How to create a successful engagement tool

You don’t meet someone, think you could be good together and jump straight into getting married. (Well, sane people don’t, because you don’t yet know if they hang the toilet roll the right way on the holder. And yes, there is a right way).

There’s a bit of getting to know them, what’s special about them and how they might make your life better.

Pass that shoe horn… brace for impact… IT’S JUST THE SAME FOR YOUR PROSPECTS.

Enter stage left: engagement tools (sometimes referred to as lead magnets). Useful, value-first, self-contained pieces of content focused on imparting learning, insight or simply designed to help your prospects with something, whilst also brilliantly (but somewhat stealthily) showing them a little bit of your brilliance.

If you fancy creating an engagement tool, here’s a mini smorgasbord (a smorgas?) of ideas and things to consider to help.

Get specific about who it’s for. The great thing about creating engagement tools is that you can make them super-specific to a slice of your audience, so that you can tailor the content to really hit them between the eyes with its relevance. You can always version the tool for a number of types of audience.

Evergreen or monocarpic (ooh, get me with my planty know-how. It means a plant that flowers once then dies). Traditional wisdom tells us that the best thing about engagement tools is that they are evergreen – create it once and it remains relevant and useful for everrrrrrrrrr. But… you could create a brilliant engagement tool that is for a specific event, one-off problem or relevant for only a short time for your audience. Think about what this could be for your business.

Testing, testing, one, two, three testing. Engagement tools are a fantastic way to test out an idea for a larger-scale paid for products and services, such as an online course. You can quickly build a micro-course as an engagement tool  - e.g. a 3 or 5 email nurture campaign - using a tiny element of the larger thing, and see how your intended audience respond, what they like, what they don’t like… and then you have a pre-warmed audience ready for launch.

Get to know your audience. Even if you are not looking to launch a specific service, engagement tools are a great way to understand your prospects better. You can track who downloads your PDF checklist, you can see who clicks to download option A or option B on a landing page, and you can look where the drop off point is on your email micro course. All this insight is great for honing your tool and getting a clearer picture of your audience and what they respond to, so make sure you measure what is going on once your engagement tool is unleashed onto the world.

Say something different. As with most business activities, the more you make your engagement tool unique to your brand, with its own approach and saying something interesting that people haven’t heard elsewhere, the better it will be. So do some poking around (sorry, market research) to see what others are offering as engagement tools, and do something different.

 Make it a gem. I’m not suggesting you give away your crown jewels, but an engagement tool does need to give some value to the audience. Don’t be afraid of sharing a valuable tool or insight – you are demonstrating your expertise, approach and valuable insight, not how well you can google a topic and scrape it into a PDF. If your tool helps someone in a way that no one has done previously, they will be a fan. And what do fans make? Clients. Or advocates, which is just as valuable as they will bring you other clients.

Get creative with the format. Downloadable PDFs are ten-a-penny (well, to be accurate, ten-for-no-pennies-whatsoever). And I say that as someone who creates LOTS of them for the Tool Shed. But consider what format will showcase your content the best – perhaps people should sign up to get access to a series of short videos, or to attend a live webinar, or take a quiz, or to take part in some kind of game or competition as they learn?

Build a list (or don’t). I would say a key reason to create an engagement tool is to help you build a list of engaged people, who you can then invite to be part of other things you offer – such as your amazing, value-packed newsletter, or to entice them to pay for something. I have seen businesses put out engagement tools without asking for an email address, name or inside leg measurement. This can make it less of a barrier to access, so more people have eyeballs on your creation. But you have no idea who they are. Swings and roundabouts – so have a think about whether it suits your business aims best to swing it with a list, or go in circles without one…

If you build it. they won’t come. An engagement tool is part of your marketing, but just because you created it, it doesn’t mean people know about it. You need to think about how to market your engagement tool – so spend a bit of time nailing the marketing message that gives people a compelling reason to access it. And get a handful of testimonials from people who perhaps beta-test the tool for you, pop them in your marketing and give people the social proof they need to persuade them to access your brilliant engagement tool.

Once you’ve cogitated on these points, you are probably ready to create your engagement tool. In which case, why not mosey on over to the Tool Shed, where the latest Allotment tool is waiting for you: Creating a brilliant engagement tool. It’s free to download and you don’t even need to tell me your inside leg measurement.