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TABLE OF CONTENTS

[Monday, June 20th]
The Conversion Equation

Applied Analytics: Questions, Answers, and Actions from 13 Report

s

Rethinking Blog Subscribers: The Playbook Nobody Told You About

6
Key Marketing Lessons Ive Learned Growing 20+ Brands

10 Lead Gen Strategies From The Worlds Best Social Marketers

Open Rate Enemies

Lessons Learned from Building a Fast-Growing Subscription Business

The Growth Canvas (Stop Searching for Nuggets - Build a Goldmine)

Five Tips to Get Your Google Analytics Account Runway Ready (...In Plain English)

[Tuesday, June 21st]

The Measure of a Marketers Worth

Evolve or Die: How Authenticity Builds Durable Brands

Syncing Facebook Ads with Mobile Landing Page Conversions

Authenticity in a World of Automations: The New Psychology Behind Top Performing

Campaigns

Video Analytics: Whats Normal, Whats Not, and What to Do About It

The 5 Best-Kept PPC Secrets I Discovered Through Millions of Ad Spend

The Homepage is Dead: A Personalization Story

Lets Get Rejected: 3 Counter-Intuitive Tactics for Successful & Brand Defining Content

Sell Out Your Event - Marketing Tips to Pack the House

Cat Videos, List Posts and Other

Myths About High-Converting Content

Is Your Copy Selling You Short? (How to Find Out and Fix It)

Youre Making My Brain Hurt! The Psychology Behind Terrible Conversion Experiences


...

[Monday, June 20th]

The Conversion Equation (S

lides
)
Oli Gardner,
@oligardner

Automated megavariate testing of marketing interaction models

CTAs will be moved to the most apt place for conversion
Videos will appear where there is most interaction
Will answer the question: What should we A/B test?

The Conversion Equation

What is the Conversion Equation?

Combines heuristic analysis, rapid experiments, conversion research, conversion
data, video conversion and engagement data, academic studies and frameworks
from industry leaders (online tools, calculators, etc.)


Made up of 50 sub equations, including clarity, social proof and video

Clarity Equation

Clarity is the most important part of conversion.

Clarity = distraction + expectation + readability + visual identification + immediacy +

specificity + hyperbole.

Distraction:What do you want me to do? Pick one thing.

Immediacy: Can you figure out what the page is about in fewer than 5 second?
Use the 5-second test. Ask yourself, What do you think this page is about?
Hyperbole: Ask yourself, Are you explaining what you actually do, or are you just
saying youre really good at doing it?
Use: The Dejargonator , a Chrome extension to identify hyperbole/jargon
Visual identification:When viewed in isolation, can people tell what the image
means? Or what the purpose of your product/service is?
Design matters -- it creates joy and reduces confusion. When you can
identify a design problem, you can use Attention Driven Design principles
to solve it.
Data-informed design; accelerates delight. Use data and design together!


javascript:document.body.contentEditable='true'; document.designMode='on'; void 0

Add the script above to your address bar on whatever page you want to edit. Then edit
the page (dont need permission) and run a 5 second test by showing your boss!

CTAs
First rule of CTAs = Have a f#cking CTA.Every website and landing page has
conversion opportunities, and every conversion opportunity needs a CTA.
CTAs should be: targeted, timely, relevant, unique, delightful, appropriate,
show-me-once, value added


The Video Equation

Which words influence the clickthrough rate of video annotations?

Click < Click here
Your > My
Now > No Now
!!! > !

Which words influence the clickthrough rate of full-screen CTAs?

My > Your
0 - ! > 1 - ! > more than 1 - !


Social Proof Equation

Social proof equation; transformation + authentic images + linking +

cravens
*

Example of social proof equation in action

Anything can be delightful: popups can be delightful, emails can be delightful, banners
can be delightful


Digital Agency Day popup example

^Effective because it was relevant, valuable, well timed and designed to delight.

Technology isnt the problem, we are.

Applied Analytics: Questions, Answers, and

Actions from 13 Reports (
Slides)
,
Andy Crestodina@crestodina

Less than 30% of small businesses are using analytics.

1 in 3 marketers dont know which tactic has the biggest impact on revenue
Most people are using analytics wrong, not getting value because theyre just
anything
doing reporting. Pretty charts dont do for you unless you
take action.
Traffic x Conversion Rate = $
Everything that we need to do as marketers needs to be designed to affect
one of those two numbers.
When you look at your Analytics dashboard in the morning, the line goes up and
you smile. Or the line goes down and you frown. And then you go back to
checking your email. But you need to take action.

Idea > Question > Answer > Action > Test (or Reject the Idea)


If you see a data puke, then you know youre looking at web reporting. If you see words
in English outlining actions, youre looking at web data analysis. - Avinash Kaushik

Whose job is this analytics stuff?

Analytics isnt something thats just one specialists responsibility; its for the
person thats doing the marketing. Everyone is responsible.

AUDIENCE REPORTS

1. Are our visitors using mobile devices?

Audience > Mobile > Overview

Click the percentage view to see a pie chart of the data.

