This is my third email on the vital topic of keeping your marketing and your business simple, manageable and effective.

If you've read anything about marketing over the last decade or so, you'll no doubt have heard about “lead magnets”.  Reports, videos, audios, software or other tools that you offer for free to attract potential clients.

You might have a lead magnet already. Or you might not have quite got round to making one.

The trouble is, most lead magnets aren't all that effective.

There's been a tendency in recent years to focus on “easy to consume” lead magnets. Checklists, summaries or very brief reports.

And while it's useful for your audience to be able to consume your content easily, that's far from the most important criteria.

If you want to build credibility and trust, your lead magnet has to be hugely valuable to your ideal clients.

A few years ago Pardot did a study that revealed that 63% of people had been disappointed by content they'd received. And of those, 97% said it damaged their trust with the brand, 23% said they'd never read content from that brand again and 46% said they were only slightly likely to do so.

A lead magnet isn't just there to get an email address to allow you to start follow-up marketing. It's got to create huge value for your potential clients in a way that's not readily available anywhere else.

If your lead magnet is just a list of 5 tips they could get from anyone else then it simply isn't good enough.

A powerful lead magnet can work wonders for your business. Not only does it attract email subscribers, but you can use it as follow-up from presentations. You can offer it via direct mail. You can use it with a referral strategy to multiply the number of people who enthusiastically refer you.

Most important of all, if your lead magnet is genuinely valuable, it gives you confidence in your marketing. Rather than feeling like you're being pushy or self-centred when you market, you'll know that your lead magnet focused marketing is inherently valuable for your clients.

That will give you the confidence to do more of it rather than shy away from it.

It makes all of the rest of your marketing so much simpler when you've already proven you can add value and you've already built credibility and trust.

But for that to happen you need to invest time in creating a great lead magnet. Just hacking together a few tips or republishing an old article won't cut it.

It has to be the kind of thing that blows the socks off your ideal clients.

Do that, and you're halfway to having a paying client.