Lead magnets got interesting again (thanks, AI)

If you run demand gen at a B2B company and your main lead magnet is still a PDF behind a form, this piece is for you. It’s about what to give buyers instead, and why that has got much easier to build.

Your buyers can get general advice out of ChatGPT in seconds now, without handing over an email address. So an eBook of general advice is a harder trade than it used to be. What still earns someone’s details is an answer about their own business, while they’re still on the page.

We’ve built two lead magnets that work that way: an interactive microsite for Microsoft Surface, and a process maturity calculator for Nintex. The Surface one has the numbers. People stayed for over 8 minutes on average, against an industry norm of 2 to 3. 60% came back, and it produced four times the leads of their traditional eBook (case study ).

Why is gated content struggling?

I’ll own this one first. We’ve made a lot of gated eBooks over the years, for Nintex among others, and some were very good.

But the deal gated content offers the buyer is a poor one. You hand over your email, you get a file, and the file sits in your downloads folder next to the last three. The marketer gets a name in the CRM with no idea whether that person cares. The buyer gets homework.

It’s worse for sales. A download tells them someone was curious for about a minute. It doesn’t tell them what the buyer’s problem is, how big it is, or whether they’re anywhere near doing something about it. So the follow-up call opens with “I saw you downloaded our eBook”, and everyone on that call knows how it goes.

The fix is changing what the buyer gets back for their details, so both sides leave the exchange knowing more than they did.

What did the Surface interactive microsite do differently?

Microsoft wanted a hero asset for the Surface range that drove up engagement with prospective buyers. It had to sit alongside the Surface device pages, double as a lead generation tool, and get people through to the costs page and the business cases.

So we built something that was, in our words at the time, “not quite a web page, not quite an eBook”. The writers and designers spent more time together than they would on a normal asset. The writers picked the copy that would work best visually, and the design team built interactive breakouts around it, so the reader clicked into the parts they cared about rather than scrolling past everything else.

It worked. Average sessions ran past 8 minutes, and 60% of people came back to it. The costs section, the one Microsoft most wanted people to reach, was one of the best performers on the page. It got there through a structured journey and high-contrast colour, and it ended up doing two jobs, as a sales tool and as a showcase for new leads.

This site really raised the bar in terms of the quality of content we have taken to Partners. The copy is beautifully written, and the interactive elements are keeping prospective buyers engaged.

Rob Stacey Partner Marketing Lead, Microsoft

What did the Nintex maturity assessment do differently?

Nintex sells process automation. The hard part was getting a buyer to say where they were today.

We built the Nintex Process Maturity Calculator to do that. A visitor answered a short set of questions on nintex.com about how their organisation ran its processes. They got a maturity score straight away and a report to download and take back to their team.

So the buyer left with something useful. Nintex got a lead that already had context: how mature the buyer’s processes were, and where the gaps were. That’s a better start to a sales conversation than “downloaded an ebook”.

We wrote the questions and the copy, designed it, built it into nintex.com on WordPress, sent every result into Nintex’s Marketo, and built the generator that turned each set of answers into a personalised PDF. The work order was signed on 20 December 2023, and by early February 2024 it was built, working and in review.

The PDF was the bit a buyer could forward to their boss, with Nintex’s name on it and a score about their own business.

What makes an interactive lead magnet worth someone’s details?

It answers a question the buyer already asks themselves, about their own business, on the spot. Everything else follows from that.

For Nintex the question was “how mature are our processes?”. For Surface it was closer to “which of these devices suits how my people work, and what will it cost?”. In both cases the buyer got an answer shaped by their own clicks rather than a document written for everyone.

The other things that matter are less glamorous. The result has to be something they can take away, like a score, a report or a costed option, or it’s forgotten by lunch. It has to land in your CRM with the context attached, so sales can see what the buyer said before they call. And you measure it by what each lead costs and what happens next, not by page views.

Get those right and the lead magnet becomes part of your B2B lead generation, not a campaign asset that dies after a quarter.

What do AI coding tools change about building a lead magnet?

They make the build the quick part. The Nintex calculator was a proper project: we signed the work order just before Christmas 2023, and it was early February before it was built and in review, with writers, designers and developers all on it. The AI coding tools I use every day, mainly Claude Code, can now get a working version of something like that on screen in an afternoon.

I know because I keep doing it. In the last week of September my AI tools built me 20 small web tools, each for one job, and I binned most of them within a day or two. I wrote that week up in a piece on throwaway software .

None of these look like rough prototypes either. They look impressive, which still catches me out a bit. I fear for the world of landing page builders. When you can describe the interactive thing you want and watch it get built, a template with a form on it is a hard thing to keep paying for.

The build getting quick doesn’t make the rest quick. Someone still has to pick the one question worth answering and get the result into your CRM with the context attached, and those two jobs are most of the work now. A lead magnet also sits on your public site and takes people’s details, so treat it as real software, with an owner and a security check, like anything else that holds personal data.

How do you build an interactive calculator without it becoming a quiz nobody finishes?

Start from the answer, not the questions. Decide what the buyer walks away with, then write only the questions you need to get them there.

This is the order I’d use:

1. Pick one question worth answering. If you can’t say it in a sentence, the tool won’t work.
2. Decide what they take away. A score with an explanation, a short report, or a costed recommendation.
3. Keep the questions few and easy. Every extra question loses people. Ask the ones that change the answer.
4. Connect it to your CRM from day one. Answers and scores should reach the sales team with the lead, as they did in Nintex’s Marketo.
5. Write the copy like a person. The Surface result came from writers and designers working together, not from a form with a logo on it.

If you want the wider case for adding game-like elements to B2B content, we wrote about that a while back (B2B gamification ).

When is a PDF still the right call?

Sometimes. If the content is a long reference piece people will print, share round a buying committee, or come back to over months, a PDF is fine. And if you can’t name the one question a buyer wants answered about their own business, an interactive tool won’t save you. It’ll just be a quiz nobody finishes.

The test I’d use is simple. What does the buyer know when they leave that they didn’t know when they arrived? If the answer is “nothing yet, they’ve got a file”, it’s worth building something better.

Frequently asked questions

What is an interactive lead magnet?

A tool that gives a buyer an answer about their own situation in return for their details, like a score, an assessment or a costed option, instead of a document to read later.

Is gated content still worth doing?

For long reference material, yes. For lead generation, a gated PDF tells you little about the buyer. An interactive tool tells you what they said and how they scored.

Does an interactive tool cost more than an eBook?

Usually, yes, because it needs design and development as well as copy, though AI coding tools have made the build much quicker. The Surface microsite got four times the leads of their traditional eBook, so the fair comparison is what each lead costs you, not what each asset costs.

Will it work with my marketing automation?

It should. The Nintex calculator sent every result straight into Marketo, so leads landed where the team already worked.

What makes a good question for a calculator?

One the buyer already asks themselves, like “how mature are our processes?”, with an answer that points to a real next step.

So what should you give buyers in return for their details?

Something about them, delivered while they’re still there. The best lead magnet answers a question the buyer already has, gives them something to take away, and hands your sales team a lead that already knows what it wants to talk about. The Surface microsite and the Nintex calculator both did that, and neither needed the buyer to read a PDF first.