Ebooks, Guides and Reports

Whether you call your lead magnet an ebook, guide or report will depend on the how you are conversing with your prospect and setting up the expectation.

The state of mind your prospect in, is critical to the type of lead magnet they are more inclined to consume.

When your prospect/lead is in research mode, they are looking to learn more about the problem, and at this stage, they would be more willing to consume an ebook or a report.

This is a critical piece of strategy you need to consider when creating your lead magnet. What state of mind is your prospect in? Are they in research mode or are they in action mode?

So, let’s step back a little and define the ‘intent’ of your prospect. In SEO terms, it’s called search intent and is a good way to create buckets of prospects. Here is a great blog post explaining search intent - https://backlinko.com/hub/seo/search-intent

Now, if we take the 4 buckets of user intent

1. Informational
2. Navigational
3. Commercial
4. Transactional

Ebooks, guides and reports address the “informational” user intent, which is basically your top of the funnel content.  When creating these types of lead magnets, you should fully know where your prospect is and then plan your lead magnet marketing strategy accordingly.

So, are Ebooks or Guides or Reports the same?

Of course not. What you call your lead magnet is important to set the expectations of your prospect.

Ebooks are mostly your take on a problem and your solution based on your experience - for example, you could have 5 blog posts on a specific topic and you can combine those in an ebook lead magnet so that your prospect gets all the information in one go.

Guides can reference other people's work and even link to their work for further learning. So, the expectation when your prospect signs up for a guide is different, as your prospect already knows you are saving them time with research and providing them a guide.

Last but not least, reports are like Guides, but need to deliver some statistical data. Findings from a test, survey or other similar findings to educate your prospect about the macro/micro trends and why they are significant to understand in the context of their goal or problems.