The Perfect Content Marketing Strategy – Russ Henneberry – MicroConf Growth 2017

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0:15so super excited to be here guys to talk to you about my favorite topic content marketing and so um my wife's here she's sitting in the front they're taking pictures and things will probably escape right after this to go play some poker or blackjack or something but I realized last night just kind of how nerd or nerdy we all are like she was with me I went to the party and I was just immediately felt like I was in my element is my first time at this event but it's been an honor to be around so many smart people and I think I was talking to a guy last night and he was

0:58like I was like so yeah what are you up to man he's like well I do some development on whoo and I was like okay like you did anything on Shopify or like what about Magento and he's like well you know I don't have my clients don't have that many SKUs and him and I are just going back and forth speaking essentially a foreign language to each other because I like what my wife is just like this you know and I'm like I I realized last night just how you know the language that we've all sort of developed around this is this is such a cool place for everybody to gather and

1:36just talk about stuff that you know our spouses and our friends and our families are like dude just shut up about this stuff so I'm super pumped to be talking about content marketing so back in 2004 I was working doing direct mail for a book company we sent out book catalogs and we would send out hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of catalogs and I started catching wind alike is just like this internet thing looks like it's for real right I started looking at the web as a as another angle for me to to be learning as a marketer and the guy who owned the company calls me and goes

2:18arrests like I'm looking here at the internet and I'm typing into things we sell in stuff like that like why is my company not coming up and all my competitors coming up no idea like why are you asking me this question like I'm doing catalogs and direct mail over here I said why don't you ask the IT guy it sounds like an IT question to me no no no I want you to figure this out and from that point I got up I said you got it I'll go look into it so I go back to my desk I sit down and Wow here I mean I

2:57haven't looked back the digital scene for me is is where it says so much more exciting than the direct mail stuff that I was doing but I learned all about search and pay-per-click in eventually started to go back to the boss and say hey man like here's the thing like we don't have any title tags and we don't even meta descriptions and we need pages about this and this and this and he's like all right like let's let's start doing that and I got so into it and have since moved on I went in and managed about 30 SEO developers at network solutions and then moved on to manage

3:37the content strategy for crazy egg which is neil patel and he chose company went on from there and in work with salesforce.com doing content marketing and and and now work for digital marketer comm we just acquired a software-as-a-service called true conversion and we have things that we very much consider to be software as-a-service in terms of our products and i'm going to share with you today content marketing as it really works in any market but with a really specific spin on software and and and startup software companies so the the presentation is called the perfect content strategy it sounds like hype but I am going to show you six

4:22characteristics of a perfect strategy again my name is Russ you can tweet me at Russ Center Barry or you can tweet the brand at at digital marketer but we're gonna work today on improving your batting average because the biggest complaint about content marketing is that I write and I swing and I strike out right it's like man is this worth my time something that you know I speak to a lot of entrepreneurs but I don't think I've ever spoken to a group that is more time-starved than a a set of startup founders right like where you are just super super starved for time and so what

5:07you really want to work on I'm from st. Louis and there's one of my best one of my favorite players uh so you have to love baseball if you're from st. Louis or they escort you to the edge of the city and you get excommunicated but I want you but I'm looking to do today is to get so that you feel confident executing a content strategy and being able to swing and connect and what do I mean by that what I mean by that is pretty shortly after that dude called me in and said why am I not ranking for all these things I pretty quickly realized

5:38that it wasn't just about the title tags and the meta descriptions and this and that that's all sort of hocus-pocus stuff that today is pretty much table stakes like if you're not doing some on-page search and stuff like that on your site but I quickly realized it's about content right it's about actually putting something on your site just kind of like what we were talking about in the in the last session having a product that deserves to win essentially like having something good and so I realized this is about content but then I went all the way the other direction like I started holding hands with all the other

6:14content marketers and singing Kumbaya about how all you had to do is create great content and everything's gonna work out you're gonna get leads you're gonna get sales you're gonna get puppy dogs rainbows and ice cream but I realized pretty quickly after that that it actually doesn't work that way either so I went way too far to the other side where it was just like this is about just creating tremendous value that's it great value and you win that's not truly I'm here to tell you I've spent a lot of time trying to figure out and I'll present to you all that I've learned about how to connect content

6:53with leads and sales so what most people are doing is they're missing the ball when they when they create content whether that's a blog post or a podcast or video or whatever and what they do generally with their content marketing so just like well it's just create content like that's what it means a lot of times for people to go and execute content right they're like well I think this year we should do content marketing and it's like well what's that mean well that means we're gonna open up a blog or a podcast or a YouTube channel we're just gonna start producing awesome stuff and that is a gigantic mistake huge

7:30waste of time you'll you'll connect on a few things but the ROI will be very sketchy like you might you might win you you might not I'm gonna teach you how to again increase that batting average the chances of you winning at this game because it is a very very powerful powerful game so in this training we're going to cover six characteristics of perfect content marketing and how to execute it at the end I'm going to give you a template that I use and my team's use to actually execute content marketing the way I'm going to teach it to you today the first characteristic of content marketing that is perfect is

