Refresh lead magnets quarterly

Put a recurring one-hour slot in your calendar on the first week of each quarter. Invite whoever owns the website and whoever owns sales follow-up. Without a date, this never happens, because nothing is visibly broken.

Make a sheet with one row per lead magnet and these columns:

• Landing page visits in the quarter.
• Conversion rate from visit to download.
• Downloads in the quarter.
• Leads from that magnet who booked a meeting or became an opportunity.

The last number matters most. A magnet with fewer downloads that produces meetings beats a popular one that produces nothing. Your CRM, for example HubSpot, should hold the source of each lead. If it does not, fix that first. The chapter Track submission rate by source shows how.

Look at the trend, not only the level. These are my starting rules, and you should adjust them to your volumes:

• Conversion rate down by a fifth or more at similar traffic: the offer is going stale.
• Traffic down but conversion steady: the problem is distribution, not the magnet.
• Downloads healthy but almost no meetings: the magnet attracts the wrong people.
• Meetings per hundred downloads clearly above your other magnets: protect it and promote it more.

Keep a magnet that converts and brings meetings. Leave it alone and check it again next quarter.

Refresh a magnet whose topic still matters but whose content has aged. Retire a magnet whose topic has moved on, or that has pulled in the wrong audience for two quarters in a row.

Refreshing is cheaper than starting again. In order of effort:

1. Change the title and the promise on the landing page. A sharper title alone can move conversion.
2. Update the examples, numbers and screenshots in the file. Put the year or quarter on the cover so readers see it is current.
3. Add one new section that answers a question your sales team heard this quarter.
4. Change the format, for example turn a guide into a checklist or a calculator.

After a refresh, give it a full quarter before you judge it again.

Take the magnet off your forms, pop-ups and navigation. Redirect the old landing page to the replacement so links in old emails and posts still work. If the content is still useful, keep the file in your resources without a form in front of it.

Do not delete the page and leave a dead link. That wastes the links you have already earned.

Every quarter, plan one new magnet or one major refresh. Take the idea from the last three months of sales calls, support tickets and customer interviews, not from a brainstorm. Ask: which question did we hear five times, and what would answer it in ten minutes? Match it to the buyer's stage, as described in Lead magnets that work.

Add a column for the decision and the reason. Next quarter you can see whether refreshed magnets recovered and whether your thresholds were sensible. Tighten them as you learn.

• Judging magnets by download count alone.
• Retiring a magnet without a redirect.
• Refreshing five things at once, so you cannot tell what worked.
• Keeping a magnet because it took a long time to make.
• Skipping the review in a busy quarter, which is exactly when decay goes unnoticed.

Each quarter you have a decision recorded for every magnet. The share of leads who book a meeting from your magnets rises or at least holds. No live form points to an outdated offer, and your newest magnet answers a question your market asked this quarter.