2. Are mobile visitors less engaged?




In this case, mobile visitors are bouncing at a higher rate.

Tablet users are converting at a higher rate.

Actions:
Check the design of landing pages for mobile visitors
Create schedule for mobile testing

3. Is the site working well in every browser?

If you wonder if your site is having problems, heres where to look.

Audience > Technology > Browser and OS


Bounce rate for every browser: are higher-bounce rate browser users having a
tough time accessing the site?
Test the site on the browsers with the higher bounce rates.


More questions to ask your audience reports

Are millennials visiting our website?
What are they doing?
How many of our visitors are local? National? International?
What times of day are people reading our blog?

ACQUISITION REPORTS

4. Which social network is driving the most traffic?

Acquisition > All Traffic > Channels > Social



best
5. Which social network is driving the traffic?

Select the goal in this case, newsletter subscribers

and see which networks
are most likely to send traffic that might convert.


What about lead gen conversions from social? Social media users almost never
take action they dont have the intent to buy.
looking
Search traffic is more likely to convert, which makes sense. Theyre for
something; they have their fingers on the keyboard and are ready to take action.
Focus on networking benefits of social media, not traffic benefits. Allocate your
resources accordingly.

6. What phrases are we ranking for?

Acquisition > Search Console > Queries

You can use a filter to display which phrases you rank for on page 2.
Get a list of
phrases for which you almost rank high. Find the pages and confirm the rankings, and
then improve those pages. Add detail, keywords, videos, images, internal links, etc.


Actions
Find the pages. Confirm the rankings
Improve the page! Add detail, keywords, videos, images, internal links, etc

More questions to ask your acquisition reports

Which email campaigns pull in the most visits?
Which pull in visitors who dig deeper?
Which sites have linked to us? Who is sending us visitors?

BEHAVIOR REPORTS

7. What are people looking for on our site?

Behaviour > Site Search > Search Terms



You can see what people are searching for on your site.
exit page
Add the as a dimension.

That way, you can see which audience isnt finding what theyre looking for based
on if they exit on the search results page.


Actions:
Make new pages for phrases that people are looking for and not finding results
Optimize your own pages for your own search tool

8. Are they reading what were writing?

Percent Content Consumption Vs. Percent Published

Look at the gap between content published versus % of unique page views.

Actions:
Publish more content on those popular topics.
Promote the high value content already created.
Reconsider your content strategy!

9. Which posts are the most engaging?

Behaviour > Site Content > All Pages



Actions:
Publish more content on the popular topics
Do more to promote the low-traffic, high value posts.

top path
10. What is the through our website?

If your website was a city, thered be a highway and youd know where it was. In
Google Analytics, thats the behavior flow.
Explore traffic through / (your sites main directory)


Actions:
Put billboards (videos, testimonials, etc.) on highways (your highest traffic flow)
Rebalance your navigation
Polish up the pages in that top path
Get rid of your testimonials page. Nobodys going there! Social proof is powerful,
everywhere.
but put them Every page should be a testimonials page.

CONVERSION REPORTS

11. Which posts inspire action?

Reverse goal path shows you what people were doing beforethey took an action.
See what blog posts people were reading just before they converted into a
newsletter subscriber.


Actions:
Drive traffic to high converting posts through social, email, internal links, ads, etc.
Dont hide your best stuff.
Publish more content on these topics.

Connect your traffic champions to your conversion champions.

12. Which pages support the lead gen funnel?

There are two types of visitors:

transactional visitors
(wants a product/service) who search for
target phrases
(buyer-related)
informational
(wants answers) who search for tangent phrases(research-related)

And two types of conversions for each.

13. Where are we losing people during checkout?

Actions:
Reduce number of steps.
Remove distractions.


Answer top questions earlier.

More questions to ask your conversion reports

What hour of day, day of week, or month of year are people most likely to act?
Are people buying right away?

Data-driven empathy
The sweet spot between analytical and creative processes.
The sweeter spot: a very analytical process combined with a smaller creative
process. The not-so-sweet spot: a huge creative process with a small amount of
analysis.

Misc. tricks
Import from Gallery: thousands of pre-made, community-created dashboards.
(Wow, these are awesome.) Add them in one click to your own Analytics.

Create annotations for data events (like spikes or drop-offs). Reasons to add an
annotation:
Email campaign
Change PPC
PR hit
Website Change
Analytics Setup change
Use Jing to capture, annotate, and share screenshots.
Instil a culture of analysis through a simple meeting agenda:
0:00 - 0:10: Brief updates from teams
Reports from people, departments and vendors.
Any major issues? Any victories?
Review dashboards


0:10 - 0:40: Review current activities

What are the outcomes of the actions were taking? Are they worth
the time/cost?
Reports and analysis: should be adjust our approach? Continue or
discontinue the activity?
Can anyone support anyone elses efforts?
0:40 - 0:55: Consider new Initiatives
Any new ideas? Evidence that this effort will be worth more
time/cost?
Knowing theres a time and place to bring up new ideas keeps
people from distracting each other all the time.
0:55 - 0:59: Action items
Expectations should be crystal clear when we walk out of this
room.
Whos doing what before the next meeting?