8:07that it is full funnel it has there is content that is utilized at all stages of the funnel so what do I mean by that the thing is that there's a big misconception and I actually ran into this last night where I was talking to a gentleman he said yeah I say we'd do any content marketing yeah we got a blog but that's not content marketing so this is a myth that content marketing is blogging okay this is not accurate content marketing is not blogging blogging is a a sort of important part of a good content strategy I've rarely ran into a business that couldn't benefit from having a business blog but

8:50it's not they're not synonyms okay the blogging is a piece of a good content strategy so what I want to I want to show you today this is probably the first of of a few different things that I want you to start learning some language around at least how we at digital marketer talk about content marketing so we consider continent we consider content at all stages of funnel so let's take a look at what that might look like what does look like for any business really you've got and I've kind of tilted this funnel to the side so it was nice and big and people in the back

9:27could see it but you've got aware evaluate convert and commit okay so this is a pretty standard marketing funnel here malik about a fancy thing where you got somebody out here at the aware stage they don't even know who you are I don't know there's an app for that right they don't know there's software for that and then they realize oh you do have this solution and so you become part of what any in this space this is not a something that somebody just kind of grabs like a stick of gum off of the like an impulse buy people are going to shop around the different competitors

10:05that you have in in your space so they're going to go through an evaluation stage I can choose you I could choose your competitor or I could choose to do nothing right which is a major competitor to choose to just not address the problem and then you get to them at point-of-sale out hearing a convert stage but then of course we all know and it probably more than anybody people that are in software know that you've got to get that commit stage right where after the purchase you get people to commit to your product use it get value from it right consumption of your product so or the value that you're

10:44giving so you may have heard these these little monikers or acronyms thrown around so tofu tofu tofu if you haven't heard that before it's kind of a weird way to think about the content the types of content so if you add something to your lexicon your marketing lexicon this trip this is a good one to add if you can start thinking about the types of content you produce and say am i producing tofu right now am i producing mo foo my true si both and this at this conference introducing a new foo tofu so to make it even weirder I've added this sort of section here called PO foo for this presentation

11:31and really what are we looking at here what will be what might we be measuring if we're looking at tofu mo food Buffalo foo so it's out here at the at the left you're just measuring impressions all right so it's like am I getting views on my videos or people looking at my blog are they socially sharing it the big mistake that people make is that out here and and we'll get in more detail about what is the types of content that you produce here but just so you know so we're spoiler alert the blog is really really powerful right there but it really really is terrible at this

12:09right actual point of sale conversion and that's so good so if you're measuring your blog saying WOW blog doesn't send any signups at all it doesn't convert anyone into customers the problem is you would fire your blog team or your content team or your outsource team or stop doing it yourself if you're doing it yourself and and throw your hands up and say content marketing does not work right my blog never gets me any sales so the problem is you're right you're measuring it in the wrong way you don't have a process to move somebody from hey you know I've seen you I know you exist I'm aware -

12:51how do I get somebody - into a trial into paid users and then how do I measure how do I use content to reduce churn so you really want to start thinking about am i producing content at the top of the funnel that is designed to drive awareness is that something I need right now I don't know it I don't know your business that well but ask yourself these questions do I need more impressions do I just need have you ever said to yourself I have this great awesome product just no one knows it exists and he's ever said that that's that's a good indication that you need a

13:28top of funnel content strategy but if it's not the problem right it's like I got traffic people know who I am people know what we are I just can't get them to convert so how can you get people in in this kind of business most of you are probably measuring trials in the middle of the funnel like how do I get somebody to just try it just just get me a trial then how do I convert people into paid users and then once I've done that if you feel like your job's done you're wrong it's time to use content to reduce churn and we're going to show

14:00lots of examples of all that so let's look at an example this is one of my favorite companies we use them at digital marketer I'll explain what they do just so you have some context they're called office vibe super cool app so we have about 60 people 50 60 people in the office at digital marketer and we want to know what the vibe is in the office like are people feeling good are people mad at the management do they not like the decision that we made here and so what the app does essentially is it sends them an email it sends all of us an email every Friday and says it might

14:36ask a question like does your do you understand the core values of your company and you might say and it has like a scale like that you could say oh I absolutely understand the core values and the mission of our company and all these things and then you click on it and then it it asks you some more questions like four or five questions super fast just to get the vibe of the office and then all that get sense to us as a management team to kind of get take the pulse of the office so super cool app super awesome content marketers okay these people are super super awesome

15:11content marketers so we're gonna look at I'm gonna unpack a lot of what office 5 is doing in this deck but I'm also going to show you some spots where it's like some should be doing better here and show you some things that I would recommend that they do but a lot of what they're doing you can just straight-up rip off what they're doing right just like look at how they're handling their content strategy and sort of apply it to what you're doing so at the top of the funnel remember what are we measuring here we just need awareness like we just need people to know that off

15:43vibe exists so what we want to start thinking about is you know what are people what sort of state of mind are humans in right because you might be selling b2b you might be some b2c we're also in human to human h2h right so you've got to get into the mind of that customer of yours that prospect so at the at the tofu stage it might be something like this where somebody says you know what I need to how do I set up an employee feedback program right that's a that's that's a good prospect at the top of the funnel for this business office vibe how do I set up an

