The Killer Combo of Free Content with Paid Promotion – Jordan Gal – MicroConf Growth 2018

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0:08[Applause] the kindest thing Rob said in that thank you for the intro the kindest part of that was monthly updates alright cool the downside of Gong last is that the attention level is questionable the upside is that I have the privilege of thanking Rob and Mike and Xander in the entire team and asking all of you to give them a round of applause another great microcon thank you okay so this is microcon growth so that's what we're gonna talk about we're gonna end things off with a very actionable talk I want to make sure that you guys can come away with something that you can use in your

0:59business next week it's actually a multi week campaign but you get my drift so what we're gonna look at is a campaign that we ran between January and March of this year so very very recent that's my excuse for doing my slides yesterday and what we did was we combined free content with paid promotion of that content and that led to some great growth for so that's where we're gonna get into real quick thanks to rob you guys already know I'm Jordan gall I run card hook with my business hubby Ben Fisher over there I've been our software provides ecommerce merchants with a customizable of checkout process and cart abandonment

1:38software as well that was our first product I also co-host the bootstrap web podcast with my good friend Brian castle Rory Brian thanks for listening everybody that came up and said hi okay keeping in tradition this is my why these are my three little buggers shout out to my wife taking care of them while I'm here thank you so though that's the reason I do everything that I do now you get to see them and meet them alright ready is this where we do we're gonna talk about marketing more specifically we're gonna talk about content marketing how many of you guys do content marketing in one form or another okay so

2:17it's it's a lot I have been pretty slow that whole thing I don't feel like we're very good at it and it was always difficult to justify because the ROI seemed very far off we're in the e-commerce space there's a lot of amazing content and it never made sense to me to try to like how are we going to break through that noise so I've had our difficult time kind of deciding to put resources toward content marketing but paid advertising I'm cool with it has a direct relationship to ROI you spend money you get clicks you get signups it's it's just more straightforward and therefore easier to justify but sometime

3:00in January when we were working on a new release of our product and that was kind of giving us the confidence to make a big marketing push I knew that we needed to do something other than just paid advertising and what it's not really that I came up with this is not that original it's just that the first time it hit me that we could combine content and paid advertising to do something effective so that's what we did and it started to dawn on us how to do this how to put these two together to make it direct ROI with free content and that's what we're gonna talk about today so

3:38we're gonna run through a six-week campaign that we ran and then basically look at the skeleton of that of so you can insert your particular situation for your product for your audience and so on so you can execute on it okay so how the thing that opened it up in my mind was thinking a little bit longer term and what that really means is what we're doing is we're taking free content we're gonna promote it with ads to build a retargeting audience and then we're gonna make them the offer so the first interaction with our brand is never a sign up for a free trial it's always

4:13content and then what we did is we thought about it longer term and we said okay how would we want to tell the story over the next few weeks with this content and so that's why we started to break things out and and kind of identify what we wanted to do so the first we want to do is we wanted to insert ourselves into the conversation we wanted to get attention what that attention does is it bought us the ability to to have some mindshare at least have some credibility so that was the next step to establish credibility and you do that by not talking about

4:47your own product but by talking about your insight into the market what's happening ideally what's happening outside of what you're doing like this is just a trend in the market and we're helping you understand it then you've earned the right to talk about your product and now it's in the context of what's happening in the market so it kind of makes sense that they need your product because this thing is happening in the market that helps us build the audience and we can finally make an offer so it's a little bit longer term thinking that what I was used to in the paid acquisition didn't direct ROI okay so let's look at the

5:18real example of what we did first post get attention so we looked around at what we had going on and sometime in December we had cracked through 100 million dollars in processed revenue in our product so that was our okay that is the best thing we have at hand to get attention so what do we do we write a blog post saying what we learned from processing 100 million bucks in the in the market so then what do we do with that kanta it's just on our blog or we don't have this big audience we have a decent-sized email list but nothing major but it's not like people are

5:54waiting for our blog to come out so we promote it so here's a Facebook ad showing how we promoted this 100 million dollar blog post right what that does is it starts to build up your retargeting audience okay next step we start to talk about things other than our product so this is what we call the trend post and this is again to build credibility so for us this was funnels that's what's happening in e-commerce in our world things are moving toward funnels think people are thinking in terms of funnels it's just a different form of acquisition and we wanted to identify that but we're not talking about our

6:31product yet we're talking about this thing is happening and you need to know about it and then of course we promote it as in in my eyes it's useless unless you promote it so now we're starting to combine okay we're spending money and it's to get people to a blog post but there's a larger purpose okay third post now we have earned the right excuse me we haven't earned the right yet we have one more force to go so this blog post is more about like how can we help them given what's happening in the market so we just said here's this big market trend this next post is still not

