways to land new leads for your staffing firm. 

What is a Lead Magnet?

A lead magnet is typically an incentive designed by companies and marketers to incentivize potential customers and clients to give up personal contact information about themselves, thus turning themself into a lead for your company. Online lead magnets are typically designed to elicit an email address and other contact info. 

Other contact info is often tailored with a delicate balance in mind. On the one hand, asking a potential lead for their phone number, location, or specific interest in your product or service may lead to valuable segmentation information. On the other hand, asking for too much information about a potential lead may turn off that lead entirely and see them head for a competitor’s website or lead landing page. 

The general rule of thumb is that there is a direct relationship between the amount of contact information you can safely ask for as compared to the actual value you’re providing in the lead magnet. The more value you provide, the more info you can seek from your lead without annoying them. 

Most commonly, lead magnets offer something of value for the potential lead. Sometimes this can be a physical item, such as a product sample, that is sent to the lead in exchange for the contact information they have provided. Still, most of the time, it’s in the form of downloadable digital content such as a PDF guide, webinar, template, checklist, white paper, video, case study, email course, access to a private group, resource library or eBook.

What Makes a Good Lead Magnet

1. It solves a Problem or Question that your potential customers or clients have.
2. If your lead magnet is not designed to provide some real value in terms of providing information or other value that the user can’t merely get quickly elsewhere, most commonly by way of a simple Google query, then your lead magnet will never work. After all, why give away your email address or other contact information in exchange for something you can get elsewhere without providing anything?
3. It underpromises, and over-delivers – Delight is too often overlooked from a customer experience point of view. What if you’re promised a particular item in the lead magnet, but then you get a bonus on top of that lead magnet item you were not expecting? That creates delight and helps to warm up your leads to the idea of your business contacting them and soliciting them.
4. Instantly Accessible – You could offer to send them something physical. Maybe that’s still a good idea, but why not provide your potential leads with something immediately accessible that gives them that jolt of immediate satisfaction?
5. Demonstrates Your Unique Value Proposition or Expertise – Standing out from the crowd is getting harder and harder. One of the ways to do that is to show off your unique value proposition or expertise along the way during the customer journey. Decide the best way to show off your knowledge or unique value proposition during the lead magnet process and use it to your advantage.

Are You Providing Enough Value?

Too often, I’ve seen companies running endless traffic-generating campaigns to lead magnet landing pages without first having thought through whether what they are giving away in exchange for the lead provides enough value. How do you know if you’re providing enough value? Simple, what’s your conversion rate? 

Of all the people that access your lead landing page, what percentage of them turn into a lead? Your next question should be: What is a reasonable conversion rate? The answer to that will depend on a few things:

1. The industry you’re in
2. Your typical sales cycle
3. How much monetary value do you ascribe to your leads
4. What is the lifetime value of a client or customer

If you can answer those, you can quickly work backward from those numbers to figure out whether what you’re spending to generate traffic to your lead landing page is worth the number of leads the page brings in. If you have a negative ROI on this calculation, chances are you need to increase your conversion rate, and one of the first culprits in low conversion rates I would look at would be: are you providing enough value?

Driving Traffic to Your Lead Magnets

Most of your lead magnets will take the form of a landing page with an embedded form. Driving traffic to this page can consist of any number of tactics, including:

• Paid Ad campaigns – explicitly designed to drive traffic to this page – for example, if you’re offering a Salary Guide for a specific location, you can run an entire PPC campaign around search terms related to people looking for local salary information.
• Social media channels – announce the lead magnet via your social media channels if appropriate.
• Email – promote the lead magnet to your existing clients/customers – sure, they’re already on your list. Still, perhaps they will find value in the resource you’re providing and will see this as the furtherance of your thought leadership, thereby helping to cement your relationship.
• Use your staff to help spread the word, both online and off
• Use Paid ad retargeting campaigns – hopefully, you will have had Google, Facebook, and LinkedIn pixels installed to retarget potential leads or people who have already expressed an interest in your website and perhaps even specific sections of your site.

Warming Up Your Staffing Agency Leads

Whether the leads you’re bringing in through your lead magnet are potential staffing agency clients or candidates that you will be placing with your clients, it’s best not to solicit your leads without warming them up somehow. After all, while your leads came in most likely at the top of the funnel, there’s no reason you can’t push them down the funnel a bit through some measure of automated processes before you make your sales pitch. 

One of the best ways to do this is to connect the form your leads are asked to fill out to an automated email system such as Constant Contact, MailChimp or other 3rd party email marketing platforms that allow for automated drip email campaigns.

These email campaigns may look as simple as a thank you for downloading email or may, in turn, be a more deliberate three or four-part email drip campaign with each email sent at specific intervals, all designed to move your leads further down the funnel before you make contact.

Examples of Lead Magnets for Staffing Agencies

Below I’ve listed some examples of what I think are some pretty good starting points for thinking about lead magnets you can develop for your staffing agency. Remember that this is not an exhaustive list but it should give you enough to start.

The possibilities for creating effective lead magnets for your staffing agency, both on the candidate and client sides, are plentiful. It can be a lot of work to develop, tweak and manage positive ROI lead magnets, but it’s worth the investment. 

Need help developing and managing lead magnets for your staffing agency? We’ve got the experience and ideas to drive the kinds of leads you want. Contact us today.