16:22employee feedback program this kind of a query could end up as a Google search it could end up as something that somebody would ask at a conference like this like you'd be standing next to somebody and be like okay do you know how to set up a employee feedback program so what you're looking at here is an actual possible prospect with an intent and I'm gonna talk more about that important important word in content marketing intent really in marketing in general intent but let's move to the middle of the funnel where this guy has sort of evolved all right this guy has moved along and he's saying

16:57now like so he knows office vibe now exists remember he's in the middle of the funnel he's evaluating now how how does office vibe compare to tiny pulse a competitor right so in the middle of the funnel what are we looking to do how are we looking to move use content to move them forward we need to satisfy intent that is of an evaluative nature right this guy is evaluating the difference between office vibe and and the competitor tiny pulse bottom of funnel at the point of sale what are we looking to do here we're looking to convert right we're looking to you know it's almost equivalent to standing in this in

17:42the end the grocery store looking at all the toothpastes and you're about ready to grab one of the brand's right you're at the point of sale what kind of content does office vibe need here what kind of intent does does your customer have at that bottom of the funnel right before they're about the purchase super important I'm stand-in there with their wallet out like gonna choose between all the different things that they have you've just evaluated and then they have a question like it the last thing I like I wonder if office vibe integrates with slack like because if it doesn't I'm gonna go tiny pulse and so you want to

18:18anticipate intense at all of these stages of the funnel you can see that at the bottom of the phone this guy's hot he's ready he wants to buy he's gonna buy he's just either gonna choose you or tiny pulse at this stage right he's done is he's done his research now a lot of companies and I think software companies are actually the best at this is understanding just how important it is to retain the customers that you have but are you using content at that post funnel stage the PO foo stage if you start thinking about you know am i building tofu mo foo buffer povo so if we look at the at the

18:55post funnel content this guy's got issues with using the product now right and your content has to be there at all times 24/7 allowing the guy to now get move through what you would call the consumption stage right reason using the product getting success getting value so a query here might be something like how do I use that engagement report in office vibe like I can't even understand this report so if you take nothing from my presentation at all please take away that content marketing is not blogging blogging is really good at the top of the funnel but it's really bad at other stages right it's not it's not necessarily or at

19:40least the way we think about what a blog is you know so creating articles and videos and things usually is a very very good type of funnel activity but really bad at all these other stages and I'm going to give you us another spoiler alert here is it's usually better to start here or here okay forget this big ol the time vampire up here now that's coming from a guy who loves blogs loves top of funnel content but why poor more awareness into a leaky bucket right fix your content strategy down here and then start go just go nuts up here because you've got this all

20:21optimized you've got content at the bottom of the funnel that supports conversion you've got content at the post funnel that supports and keeps those those people from churning out so what is the second sort of characteristic of perfect content marketing the second characteristic is it is intent based so I use that word a couple times already but I'm gonna further define this because I really want you guys to start thinking about the intent of your customers it's different than understanding your customers avatar like a lot of people talk about that I think that's important you know their demographics and all these things it's more about their psychographics like how

21:02do they think it doesn't matter if they're thinking this when they're 30 years old or 80 years old or Thor man the female they live in San Francisco live in New York live in London doesn't matter if you can start figuring out different buckets of intent that would be a perfect fit for your business and your app you you're onto something and you can start to build your content strategy around that so let's start unpacking what what what I mean by that so let's look at intent at the top of the funnel again we got this guy here how do I set up an employee feedback

21:37program that's intent at the top of the funnel this guy's not ready to buy so if you're calling this guy after he shows this intent like if you're you know like if you ever opted into something at Marketo or like Salesforce or something in like two minutes later your phone rings it's like man I just booked I didn't actually take a blood oath and then they you know throw like marketing automation software because they are mark Marketo obviously so like nothing against Marketo I love their marketing but man are they aggressive and you know they're they are showing some super aggressive tendencies towards somebody who's really pretty pretty high up in

22:19the funnel but let's look at what intent might look like in the it from a different human being completely right different customer different intent bucket this person wants to know how to set up an employee recognition program so it's a different use of office vibe same same area of the funnel pretty high up on the top of the funnel not super hot and ready to buy but this this person is different from this person this person wants to set up an employee feedback program so the employee can give feedback this person wants to set up a recognition program so that they can start to recognize people

22:57who are doing cool stuff like give awards and stuff like that two things that office vibe does but different intent and needs different content to satisfy that intent at the top of the funnel every one of you guys I talked to yesterday my app does this or my software does this and it's and I'm be like well who's that for it's like well it's it it does this for this group of people but it also kind does this for this group of people and there's different reasons people come to us for that can you figure out I'm guessing right now you're thinking I know what those reasons are I know what those

23:29reasons are and I could build a piece even if it's just one piece whether it's a video or article or something like that at the top of the funnel that would cause somebody to go like this Jack I have that problem or I'm interested in that I started a guy yesterday who does stuff with caterers and it's like how do you get a caterer to raise their hands and say I'm a caterer people will tell you what they're interested in simply by going and reading an article and we're gonna get to why that's so powerful in just a second but in the middle of the funnel if we go past that's good best