7:09talking about us it's now talking about what do you need to know how can we help you succeed given that this whole thing is happening in the market and then of course we've promoted now one more post now we finally have earned the right to talk about our own product so our product helps you build funnels so now what we've talked about is funnels is the new thing here's how you what you need to know about that and how we can help you and now we've started to introduce our product but now it's in context it's not here's what our product does isn't amazing it's this whole thing

7:46is happening outside of us and you need to know about it and not by coincidence that's what our product addresses what we see is happening in the market this is what our product addresses and of course we promote its right so you now you start to get a sense of what's happening its blog post one little retargeting audience then blog post to larger target and then it starts to build it starts to build and starts to build now we drill even further down into our own product so this is our like differentiating feature the thing that people sign up for our product for is our post purchase upsells so we now have

8:27a blog post right we've earned the right we've gone from market to trend to our product to now our killer feature so we've kind of look we've looked at it in a multi-week sequence and we've started to drill down so now this is where we talk about our specific killer feature and of course we promote it so now we're starting like gain momentum in our Facebook retargeting audience we're building up emails so are we done nope now we repurpose all of that Conte to get the most out of it so posts 2 through 5 not the attention getter but the what's happening in the market all

9:06the way through our killer feature we wrap that up into any book right if you think about it you have a post that talks about the market and slowly drills down further and further you add an intro you add a conclusion you have any book what do you do with the e-book promote it so we ran Facebook Ads and then we also used it as an exit intent pop-up I cannot stress to you how surprising it is how well eggs in 10 pop-ups work if you match the right value to your audience this thing converts it like I don't know 4 or 5 percent just every day every day so it

9:41doesn't work if you just throw it out there like Center for the email list but if you understand what people are looking for especially if you've built up that credibility and they've seen you before and you've gotten their attention and you've provided them value outside of yourself and so on this thing worked really well alright so now let's look at the campaign overview what do we have we have our attention getter we have our market trend to establish credibility we're establishing further credibility by offering them help in what's happening in the market and what you need to know then we started to focus on our product then we hit them up with our

10:15killer feature and then we wrapped it all up into an e-book repurposed it all right now the interesting part so the results were very surprising I did not expect it to work as well as it did and let's let's start to break it down ok so each post was promoted for seven days after published so it's published on a Monday promote for seven days published new blog post from what the new blog post and so on in total over those like five or so weeks we spent a little over four thousand dollars in ads we got a hundred and twenty seventh rasam in almost all of them from the

10:54retargeting audience almost nobody saw a blog post click through to our site and signed up if we were trying to go in that like short term view of things we would have not seen very much results but the retargeting the free trial' ads after someone was on the retargeting list that's what brought in the trials so it's $32 per sign up we converted roughly 30% of those so we got 38 new customers out of it our price point is pretty healthy it's 300 bucks a month so for a hundred and eight dollars per paying customer we got $11,000 in EM RR that's kind of crazy multiply that by the year it added

11:34a hundred and thirty six thousand bucks in AR our check out Oscars move by the way that is amazing so four thousand bucks not spent adds a hundred and thirty thousand bucks in mr AR AR I was like we we got to do this all day but we still want more what do we do for more we have like a thousand new emails we have this big retargeting list what do we do webinar so now what we did is we took our one of our best performing like superfan customers and we said Nate you have like a big Facebook group you have your audience we have our audience let's

12:13do something together we'll give you an affiliate link so what we wanted to do is put on a webinar that showed success real success this guy's made like a million dollars in our product over the past year yeah you made a million more dollars so you went from a million revenue to two million and hired a bunch of people it's like a perfect success story so we said that's like that's the hammer so we've built up all this credibility we've got trials and then all of a sudden we're gonna show people exactly how to use the product with real success what do we do we promote it so

12:44we ran Facebook ads for it and now we sent out an email to the list that we just generated from this whole campaign so we want more results this brought in 360 registrations we converted nineteen percent for 68 new trials converted roughly 30% of those and ended up with another twenty one customers so that's what the webinar added the total campaign results were like absurd four thousand bucks in spend led into this two hundred thousand bucks in air our so again in my my log every six weeks every six weeks every six weeks what what this did for us was kind of open up the the right so

