You can have an all-singing, all-dancing website and thriving social media pages but, without a mechanism to capture the contact details of your followers or site visitors (a lead magnet marketing strategy), the quantity of traffic will have very little value.
Not everyone will want to register as a patient with you straight away – many of us require multiple touchpoints with a company before we become a paying customer. For this reason, it’s important to be able to contact the people who have shown an interest in your clinic or treatments by visiting your websites or following you on social media so that you remain in the forefront of their minds until they are ready to buy. These people are often referred to as ‘warm leads’.
With social media pages, the platforms own the data for your followers. If you accidentally contravene their rules, your page could be shut down without a moment’s notice and all your hard work – including your page likers – would be gone forever.
With this in mind, it’s essential to have an effective lead magnet and data capture mechanism on your website that will enable you to collect and own the contact details for your website visitors and follow-up with them in the future.
What is a lead magnet?
Before we go any further, let’s clarify what we mean by a lead magnet. Digital Marketer defines it as “an irresistible bribe offering a specific chunk of value to a prospect in exchange for their contact information. The goal of the Lead Magnet is to maximize the number of targeted leads you are getting for an offer”.
The challenge is creating the right lead magnet for your clients – something that gives enough perceived value for them to be happy to hand over their name and email address.
What makes a good lead magnet?
Different lead magnets work for different markets and audiences. On a daily basis, you probably see websites inviting you to sign up to their newsletters or download a free ebook. Video tutorials, white papers, workbooks and planners are also popular.
As a marketing agency, we’ve spent years at Cosmetic Digital creating and analysing lead magnets marketing campaigns for our clients in the medical aesthetics and dental arenas. We’ve found that, broadly speaking, traditional downloads tend to underperform. Many clinics offer an e-newsletter but sign-ups can be minimal. These days, people’s inboxes are inundated with newsletters, so your content needs to be compelling and relevant for people to want to receive regular emails.
A good lead magnet is something that answers an immediate need for your potential patients and give them value. Subconsciously, you want them to feel that if you give away this much value for free, imagine what they’d get as a paying client.
A lead magnet specific to our clients
Using the data and insights we’ve collated over the years, we’ve always been passionate about creating lead magnets for our clients’ websites that ensure high data capture/sign-up rates. We wanted to offer new patients on our clients’ websites more than just information on treatments. To do this, we created a Smile Assessment for dental sites and a Skin Assessment for our medical cosmetic clients.
Website visitors use the Smile or Skin assessments to answer key treatment questions, revealing what they want from their treatment and how they feel about their appearance. With a Smile Assessment, for example, they can rate their smile, select the approximate colour of their teeth, take and upload a selfie, and more.
To get the results of their assessment, all they have to do is sign up with their name and email address. They then receive their smile rating with practical suggestions about what they could do to improve their smile and they can even book a consultation straight from the assessment. Our clients that have this already on their website, have told us how effective it has been in boosting their enquiries each month.
At the client’s end, they are able to collect powerful data about potential patients to create a tailored response to their assessment. It’s a high value activity for both parties.
Our Smile and Skin assessments are examples of creating a lead magnet that is 100% targeted to the audience. The assessments are hassle-free to complete but give a personalised response that makes the recipient feel that you are interested in addressing their individual concerns.
Although our Smile and Skin assessments are used by multiple clients, they can all be branded and content customised to create a unique experience that reflects your clinic brand. This ensures that potential patients feel they are getting a service and signing up to a mailing list that’s specific to your business.
Start building your mailing list
Every clinic website hoping to attract new patients or bring back old ones should have a lead magnet and method for capturing contact information. As we pointed out above, this is data that you own. Anyone who signs up to your mailing list will have actively given you permission to contact them again. And it’s far easier to sell to a ‘warm lead’ than someone who’s never come into contact with your clinic before.
Want to know more about how lead magnets? Call us at Cosmetic Digital on 0115 9140 640 to start a conversation.