24:08here so here's a third intent that someone might have at the top of the funnel so there's a completely different guy same group same same grouping of content top of fall awareness style stuff so how can I become a letter a better leader so office vibe does a lot of stuff around just making people better leaders because they know that the leader is the one that they must reach to sell their sell their product so let's look at some intent in the middle and in the bottom of the funnel so here does office vibe work on mobile devices okay this person this is a different intent this person showing more intent

24:48to buy than ever but then then the prior people at the top of the funnel you agree with that does it work on a mobile device isn't that a different question then how do I set up an employee recognition program this person is now asking a branded question about your application does it work well on mobile right and if there's no content there they don't know they just walk away it's like I don't know if it works on mobile that's a question mark in my head because there's no content to satisfy that intent so how about this one here at the bottom of the funnel who else has used office vibe and had

25:26success like I don't want to be the first one on the dance floor like office five like who else uses office vibe so a social proof style question here at the bottom of the funnel like right before I buy it's like anybody else use this like anybody else using this so if you don't have content here that shows who's using your software who else is using it and to quiet or satisfy that intent you just lowered your conversion rate didn't you you didn't satisfy that query right there in the person's head your conversion rate went down so how about intent after the purchase how do I

26:07charge change the default language from English to Spanish in office vibe if you don't satisfy that query that intent this person could churn on you they're like well now I got 12 people in the office they're speak Spanish and they can't understand what's going on in office vibe and so I might pay for this for another couple of months on accident but eventually I'm going to cancel right because I'm just I never figured out how to do this it's not in an easy way right I got a call customer service to figure it out or something like that if you use content they can access that 24

26:45hours a day and you create a good solid you know support knowledgebase around your application you're gonna reduce churn it's not hard this is no this it's really that crazy Arak rocket science I think what you're probably starting to think right now is no it's not rocket science it just takes a lot of time and I tell you what you're right it does it takes time it takes energy to get your content marketing sort of in a pile right it takes a lot of energy to do that and that's why I think so few people really do it right but as we get towards the end here I'm going to show

27:20you some sort of QuickStart stuff where it's like here's start here right and it I'll tell you that before before I get to that that big tip here is that the low-hanging fruit is in the bottom of the funnel right don't start way way up at the top so I've said that before I say it again because it's so important to reduce churn and to close deals right now if you're it brand new startup which I think this is the growth edition of micro comps so probably most of you like Mike was saying earlier are already moving I stand behind that statement a hundred percent now if I was starting

27:58talking to startup like complete starters and they have zero awareness maybe you do start with with some awareness stuff but for those of you that have existing customers and existing awareness in the marketplace people are googling your service comparing you to other people start at start closest to the money start as close to that money as you can with your content so number three the third characteristic a perfect content marketing is that is driven by assets assets and what is an asset so if you ever thought about a blog post on your site being an asset to the company you should you should have you should be

28:37trying to hit the ball every single time you produce something or what are you doing like why are you wasting your time writing this thing so at this point I like to make a distinction between two different types of companies that do content at the top of the funnel blog stuff the publisher the company that should be that is trying to compete with uh Men's Health magazine or The Huffington Post so Huffington Post is probably putting out four to six eight articles a day right are you gonna compete with that right if you're in the are you gonna try to compete with men's health calm if

29:20you're in the fitness have some fitness app or something like that no unless you are like if you're going to do that then do it like become a publisher but if you're not you still need content at the top of the funnel so Ezra's over here great great unbelievable marketer but how many pieces of content do you use to run boom yeah I mean at the top of the funnel one OK he's one badass article at the top of the funnel that he buys traffic to and I'm sure you'll talk about some of the stuff tomorrow Nestor you're talking about boom tomorrow but what I'm saying is either choose to be a

30:01publisher or take yourself off that hook okay that you have to be producing three times a week a blog post or a podcast or an article or something like that you either be a publisher or you're not right so you don't have to be a publisher you don't have to be creating ten fifteen pieces but you do need assets like he has that one piece it's a money piece right it's the one piece he drives his traffic into to warm that traffic up with some really nice top of funnel awareness style content he doesn't try to become a publisher he just publishes the one piece and then if

30:43he wears that thing out he'll go out and create something else right so if he if he goes and runs ads to it and in any fatigues the article he might switch it out maybe bring it back or something like that so I don't we talked about this a number of time so asset driven you must have these assets you really can't go into this game and try to play this game without something at the top of the funnel without really something at the bottom and for you guys I would say post funnel right you really need these pieces in place so let's talk about what we mean by that take this

31:16again go back to the intent at the top of the funnel how do I set up an employee feedback program super obvious intent for office vibe super obvious intent but do you have a piece in place it's like of course that's a something that our people are wondering but do I actually have an asset in place like this one here this is a amazing piece of content called employee feedback 101 very well done very well-written very exhaustive look at employee feedback and it they have one piece one piece is all they need on that intent and they drive all that traffic into that piece so some

32:00wandering at the top of the funnel like how do I set up an employer feedback program so this isn't just some random blog post this is he really I wouldn't even call it a blog post I would call it you know almost a white paper on employee feedback and what it is let's move to the middle of the funnel how does office vibe compare to tiny pulse a competitor will they have an asset for this intent are they that awesome that they would have something on that they actually do its and they can't rank for it they're not getting ranked for it so will they do they just