13:28you see I went from a Content non-believer of like how we really going to get attention to okay how can we really simile exploit free content and promote that using paid advertising still give value but the goal is obviously always to bring in trials so it added two hundred thousand dollars and ARR in the back of my mind right the revenue is good but it depends on your point of view I'm I'm in this for the enterprise value for the value of the company two hundred thousand dollars in ARR where's Thomas Murphy what's the multiple these days for for SAS even if we're gentle its what five to ten so

14:08this campaign for four thousand bucks and spend added a million to two million dollars in enterprise value for the company now I'm like I'm dancing so the point of this conference right is not free to talk about what we did it's it's how do you do it and I think this is repeatable I think it's just a skeleton and yes there are certain factors and so on but I think I think a lot of us can apply this to our businesses depending on what market you're in and so on but this is what it looks like how do you get attention ideally you already have attention right we we did not invest in

14:44content marketing and in building up an audience in that way so we had we needed a way to start the conversation with getting attention then we talked about the larger market we helped them succeed in that market we talked about our post the differentiator we repurpose that content that we still use to this day and then we did the webinar so again with this in mind that we want to go a little bit longer term we want space between the initial contact and the offer and that point of it is to drive that retargeting on audience as big as possible and make them the offer there

15:20so let's look at what it actually looks like the attention post that the question that we wanted to answer was how do we get attention and for us ecommerce these days in the Shopify were with marketers it's real straightforward it's just dollar amounts and screenshots and like arrows and Lambos that's just the way the market works so we knew to get attention in our market it was 100 million bucks not like some you know something else promote with ads and then we target to the actual call to action the market trend posts was what's your unique insight into the market so we wanted to make it like dramatic we

15:58wanted to say the old way of doing e-commerce there's this new way and if you're not doing it in this new way you're gonna start to lose so we identified this trend that was happening outside of of our product entirely there's a great medium post that I should have linked to called the greatest sales pitch I've seen all year and it's about drift and it goes through a lot of this this narrative on like identifying a trend that's happening outside of your product where you can kind of point to and say that's happening one way or another for them it was immediate conversations instead of email okay next up how do you help them

16:36so you've you've identified what's happened in the market and now you're starting to build a relationship with them and saying this is what's happening in the market here's what you need to know to succeed in that market again not talking about your individual product finally you've earned the right to talk about your product what is your product do in the context this is the trend that's happening our product helps you succeed in that trend and then you drill into the salivating drooling what does everybody want I mean right all of us have that hopefully have that killer feature of this is why people sign up this one thing whether it makes their

17:11life easier makes their invoicing better makes their purchase orders more easier manage whatever your killer feature is that's what we identified here in this and then we wrapped it all up right so you know you're repurposing so it's efficient you're still promoting I mean every step of the way it's just promote promote front and then retarget and then the killer piece that last final piece was the webinar that showed proof again outside of your claims so brought in a third party so up until now is your point of view and then finally the webinar was the hammer of okay here is a third-party credibility someone who's

17:53succeeding with the product alright get after it here are my slides I went pretty pretty short didn't I I don't think anyone behind I think the last talk but I'm happy to take questions all right let's get started with questions sorry got me a bit off guard who has questions all right there's one up here and then I'll come back there hi thank you so to clarify you have the first attention-grabbing email and that creates a retargeting audience and yes everything you do is to build the retargeting bodies okay oh so all the other remaining emails get sent to anyone who was that first email created

18:35the audience yes I didn't want to go too deep into that but the the once someone gets pixeled then you have them in a custom audience and so we we once we had them in a retargeting audience we then promoted the free trial' but we also promoted the next blog post of them all in all the other blog posts yes it was like get the next one in the series yeah we made it sound like it was like this series of things like here coming up next is this next one and if you go to the Carter blog you'll see all all the posts so you'll see the call to actions

19:11that are in line some of them I think all of them will have a next intent Papa because that works for us some of them have the free trial call to action and nobody took some of them have a sign up for the email list I think also the the exit intent pop-up during the campaign was sign up to get the next one in the series yep are you doing different retargeting audiences like if you sign up for the the first blog then you're in that list and they don't get another offer you're pushing them number two or is it just a general bucket and you're

19:46you're pushing all the different blog posts sequentially how's that working yeah we did we did but just a bucket for the campaign so it wasn't like the audience that we had prior it was starting with this one how do we start to build it up and then he was all the same bucket anyone during the campaign and we just kind of would rotate the once you've seen a blog post you get free trial offers and then once those run out then you're getting blog posts and then again you're getting free trial offer so it was it was a mix but it was the same bucket of people okay a

