What is a lead magnet?
A lead magnet is something that you give away for free in order to ‘attract’ or ‘magnetise’ leads.
A lead magnet for coaches is a valuable free resource that you offer to your social media followers or website visitors in exchange for their contact details, typically a name and email address.
How will a lead magnet help you as a coach?
The purpose of a lead magnet is to provide immense value to your ideal client and target audience whilst also building trust with them.
Let’s face it, it’s very rare that a new client will just fall into your lap without having interacted with or consumed your content for at least a few months.
Your lead magnet will help you to show your ideal client that you know what you’re talking about, you’re not just a load of waffle. You’re a pro and you have useful insight, information and experience to give.
Don’t forget… a good lead magnet strategy will also help you to build a solid email list that you can retarget with other marketing strategies in the future.
Oh and if you want to read about keeping your current clients in the first place, then we’ve got a blog on that (of course)… How to Improve Client Retention in 2024 >
What makes a good converting lead magnet?
An effective lead magnet is one that is superbly specific and adds genuine value to your audience.
Lead magnets work very well with cold audiences, taking them from people who don’t even know who you are, or are maybe just following you on social media but haven’t really interacted with you yet and turning them into much warmer leads and people that are nearly ready to take the plunge and hire you as their coach.
The aim of the lead magnet is to help push them over the line with falling in love with everything you have to offer them.
Sounds easy right? 😅
What lead magnet ideas are there for coaches?
In terms of your online fitness coaching business, a lead magnet could be one of many things. So we’re talking a webinar, an eBook, a workout plan, a nutrition or recipe guide – to name a few.
Put very simply, your lead magnet should fix a pain point for your ideal client.
So do some research. Your current clients are invaluable here. Talk to them and ask them what their pain points are.
- Is it not knowing what to eat on a night out with friends so that they don’t ruin their progress? Boom, there’s a restaurant guide for that.
- Is it that they don’t fully understand the impact of menopause or the female cycle on their training and strength goals? Boom, you can make a webinar on that.
You see where we’re going with this?
So the bit that you’ve been waiting for…
In our experience, here are our best lead magnets for fitness coaches:
- A free Facebook group
- eBooks
- Free assessments
- A webinar or course
Now that we’ve got that out of the way, let’s delve into each one in more detail and give you some real value to take away and implement with your own lead magnet strategy.
A Free Facebook Group
Nope, they’re not dead! Groups like this are alive and kicking. We know this as our Asset Academy Community Group is a hive of activity with online coaches just like you, chatting daily about recent social media updates, trends and ideas to help grow their online fitness business.
Facebook groups help to build trust and loyalty with you and your brand. They’ll give you regular opportunities to chat to your leads and nurture them further towards becoming a potential new client.
You might even have existing clients in your Facebook group too, so they can also help with spreading the love for you and your coaching services.
Want to learn more about how to build trust and loyalty for your fitness business, we’ve got a blog for that >
eBooks
A staple for our own Asset Academy coaches. Offer a free custom eBook, like a recipe ebook, a nutritional guide or a cheatsheet to help your new leads learn more about the ways in which you can help them.
Utilise assets like the ‘Costa Summer Cheatsheet’ or the ‘Five Guys Restaurant Guide’… if you’re part of the Asset Academy then they’ll be branded for you and ready to use within 3 days… (just sayin’).
Allow your leads to download these assets for the small cost of just their email address.
They get a useful and informative guide centred around their current needs/pain points, you get the contact details of a new lead that is currently seeking support with the exact problem that you can support and fix!
It’s win, win.
a Free Assessment
This could take the form of a free discovery call or even a quiz that your new lead can complete, because let’s face it, we all like to either talk about ourselves or learn more about ourselves, so this type of lead magnet performs really well.
Pop a link on your social media or add a lightbox to your website to promote the free assessment.
One thing to note though, whilst this is a good lead magnet idea for coaches, it’s also one that doesn’t necessarily return you an abundance of leads straight away.
This type of lead magnet is for the very warm lead, someone that has quite likely consumed a lot of your other content and is now finally ready to take the next step and actually discuss becoming a client.
So be patient with this type of lead magnet, don’t oversell it, and let it burn over time to help generate more leads for your fitness business.
A Webinar or Course
This is the big one.
This is where you can add the most value to your new leads AND your current clients.
This is the next best thing to giving a live presentation, so let’s break it down. You want to do your research on a webinar or course topic.
- What do your ideal clients need to know the answer to, pronto?
- Why will having this information impact their lives or business?
- How do they make this knowledge work to their advantage?
Are we talking about nutrition, training, lifestyle hacks or something else?
And off the back of it? Offer the opportunity for the lead to book a discovery call with you or give them further access to the rest of your resource library or free Facebook group.
You really can be the gift that keeps on giving here.
Need some presentation slides?
How do you tell people about your lead magnet?
Now that you’ve got your led magnet ready to roll, you need to tell people about it! Of course, it’ goes without saying that you can shout from the rooftops about your lead magnet on social media.
Pop it in your bio, message it to new followers or just chuck a story on with one of those ‘add your email here’ stickers.
Already got an email list? Send it out on your weekly email, as a standalone offer or as a side note amongst your main email topic.
Once you know that your lead magnet is a good one and it’s been received well by your new leads, you might be in the position to put some money behind it and push it via Meta ads or similar.
Key takeaways
- Haven’t got a lead magnet? GET ONE.
- There’s no right or wrong lead magnet, just the right one for your audience. So do your research.
- Turn your lead magnets into funnels. Don’t just stop at the download or free course (or whatever lead magnet you choose), continue to nurture that lead into a fully-fledged loyal and trusting client.
what's next?
You’ve got a couple of options.
- Need some more ideas on lead magnets? Head over to our Asset Academy and take a look at how other coaches are doing it >
- Read up on how to streamline your social media here >
keep up to date
Thanks for reading our blog, we hope it’s offered some help in your own fitness website build. If you’ve got any comments or questions, please feel free to leave them on here or drop us an email on [email protected] and we’ll get back to you as soon as we can.
We’ve got more blogs for you here > Make sure you check back regularly to keep up to date with all things fitness branding.