32:38go out and buy a super branded Google ad that just owns that that top result so that's an ad there that you're looking at I've office vibe verse tiny pulse and when you go to that page you're going to find a comparison between the two it's a money page it's worth a hundred random blog posts that you flipped against the wall that page with a hundred of those a thousand of those who knows how many write until you actually measure so let's look at here's a quick tip on this right so anybody to spend it has an existing application in the market a really any existing brand at all he said

33:19one of the fastest ways to figure out if this is worth your time in the middle of the funnel is just to Google your own brand and type the word verse next to it look at closed on Io I know they've done some stuff here it and I'm not sure if they're here today but look at what old Google suggests is saying like in the middle of the funnel there is enough demand for closed iover salesforce verse pipe drivers HubSpot verse base erm verse relate IQ so what comes up when you type that about your brand right if something comes up I would but you need

34:02it you need an asset there because that person is typing that in is worth a hundred people trying to figure out how to set up an employee feedback program they're not even close to being as hot as that person is they're comparing you against your competitor you want that traffic just create the asset it's a branded asset so create the page at the bottom of the funnel how about who else has used office vibe and had success is this on your site can I find this do you satisfy this intent well office vibe does they do a pretty good job they have they could do better

34:43I think but they have a bunch of logos right you've seen this exact setup on they're probably already on your site look at Salesforce so Salesforce one of the best things Salesforce does and I learned so much from from being on that content team is middle and bottom of funnel stuff customer stories who else is using Salesforce are they like me and can they get similar results and these are pretty you know we had I bet you there were twenty something people on the team that created these stories they were in the PR department constantly tracking down companies like Yeti here super hot company that is using

35:27Salesforce and telling that story and then just putting it out there right letting people choose at the bottom of the funnel like Oh tons of social proof like oh I sell a similar product to what Yeti sells yetis having tremendous success maybe I'll have tremendous success great piece at the bottom of the funnel the customers story is super powerful it doesn't need to be super highly produced it could be text or it could just be an iPhone video that people that people are taking that are just doing a testimonial but social proof at the bottom of the funnel is super powerful content and a great a

36:06great initiative for you if you're going to decide like we're gonna do content marketing and we're gonna start at the bottom of the funnel at the at the conversion stage a great way to start that is just to say alright let's send emails to the best customers we have and start drumming up some customer stories I want to start getting these out on Facebook I want to start getting these out everywhere so customers story at the bottom of the funnel but how about this one how do I change the default language from English to Spanish and office vibe will office vibe satisfy this intent posts funnel post purchase you know the

36:47answer of course they will so they have a page in their knowledge base about language preference preferences it's amazing how many apps don't have this kind of stuff where they just need to anticipate the intent of the customer or just go and talk to your customer service or open up Zendesk or whatever you're using and look at what people are asking and create pages at the post funnel that help these people because it reduces churn if for no other reason you don't want them to be frustrated of course so you love your customers but if you want your business to succeed and you want to reduce that

37:22churn level get out there and create these pages a lot of times you can have the engineers create those so it crazy egg I actually think my better contribution to crazy it was not at the top of the funnel but at the post funnel creation of support and working on getting the engineers to create the answers to all the questions that we knew our customers had beginning with the most important thing which a lot of you probably have this problem is how do I even install the damn thing I just bought your application how do I put it on a drupe site you know people who still use

37:59Drupal I don't put on Joomla how do I put it on WordPress how do I put it on Shopify how do I put it you know so a lot of you that's the very first thing if you got a post purchase and I can't even install the dang thing and I can't find any content about it now I'm frustrated and very likely to churn or refund or charge back things we love right churn and refunds of charge back so my so assets needed change as you move through the funnel you need different types of assets as you move through the model because intent changes as your

38:32prospects are moving through the funnel think about that the assets you need change because the intent changes I can't keep showing you blog posts you're ready to buy this thing like what am I giving you instead of oh here's another blog post about something super awareness centric and top of funnel it's like dude like I want to buy the product like what could you give me about that well heat you want another blog post you know are you in another article you want another podcast right so everything has its place number four is the one that people forget to apply but you really need to be considering ascension and

39:13what do we mean by ascension a digital marketer we use this term a lot how do we ascend somebody ascend the relationship right so I just met you I shook hands I just let's say I walk into a bar right and I'm like I shake someone's hands think about how what normal dating relationship forms right you go from like my wife and I at some at some point didn't know each other and now we have children together how did that happen everything that especially looking at me and then looking at her so he's probably really wondering so how does that happen it happens to a normal progression of a

39:50relationship and that's why you would need to learn how you need to understand that you need content that's a shakin how you need to you how do you do you need content that's more of a let's grab coffee or a first date right you need content that progresses the relationship so your content has to be a sentient focused it has to have if you're content this is a blog post with no teeth in it most people are reading what you have most of are not reading it okay and then the people that do read it they don't even know what you do because you don't make you don't make calls to action in

40:25your content you don't advertise in your own content which is really the power of that awareness type content the first place failure to provide an appropriate call-to-action is not just bad marketing it's terrible marketing but it's also bad UX it's a horrible user experience if I am ready to go to the next stage and you won't show me how so I was in we were looking at painting painting a room in our house I was on this thing I was looking at a tool that was showing me all the different paint colors that I think it was Home Depot or something had and once I selected the paint color I