20:22question over here so you know the ad spend is part of the investment the other part is time and energy and you know worker hours so how would you estimate that and also how would you repurpose the existing content for the next campaign are you gonna target a different segment that might the the they haven't seen the content and might still be relevant are you producing new content what is the like you know five-year strategy for this yeah the it kind of caught us off guard how well it worked so we don't have like a concrete plan on how to do it again next month right you have to we didn't want to just

21:02repeat the exact same thing we looked at it really as like a like a coming out to the market campaign and so that that's why it was like here's our what we call thought leadership even though that's a strange word to use for it or at least I don't like it but we wanted to establish ourselves as as as a company that was doing things like for a reason like with ideas behind it and what we thought our opinion on the market was so I think the next campaign most likely won't be as effective because unless we really nail the next idea but I think what really

21:38worked in it was that was like nailing what people thought was gonna happen at the same time we spent 4,000 bucks and ads we barely touched the market if we ran the exact same campaign and excluded people that were already on the list I think it would be maybe not as effective but close right all right here so I believe you said you had a 30% conversion from the signups to paid is that right how does that compare to your sort of benchmark normal conversion of trial to paid I that is pretty much our normal oh it is okay so they weren't higher or lower they're

22:18just yeah what I did here was I just identified the ones that we can directly attribute to the ads in this campaign okay I guess what I'm asking is where they hire so they weren't higher quality or any different quality from what you saw that's to be determined okay I hope I hope they're just as good another quick question so how did you determine budget per post like how much do you did how did you determine how much money to pump into that yeah that's the that's the one thing I feel very stupid about because we had a budget I think it was 45 bucks a day for the initial and then some more

22:50for the retargeting and last week we upped that to a hundred bucks a day from the 45 and we should have done that as soon as we thought it was working we should have done it so that yeah we knew we wanted to spend some money on this and and you're right to the the previous question we spent a good amount of money on the content because we wanted this to be this evergreen flag that we were putting down saying this is what we think is happening so we hired a really good content writer and that cost a lot but I saw it as important for this

23:25campaign and also for the longer-term credibility that came along with these posts and this this e-book and this content that that we put out there hi how did you decide how and who to target in this campaign okay how much do I reveal Ben look-alike audiences work really well for us for existing customer lists that's the single best performing audience and then there are tools out there that allow you to scrape emails from Facebook groups and our market happens to be very very active in facebook groups that's where people go to get advice find their gurus sell their courses there's just a lot of energy and activity in facebook groups

24:13so we found the ones that we thought were appropriate and used those as custom audiences and then created look like audiences from from them all right over here I've I've never done anything any kind of retargeting campaign like this but as you were laying it out it actually looked really familiar to me because it's exactly what I'm doing in email sequences and so but but I wonder about about the differences and the opportunities because I imagine you're already doing email sequences about like say somebody you're getting in the retargeting campaign that wouldn't necessarily sign up for a lead magnet and so you're warming them up you know

24:57on your blog posts or so I wonder about those ideas of what you think if you could compare and contrast this with with an email sequence strategy and maybe why you think you're doing this in addition to instead of just not trying to get them into an email sequence and do exactly this through email I think email is really hard these days getting people's attention getting people to read the email getting people to opt-in to begin with and so we saw if we were just aimed at the email we were just gonna miss out on ninety-five percent of traffic that didn't often and so the audience is just so much larger to be

25:37able to retarget to once they hit the page and also just removed the it removed getting them to opt-in as a goal it's just it just removed it entirely yeah we want them often we had the excellent n pop-up and but we were gonna mark it to you one way or another so if you didn't opt-in you we still treated it like the look you you were a target you were a prospect so once you click on something that says how to do X in the Shopify market and e-commerce or so on you you're part of our prospect list and therefore we just started doing the retargeting and the

26:11truth as you mentioned the the similarities between email and and and retargeting the the way we've seen is the right way to do retargeting is in a sequence it's not retargeting the same ad for 30 days it's one ad for three days different ad for five days content ad for a few days back to free trial back so it's really like a sequential let's say 30-day campaign on on retargeting so they get pixeled and then they get trial ad and then content ad and trial ad and content ad over the 30 days after they get pixeled which is pretty similar to opt in and then get

26:48value and get value and get value and then get the the offer so just so I'm understanding the mechanics correctly that's retargeting was it just in the facebook network or we're using other ad networks in your retargeting we were also using Google yeah but almost all of our activity came from Facebook but it's you know it was it just as easy to get the pixel I don't know if that I just say Google I all of our activity happened Facebook excuse me but we did retarget in Google and it didn't work nearly as well as as the Facebook Ads so basically when you they clicked on the

