# Personalizing Your Marketing: Why You Should Be Niching In Realtime – Brennan Dunn – MicroConf 2017

Channel: Rob Walling
Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=54QiSeu_3kY
Duration: 12 min
Language: English
Words: 2215
Transcript page: https://viewrankai.com/tools/youtube-transcript/54QiSeu_3kY

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[0:15] All right, so I am I can see down here. I'm really excited to share this talk. So, I geek out on all things uh automation and personalization. And I think that what we're going to be talking about now is going to be something that is going to be really common when it comes to how marketers

[0:32] operate over the next few years. Um I've been doing it on my own website for the last 2 years. I've been personalizing the content that people see depending on who they are, where they come from, what they've done. And it's been line for line the most profitable code I've ever written. I'm going to share with you a few of the

[0:48] things that I've done. So, the typical way that a lot of us operate is we put up a you know, a new product, a new website. And we bring people to the website. The issue is that these people are often different. You know, one you know, you might have freelancers who come to the website, agency owners, somebody who's not even a freelancer yet. And the issue is they're left thinking, "How do I make this work for me?" And whenever people need to ask that question, when they need to think, "How can your product

[1:19] help me?" that's an issue. Because if you're making them need to think about how what you're telling them is going to benefit them, you know, there's there's a miscommunication. There's something lost in translation. As oftentimes like I said, people have different personas. You know, you might have a freelance web designer who is looking at your at your website. You might have a development agency owner who's looking at your website. You might have somebody who again is looking to potentially get into the world of freelancing who's looking at your website. And this is the issue I had back when I ran PlanScope, which was a SaaS that I sold last year

[1:55] through uh Thomas who's here. And um I remember I would have agency owners who come to me and say, "If this software helps freelancers, this can't help us. You know, we're an agency. We're we're not we're we're you know, we're better." And uh this this is really frustrating for me because I knew that I could help both sets both freelancers and agencies, but by having a general marketing site that tried to speak to everyone, I was really speaking to

[2:24] nobody. So, the thing that a lot of us the conclusion many of us come to is, "I know, I'll niche. I'll niche down. I'll speak to one group. I'll speak to one pain, one problem that people have." And that works. I mean, it works well, but the issue is you're turning away people when you position yourself very strongly. So, if I'm saying that I, you know, that I help freelance web designers, for instance, learn how to price, I'm turning away the development agencies. I'm turning away the person who is not yet a freelancer from, you know,

[3:02] acting on what I'm what I'm offering. Likewise, if I think I'm going to niche by uh targeting development agencies, I'm turning away those who do not identify as development agencies. And so on for people who are just looking to get started. So, what we often do is we come up with like these industry-specific or these problem-specific landing pages. We create content that we silo on our website. Um the example here is Help Spot, where they have all these different kinds of landing pages that target higher education, health care,

[3:36] what else? Uh finance, transportation. So, the idea is if you're googling around for like transportation uh help desk software, you might land on Help Spot's industry-specific landing page. And yeah, it's they're speaking to you, but then you go to the home page and it's back to general copy. You there's a a lack of continuity often between the siloed targeted content with the rest of our site, with the rest of

[4:03] our our brand. So, what if instead of niching our product we niche the entire funnel? And what if we could do that on the fly? What if we could dynamically change the content people are seeing based off of who they are and what we can infer about them uh based off behavior that we've observed. So, you're looking now at uh

[4:25] my Amazon home page. You can probably tell I'm looking to build a gaming PC cuz it's all, you know, GPUs and stuff. But, Amazon knows who I am. I have an account with them. They know what I've been looking for and browsing for. So, they're they're providing me with a personalized home page. Netflix knows what I watch. They show me movies that they think I'm going to like and, you know, I go to netflix.com, this

[4:49] is what I see. Facebook, obviously, uh knows who I am. They're not going to show friends of, you know, any of you. They're going to show my friends because it's my account. I'm logged into my Facebook account. We often the common thread with those three examples I just gave you are they're all they're all apps. I mean, effectively,

[5:10] right? You log in. You log into Amazon. You log into Netflix. You log into Facebook. But, there's a many of us who who create software, we get it for web apps. We get that web apps are personalized. It's it's our content. It's scoped to the signed-in user. Why can't we do the same for our websites? Why can't we do the same for our blogs? Why can't we personalize our

[5:32] marketing sites? How many of you use an email service provider like Drip, ConvertKit, uh Infusionsoft, anything? I mean, I'm guessing most of you, right? So, we all use uh tools like this. What if we use these tools as databases? What if we could use these tools to power personalization on our websites? What if we could have it so when somebody opts in to like, let's say, a lead magnet or newsletter opt-in or something like that. Or they click a link in one of the