41:10couldn't buy it I was like where's the button that lets me just buy this paint and move on with my life it's horrible UX and it really should be considered at every stage what do you want the person to do next ask them to do that that's a call to action look at this situation here go back to our guy how do I set up an employee feedback program dudes way up at the top of the funnel way up at the top of the funnel you'd rather have a hundred people comparing your app to you'd rather have one person I'm sorry comparing you to your competitor then a

41:49hundred of these guys but how do we move that person to the next step because that's exactly what you're doing at the top of the funnel awareness is a volume game it's about throwing a lot of awareness at the top of the funnel and then learning to ascend some percentage of those people to the middle so how do we do that look at what office vibe does in their super top of funnel piece about employee feedback 101 they make a simple call to action do you want this in a PDF format with call-to-action this one want to save this guide for later you hit that button that's gonna pop an opt-in and

42:31now I got your email address okay so it's a it's an opt-in from that top of funnel piece that's now going to allow me to have an email address so I can do some nurture super super smart right there so who else has used office vibe and had success watch what should what should be the next thing for that that intent right there should we give this person a podcast next like oh you want to know you want to know who else is using the app how about you go listen to go read a blog post that's going back in their relationship the next step for

43:10this person is a trial you know so or some kind of an opt-in right so I don't know what what office vibe chose to do here I'm having a hard time seeing but subscribe okay so they're going for an opt-in right there but you've got to be going for something what are you moving them to next how do I change the default language from English to Spanish in office vibe your post funnel folks what do you want them to do next if they're reading the knowledge base what's the next step in that relationship you don't want them to churn remember so they're gonna read that thing if it wasn't

43:48helpful you need to give them that next step which is send us a support ticket alright so send us a ticket so that you're not just frustrated if that didn't help you you just read that thing now submit a support ticket so what you want to be doing is removing friction what is the next thing they should do based on what their behavior is right now okay so they're reading something about employee feedback how about how about we try to make a dollar aisle offer there they're reading something about employee feedback how about we try to go for an opt-in there and measure that stuff right this is how you put

44:24teeth into your content marketing so you include calls to action the fifth one this is starting to get increasingly more tactical I think when we get to segment so what do we know about these people what do we know about people that visited that page seven mistakes managers make when giving annual performance reviews they also visited this page five mistakes made in performance reviews and/or they visited this page ten performance review tips you're probably neglecting what do we know about that person it's not a trick question they are they are doing performance reviews or live thinking about it okay so first thing you do is you segment you understand what no

45:19matter whether they visit one or all three of these posts what do we know about them and what do we want them to do next this is how you sound out like how am I going to move somebody from here to here to here so the first thing you do is you make a relevant offer inside that content whatever that post was seven mistakes managers make when giving annual performance reviews just like office five does here so here's seven mistakes managers make than giving annual performance reviews I know you're doing a performance reviews unless you just like to read about stuff like this okay which no one does so you

45:55can see here a free bonus download right there CTA nice and relevant right there inside the blog post you here's the problem you're gonna see a big whopping half percent all the way up to 20 percent which is rare I've seen it as high as you know 20 percent take rate on that offer right there inside the content has a hundred percent to do with how congruent the offer is to the content itself so if it was completely if you're if you're I'm reading something about Thai food and you make me an offer about making a hamburger or something that's a terrible congruence but the higher more

46:38congruent something is the higher that take rates going to be but it's still not that great we see anywhere between three and five percent take rate on an offer embedded in a piece of content like this but here's where content marketing gets crazy and this is like I said getting more and more tactical because the second step in this is I know what you're interested in you're interested in conducting better performance reviews I know that I have now segmented you and I am going to now retarget you so retargeting is probably the biggest thing has happened in digital marketing since I've been in the game so there's

47:21been some pretty big things that happened but this is it this is the most significant thing that's happened along if this stuff is really really powerful when you especially when you combine it with good content so I segment you but I know what you're interested in okay because of what you're reading people don't spend time with things that they're not interested in so you read the article now I'm going to retarget you so that's what this is what this looks like pick a traffic source I don't care what it is social media email marketing YouTube ads AdWords Facebook ads I don't care what it is by traffic into a piece

48:03of content by that traffic by it you say well I clicks into a blog post yes we do it all day long okay I'm recommending you try this okay so by clicks into a piece of content what is that done for you right there first of all they've seen your brand they're warmer than they were before they did the click second they're segmented you know what they're as long as you built the piece of content properly and know what to talk about to them about next they are now segmented so they are both warmer than they used to be and they are now segmented the next step you're going to you you're

48:43going to use something like Facebook Ads network or Google Ads networker where all the different places you can set up a retargeting ice I recommend you start with Facebook it's the easiest place to start they make it super easy to drop a cookie on that person's machine it's really called a pixel I don't know the difference but but that cookie in a pixel but then you guys do I heard some Snickers like guys dumb then they go back to Facebook so they read your article they got the cookie six hours later they're they're on Facebook now you based on their behavior before they were on this post they were