27:23first one you would only show it to them on Facebook like the second article is after they completed certain things in this sequence is that correct yeah once you get pixeled looking at free content you're getting free trial offers and then if we come out with a new blog post then it makes sense to promote that to you also and then back to free trial offers any other questions for Joe has a question in the back all right there's on here too

27:53hey so I feel like we need a flowchart here something it's all these questions are about sort of how how the process works so so each piece was promoted for one week and then no longer promoted and then the next piece was promoted is that correct yeah so did you try just promoting the first piece the whole time instead I guess what's the the grounds for having the five different pieces so if if we thought about it from their point of view like if we were self-conscious about it we'd be like is anyone really gonna pay attention like along the way and well we just ignored the fact that they weren't

28:34we were just we're just going to tell story for six weeks we're gonna get attention and then talk with this and then this and then this and this and hope that people kind of capture it in that order and there's no real way to control that I guess you could really go all the way in and identify what someone has seen and then show them the next thing but this was more blunt so we just looked at it like from our point of view we're like we're just gonna talk about this in sequence and hope that we capture as many people in the beginning and so there are links in each blog post

29:05to the previous blog post so you can navigate around but we just kind of marched right on with our messaging and maybe that's not ideal but that was kind of the only way in our head that we just kind of justified or got around the worry of well what if someone sees this first or that next and what should we do here we just kind of went bang yeah and we also knew that it was leading into the book so we knew that we were creating this content releasing it and getting the most out of it the truth is at first our plan was to write the book

29:39we said we want to come out with a book that talks about our point of view on the market and then as we started writing the book and like outlining it we were like this is just a bunch of blog posts that's like where the idea originated and we said why don't we get the most out of this thing I just remember that as you're asking it when we get the most out of it by just breaking it up and dripping it out there so if our goal was the book we didn't really care if it was gonna be perfect and who what order are you gonna read it

30:06in and so on we just said let's just get the most value out of what we're working on and that's when we said well let's just publish the book at the end and let's just pull out chapter 1 chapter 2 chapter 3 in chapter 4 so if you look at like how would you start an e-book that you want to talk about the market and get like attention credibility you wouldn't just go into your features you would talk about here's why we built the product here's how it helps you here's what the product actually does and here's our killer feature so it's it's one narrative and we just tried to get

30:36the most out of it and then as the retarget list got built an email list got built it kind of dawned on us like we have this captive audience they're warm we just gave them a bunch of good stuff people are signing up so let's capitalize with the with the webinar while we have attention so in the future the the model may not be exactly this but the model is okay if we want a big promotion down the line how do we build it up build it up build it up so it has maximum impact when when we when we pull the trigger back here so now that you've

31:09got these folks through your purchase funnel and there's ninety or so of them I know it's super early but now you're activating them are you seeing anything differently in the data in terms of how they're interacting with the product or so we've done something we've done like a another partner webinar it was actually a live event back last August and they were not good customers so they signed on we had this huge August that felt amazing and then very quickly they started leaving because they were not right so we're really happy that this this group is much much better so we have to kind of learn from it and make

31:45sure we do identify the right audience because this this group is just much better so we have to kind of tease out like why what what makes them different is it how far along they are is that an ambition level is it willingness to spend is it you know what are the characteristics that that make that group better than the previous one back in August all right we have time for one more question hey thanks for the song you mentioned that email is becoming more more difficult to work with for you and Facebook and Google where the channels that you were working with for this particular test that you're running is

32:20there other channels that you're excited about or it's kind of on your radar for pursuing this sort of thing I think what what Ankur mentioned earlier with with partner webinars what we find is that when we can reach into someone else's audience with their credibility that's the ideal so when so some people know about our product and they dismiss it as too expensive so in the Shopify market we have one competitor there are 37 bucks a month we start at 300 a month and it goes up to several thousand a month so people we get chat every day like are you serious am I missing where

33:01the starter tier is or what what do you what are you talking about so that we ATS an issue to overcome so when when we get the credibility of somebody else ideally that has a Facebook group or a big list and they have credibility we try to work with them our ideal is working with them then using our product and then like touting the results to their group so we're like using one one step in so again email not that it's an afterthought it's just not our main thing and I think it's the same reason the webinar worked well because it wasn't us talking about it people look

33:36at us and like it's too expensive how can I possibly trust that it's gonna get me roie if it's that expensive a lot of our customers pay 79 bucks a month for Shopify so we're asking them to pay double triple quadruple what they pay for the entire platform for this one app and they're a bit perplexed by it but if they hear from someone that they admire so that that's our version of it that just works better for us where someone has a captive audience and they have the credibility of that audience and we kind of slide right into there thanks again Jordan [Applause]