A Lead Magnets Gem From The Inbound Conference You Should Know About

We received several comments about the article we wrote about the Inbound marketing conference. Most thanked us for highlighting the changing world of digital marketing and where to focus to keep up in the new year. Others enjoyed seeing the "Big Papi" David Ortiz chest pump. All in all, it was a great conference, and we learned a lot while meeting many great and inspiring people along the way.

This article is about a tool we discovered that enables users to create a lead magnets eBook, list, or other valuable asset and create it from several of your blog articles. Of course you need blogs in order to benefit from this tool. If you need help writing blogs for your business, please consider our blog writing service.  

How to easily create a lead magnets

One section of the article described how to leverage existing content to double lead generation through the use of lead magnets. The author of the presentation was from a company called Beacon. See their claim in the image to the right. 

They make an online product that enables marketers to assemble a set of blogs, all relating to one topic, into an eBook or another type of asset. When these eBooks or other assets are used on a website, they entice visitors to provide their information in order to receive the offer. That is why they are called lead magnets.

We mentioned that we were evaluating Beacon during the writing of the Inbound blog. Several subscribers asked for our feedback about the tool once the evaluation had completed, so here goes.

Review of Beacon for creating lead magnets from your blog articles

Creating an account in Beacon is simple, as was the process of connecting it to our Hubspot instance. Once connected, we were able to see listings of all of our blogs in Hubspot. I should also note that Beacon also supports the same workflow with Wordpress. For this eBook, we decided to use articles that were educational in nature about the Inbound Marketing methodology.

We selected these blogs to be included in the eBook which we decided to title "Inbound Marketing Guide for Newbies":

• What is Inbound Marketing and Why Should You Care?
• Will Inbound Marketing Generate Results For My Business?
• 5 Reasons Why Inbound Marketing is Better Than Outbound Marketing
• You Don't Have to be a Big Corporation to Have an Effective B2B Inbound Marketing Campaign
• Little Known Ways that Inbound Marketing for High-Tech Businesses Generates Great Leads
• 9 KPIs to Measure Inbound Marketing Success

Once we selected these six blog articles, then Beacon started to do its magic and assembled them into an eBook. What's more, the tool assembled the articles into the document in an editable fashion with a cover page, table of contents, introduction, about the author, chapter breaks and a call to action at the end. If you do not have standard text for these sections, then you will have some writing to do. The TOC was automatically generated and provided for clickable links within the PDF which is an important and really cool feature.

We then went back and integrated the lead magnet into each blog that is included in the eBook since the title has the context to the topic of each article. You may ask, isn't that just duplication? Well, yes it is, however, you do not know the path a user will take on your website because it is rarely linear, they hop around from page to page. They may never see several of your blogs that relate to a topic that may be important to them. By combining them into a lead magnet, you perform a service for them while also create more opportunities for conversions.

Here is how I integrated it into each blog:

As an extra bonus, download the eBook that unravels the mysteries of Inbound Marketing with expert tips for beginners called Inbound Marketing Guide for Newbies.

Our assessment of the Beacon tool

Overall we loved the tool. Throughout the process, we sent the Beacon team questions which they promptly answered. None of my questions were required to complete the process, but because I planned to write this review, I wanted to be sure I understood their intent.

Key Points:

• Beacon did the heavy lifting of migrating blog content and formatting it in a professional way. I think this point is one of Beacon's strongest factors since the design it creates is professionally done, and it saves the time and effort of hiring a graphics designer to format the eBook.
• We wrote new content for the introduction, and about the author sections of the document which you would have to do for any eBook.
• Within a few hours, we had a PDF for our lead magnet.
• The internal links in our blog articles are relative, meaning they begin with a "/", not the full URL. Since the eBook is viewed by prospects outside of our domain, we had to update all of the relative links manually. This was not a big deal since we reviewed all of the content anyway.
• We thought that the table of contents could have been formatted better than it was since it spanned two pages. The Beacon team provided tips to improve it.

Here is a link to the finished eBook: Inbound Marketing Guide for Newbies

Conclusion

Beacon comes with our highest recommendation. All marketers struggle with the time to generate content for their website. Any tool that helps to automate the process should gain your attention and evaluation. Beacon has a free version and a paid version with more features for companies of multiple sizes and agencies. If you give Beacon a try, please share your experiences in the comment section of this blog. To learn about how to attract qualified leads, please download this free eBook. 

Bristol Strategy is a full funnel inbound marketing agency and inbound sales agency offering the full complement of services to enable our clients to surpass their business objectives by transforming the way they engage with their buyer on-line.  Reach out to us to learn more about how our experience and capabilities can help your business grow.