49:25segmented they now know you know maybe don't know your brand super well but at least they've been on your site seen your logo things like that you give them an ad back into a more direct response offer ask them to do something that takes it to the next level an ascension path like opt-in to get this ebook and now you've got a lead or you some percentage of those people are going to convert to leads and maybe your funnel maybe your funnel ends with a phone call they opt-in you call all right I know so that's how up again Marquette O's works but maybe it doesn't maybe it sets off

50:04another set of email communications maybe it triggers new retargeting ads or maybe it does all of the above but it starts with understanding what are the different intents of your customer how to build a piece of content that would get them to raise their hand and say hey I'm interested in running performance reviews okay how about I buy the traffic into that post drop a cookie and then retarget with the proper direct response style offer right so what I mean by direct response is hey this ad is really just designed to get you over to this squeeze page and opt-in for another piece of content here you might ask you

50:47might go into a webinar you might go into a live event like this one you might who knows what you do but you need to be building using a whiteboard I love using a whiteboard for this kind of stuff like because I'll tell you this is what most people think is the problem the traffic there is no such thing as a traffic problem on the Internet there is so much traffic out there it's sick you just need to write a check for it okay and you need to know that when you do send that click what are you gonna do with it because so many people

51:22just buy clicks in there or they don't buy clicks or whatever because they just gonna drop it on the homepage or they're gonna drop it they're gonna go way ahead in the relationship like skip from hey how you doing - hey let's get married with an offer like right here by my by my $99 a month thing right where it's way too early in the relationship this is a really good looking funnel look at let's look at one from Salesforce this is one they use all day long to grow this business this is an acquisition funnel that Salesforce uses all day long by traffic into a blog post about

51:58whatever this one's about choosing a CRM cookie go to Facebook give me an ad that's gonna go for the opt-in so I don't know what that says because I can't see it's gonna send you into a squeeze page if you fill out that form they're gonna call you every day all day long that's the funnel and it's just one of many different types of funnels they have running but that funnel has been running Facebook's but you've seen them you've seen those ads so you need an acquisition funnel it's what you need to figure out like how am I going to use content to segment by the traffic in or

52:44don't if you're gonna try to become an SEO God and bring in tons of free traffic that's great because when you buy this traffic you do need to pay for this click like if you buy Facebook Ads into this post you're gonna pay for that click you're not gonna pay a lot for it these days of it's getting more expensive but you'll pay less than you would if you tried to buy a Facebook ad into this page especially if no one knows who you are that you're advertising to and that gets into some things like relevance scores and stuff like that this simplest funnel right here for an app by the traffic segment

53:24at the piece of top of funnel content at this stage somebody can walk away and go I had a really great relationship or with that brand it was pretty nice I read a really awesome piece of content or I watched a really cool video no harm no foul right I'm gonna retarget you and you probably weren't going to do anything but some percentage will what is that percentage it's a simple spreadsheet that you need to keep to figure out what happens from step to step the last of these perfect content marketing characteristics is that they are cross that perfect canta marketing's cross channel don't think that this is

54:02just about your blog or your podcast or anything like that I go on I'm gonna breeze right through number six here to get to some execution stuff and then we're only through five minutes five minutes left here but I went on YouTube here's a place where office five is not doing very well no demo for for their product on YouTube that's not a good use of channels okay so I go on a YouTube type in office vibe demo and I find everybody except office vibe showing me the demo of their of their product somebody looking for a demo super deep in the funnel like way way deep in there

54:43at the bottom of the funnel looking to buy they want to see how it works they want to sort of watch somebody use it and they're not there fortunately for them most of their customers that review and give a demo are pretty happy with the product and do a pretty good job but why not build the official office vibe demonstration and put it on YouTube so how to execute this stuff this is where I really want to get to here's how to get started with with content marketing you want to create what I call a Content campaign plan okay so this is how you end up hitting the ball more often than

55:19you did missing it looks like this I'm gonna give you a bitly if you have a computer you can even access it right now it just goes straight to a Google Doc vit dot ly / content - campaign - template that will open up a Google Doc so I'll leave that up for just a second this is a very very cool dock that we use to plan content and it's bi TI ly / content - campaign - template it looks like this if you're looking at it right now on your screen across the top we have different intents that people might have for using your application across

56:07the top up here so in my case for office vibe it's I want to conduct a performance review I want to onboard employees or I want to improve leadership skills then along the left side here you have the different stages aware evaluate convert and commit what assets now need to be built for each intent at each stage of the funnel so then we start brainstorming this is the fun part actually for a Content person like myself who likes to create creative stuff like what should we build for somebody that is interested in the product because they want to do more onboarding what should we build for them

56:54at the awareness stage let's brainstorm some ideas so you come up with this idea so for us for office vibe here they have asset B which is then described down here in a little more detail so it's in on employee onboarding guide okay and it's gonna live on the blog you can see the channels are there and then you start to do things like assign a writer or someone to create the piece and things like that so this is how we we plan content at digital marketer and across all the businesses that we own is we look at the intent that's so much the demographics as much

57:36as the sort of psychographics like why would somebody want this thing that we have and then we start to say okay we know we can't get them to buy until their first away or we can't get them to buy until their first evaluate so we need assets at all these stages if you go to that template you can use it a lot of people actually built this one sort of new for for this event only and use the office five example so there really shouldn't be anybody else in in this one except you guys this is the only place I've ever shared this version of this template but you can see there