[6:04] emails we send them. What if that was an authentication event? Um actually, with Drip, for instance, whenever you click a link in Drip, you'll you might notice there's an underscore underscore s uh query string parameter that gets included. That is a unique ID referencing the individual who is now viewing the page. And we can use that to I'll I'll show you next. We can use that to use the email service provider as a data store. I mean, thinking like an engineer here, I'm thinking

[6:33] well, Drip holds tags and custom fields. I can store a lot of different stuff in that, right? I can store whether or not they're customers, what they've bought, uh what kind of business they run, how big their business is, revenue, whatever else I want. And then I can get that and push that over to my marketing site. I can push that over to my blog. And I can do fun things with that because I can use my blog and my website as a templating agent or engine that

[6:57] reads from my email service provider. And then this opens up a lot of possibilities. So, for instance, here's something that I've done. At this point, this is my uh kind of like site-wide call to action. You're reading an article, a little slider comes up. Again, thinking like an engineer here. I have multiple categories of content. I have articles on proposals, articles on

[7:19] pricing, on marketing, and so on. Somebody's not logged in yet because I or somebody's not authenticated yet because I don't know they're not opted in, they're anonymous. But I'm tracking the kind of content they're reading. And one thing I've started doing is if they are reading articles on uh proposals, and that's mostly the article type they're reading, the universal call to action they're getting is about how my lead magnet can help them close more proposals, then they go to my home page and the hero

[7:46] talks about proposal closing. Likewise, if they read a lot of stuff on pricing, they're now getting uh call to actions about pricing. That's been huge. Um likewise, to go back to Help Spot, what if we knew somebody came over by landing on an industry-specific page for uh higher education? Or maybe they came in and were referred by a, you know, a blog that talks about higher education and they're like, "Hey, you got to use Help Spot. Awesome

[8:12] product." And they link to it. Wouldn't it make more sense to do something like this when they link over, when they come to your home page? It should. It does cuz we want our messaging to be relevant. But again, most of us treat our websites and our blogs as static assets. But we can do this and we can do this easily just through some, you know, on-site

[8:30] personalization. Likewise, let's say they're on the pricing page. Why not talk about reinforce what it's for? Show some testimonials from higher education companies that are using Help Spot. This is the kind of stuff that if you do this, can massively impact your bottom line. And I want to give you an example of something I've done. So this is my main product, Double Your Freelancing

[8:50] Rate. What you're seeing here is the generic, default, sent from the server headline. If you're a developer and you show up and I know you're a developer, this is the headline you see. You're a designer, changes the headline, it changes testimonials, it changes the copy to be focused on design. I speak directly to the a designer. It's effectively niching

[9:10] on demand. And what this has done is back before I did any level of personalization on that sales page, if you showed up and I knew you were a designer and you showed up on the sales page, your value was 24 about $25. Since changing some simple copy on that sales page, um it's now at about $42. Not All I'm doing is changing copy. Like it's it's

[9:34] 15 lines of JavaScript. That almost doubled the revenue I get per designer who ends up on that on that page. And I'm able to since I treat my marketing site and my blog as a SaaS, here's Mixpanel, I'm able to see valuations across tags, across custom field values, across any sort of segment that I I want to see, and I'm able to get all this interesting data. Like for instance, I mean it's really hard to read, but developers are worth about

[10:02] twice as much as designers. That tells me I want to get a lot of developers right now cuz they're worth a lot, but it also signals that I could do a lot to improve the value of designers. So by having this data, by doing this kind of customization and personalization, I'm able to act on this sort of analytics in a way that I couldn't if I was just, you know, didn't do it you know, wasn't doing any

[10:26] of this kind of stuff. I get feedback like this all the time. I get feedback from people who are like, "Wow, like you spoke directly to what I need you know, what what like what I need." And I'm like, "Yeah, well if you follow the the trail back when you joined my email course, I asked you what your goal was in joining this email course. There was trigger links, you chose one. Now 2 weeks later you're on your on my sales page and it says exactly what you told me. That's not a coincidence. That's intentional and that works." Um so I would ask you, what can you do to start personalizing

[10:58] the experience uh that people have on your website. Russ said it great earlier today where our job is to lead people up the funnel to the next stage of the funnel. So one thing that you could be doing is if they're not on your if somebody's not on your list and they're on your blog, yes, show the opt-in, show the lead magnet, show everything else. But if they are on your list,

[11:18] why the hell are you showing them that? Show them something more valuable. Show them something the next step which could be your entry-level product or something like that. Lead them up the chain um instead of having a instead of let's hammering, let's say your blog or your site with call to actions that are all vying, you know, fighting against each other, you know, advertising the product and then

[11:40] the opt-in and all this stuff. Do one thing at a time and I can guar- I mean, I can guarantee that it will make things move in the right direction. So, thank you. My name's Brendan Dunn and I'm here through Saturday. So, if you want to chat personalization, uh I'd be happy to. Thanks.

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