58:13are two tabs at the bottom one of them is the example which is this that you're seeing on here and probably not seem very well on here but and then the other one is just the template that you can use but I urge you to start at the bottom of the funnel link okay let's take somebody that wants to use the product to onboard employees what should we be building at the convert stage down at the bottom of the funnel or maybe start post funnel if you have a churn issue all right so once again there's your bi TI ly / content - campaign - template and I thank you so much for

58:52your attention today [Applause] awesome presentation thanks very much can you give us example sort of drop-offs that we should aim for in that sass follow you example so should we start off with a thousand people thing seemed a blog post and then a hundred people getting retargeted and so it's a great question like conversion rates on average so if we back up I don't know if I'll back be able to back out maybe maybe Xander can backed me all the way up to the sort of aware interests all the way at the start a presentation but for us what we see and this can vary dramatically but to generate leads we're

59:37looking at fifty to sixty percent conversion rate on something like a webinar registration page or a lead magnet what we call a lead magnet at digital marker and a lot of people call this a lead magnet which is a really specific nice very valuable piece of content at traded and it's exchange for someone's contact information we're looking for anywhere from forty to sixty percent usually the funnel will work as low as thirty percent as long as the backend of it is doing well right and then things in the back but for webinars and things at the very top of the funnel our application and I'm sure you guys

1:00:14would be way more qualified as I would love to just instantly have a average conversion from trial to full pay but for us we're at sixty percent and we don't know if that's really fantastic or great at with our with this this app we have called true conversion where where do you think that it falls on that range Rob like from free trial to convert to full pay free free trial to full paid and credit card upfront or no yeah credit card out up front I would I would want to be between forty and sixty percent yeah and that's that's kind of where we're at so you know those are pretty

1:00:56dang good conversion rates if you're driving traffic especially if it's qualified traffic that's raised its hand it's been on your looked at your content we look for if we're just looking to generate leads not necessarily looking for trials right we're looking for leads just they set up a free trial they just set up and said I want this ebook or I want this webinar or one with this whatever we're looking for forty to sixty percent there we can see as low as thirty I've seen as high as seventy percent seven out of ten people that you put on a page want what you have it really comes down to the

1:01:28offer right like how good is the thing and then of course the design you know that's why you know apps like leadpages are so important that build beautiful trusted landing pages that have no to convert you know so you know if you if you don't have a good landing page use software right like that hard you don't need to you guys a lot of you guys could build beautiful pages yourselves but we use software even though we have the capability of seven developers we could build custom pages all day long we use apps like leadpages or you know any of the number of sites like that to build

1:02:04pages but if your offers good and your copy is compelling okay so that's why I was so excited to see Joanna Wiebe here because she writes so much about writing compelling copy if you want to see really well-designed squeeze pages landing pages with great copy on them just go jump around on copy hackers comm and see the kinds of pages that she's building and the copy is so important it's the offer and then how you describe that offer that's going to be you know most of the battle as long as you're using a well-designed page using subtly pages the shaman came here thanks very much for your talk rest I got a lot out

1:02:48of it definitely a lot of aha moments especially starting at the bottom building up starting closest to the money that was yeah it was really good you mentioned for someone who's middle of funnel giving a next step of like a free trial let's say you don't have a trial what would you recommend as the next step is there something between someone who's middle of funnel and purchase if you don't have a free trial option what are you selling it's a membership so it the example you gave the ninety-nine a month that's exactly what it is is it is it too quick to go straight to that it'll memberships

1:03:22difficult to sell to cold traffic or or even warm traffic it's very difficult to sell continuity that's why so many application companies start out with the free trial because it's like zero skin in the game I'll get your credit card but when I got a bill you for 14 days but in a membership situation which we are very good at digital market we've spent tested a lot of different types of ways to sell membership and if it's information that you're selling inside of that inside of that site the best way to do it but here's the problem with selling membership to an information site is you go up to some and you go hey

1:03:57we've got this thing in it's awesome and it's like well what is it it's like it's everything it's everything that you need to do X like grow tomatoes or you know build a business or whatever and it's not specific non specificity is one of the biggest sins of describing something you want to sell right you need to be able to be specific about what it is you're selling so what the best way that we've found to sell membership in that way you go into the greater pool right like you get this thing like what's in there everything's in there it's like well that's not it doesn't tell me much like

1:04:31it's like everything you splinter we call splinter you splinter a piece out onto the front and you sell it for a ridiculous you're not looking to become profitable off of that right so we sell that kind of stuff for seven bucks right and it's one time seven bucks super low commitment but does convert them into a client and then we say hey did you like this thing yeah I loved it it was great obviously it's a great product he said do you want a whole bunch more of stuff like that it's in the membership so it's really hard to describe to somebody that you just have this giant bucket full of

1:05:09awesome stuff very nonspecific very difficult to convert people pull something very specific out especially something you can use to target people if you're buying traffic like something that would you know this is a something I can write specific ad copy and stuff like that around and I actually think maybe Joanna's talk tomorrow is going to touch on some of this specificity stuff that's so important in copy yeah thanks again rest rest is going to be around for the next day or two so feel free to approach him at lunch in the evenings if you have more questions for him another round thank you [Applause] you