One final tip

how to win every marketing argument for the rest of your career:

Never bring an opinion to a data fight. Because the highest-paid opinion (HiPPO) always
wins unless you have data.


Rethinking Blog Subscribers: The Playbook

Nobody Told You About (Slides)
Anum Hussain,
@anum

Trend charts indicate content marketing is going up and to the right and we proudly
preach of our focus on optimizing email blasts and valuable content but it doesnt mean
were doing it.

The key is to apply the see the world through your subscribers, much like product sees
the world through its users
Ask yourself, What is the most value we can give to the end person consuming
this content?
Thats the mentality used to drive Sidekicks content strategy and turn it into a
revenue generating channel.

Application #1: Apply user onboarding to content

Current content sub model is as follows: reader subscribes, receives subscription
complete email, receives post
Most marketers dont strategically onboard their subscribers


Revised subscriber workflow...

Step 1: Visitor comes to website and subscribes.

Step 2: Subscribers enter 4-week workflow that sends them top-performing posts
based on the hypothesis: higher engagement early on will result in retention.
Result is 2x clickthru rate.
Step 3: Once workflow is complete, subscribers get added to regular subscriber
list and sent 2 posts per week.

Added benefits of onboarding subscribers

Allows new subscribers to view the BEST content
Instead of creating new content, setup workflow to send content that 90% of
subscribers havent seen

Want to learn more about making the most of your old content? Check out this deep-dive
on Optimizing The Past by Pamela Vaughan at HubSpot:
http://bit.ly/UnbounceOldContent


Application #2: Measure subscribers like user retention

Most growth teams seek authentic growth through active usage
HubSpot measures HubSpot Sales Products in WAU
Applied the same metric applied to product to content for Sidekick

Looking at views could easily fog vision;

active engagement
is a better measure
Engaged subscriber: an individual who was subscribed but also clicking through
(definition used by Sidekick)

Nervous about removing people from your list? Check out this analysis of when HubSpot
removed 250K subscribers from the Marketing Blog: http://bit.ly/HSMktgUnsubscribe

Application #3: Allow subscribers to churn just as users

Goes hand in hand with retention mode.
When a content reader becomes engaged we keep emailing them, but not a
freemium user who is unengaged we consider them churned
Dont be that additional white noise!

HubSpot Experiment:
If you were subscribed to content for 4 months but hadnt read a single piece of
content, then you were removed from the HubSpot blog list.


Unsubscribe campaigns content focused on the people who actually matter in

the funnel.

Content is more than a marketing channel, its a revenue channel.

If you have to use your content to get people to use your product, you have to be
careful about how you do that.
Weekly product user retention increased if users were subscribed and reading
our content; this was a green light that HubSpot was on a path to meaningful
growth.

6 Key Marketing Lessons Ive Learned Growing

20+ Brands (
Slides
)
Erin Bury,
@erinbury

Nobody knows the secret sauce to marketing. Startups, Fortune 500s, agencies,
and now working on my own, I thought we might have the secret.
The truth is that like a stock broker doesnt know the secret to the stock market,
marketers dont know the secret to marketing.
Here are some general lessons Ive learned over 9 years

Lesson #1: Virality isnt guaranteed, but you can do 5 things to set yourself up for
success.

Theres no secret to going viral. You cant engineer virality. But hopefully these
questions can put you on the right path:

1. What is the goal of your campaign? Why do you actually want to go viral, and
what business will it drive? (Positioning, sales, social engagement, website
traffic, or just purely awareness/buzz)
2. Is the idea that we developed unique? Has someone done it before? Will it make
someone laugh/cry? Would I share this campaign if it showed up in my
Facebook
feed?
Theres a reason the ALS Ice Bucket Challenge was successful. It was the
first time we saw a social good viral campaign.
3. Is it the right timing, and is it relevant now? Does it relate to a current
event/trend?
A startup called Sortable created a landing page for applicants from the
US to escape Donald Trump by working for them in Canada. It went viral.
4. What are the 3-5 ways youll market this campaign? (Seeding to social
influencers, social ads, PR, partnerships)
Something like the WestJet Christmas Miracle had a strong marketing
campaign behind it. It didnt just go viral.
5. What resources (people, budget, time) would you need to devote to make it
successful? You dont need to put a ton of money in to go viral.

Case Study: 88 Creative



88 Creative was hiring for junior roles. They created a BuzzFeed Quiz to vet job
hunters and asked them questions like Do you like salad or pizza? (Salad is a
bad fit, apparently.)
They also built a microsite that asks you if a phrase is the name of an agency or
an adult film. We sent packages to agencies with provocative names, it achieved
business goals: positioned us as a creative agency

Lesson #2: Being an early adopter is key but be strategic about it.

When youre in startups, you have no money, so youre looking to new, underrated
and low priced tactics anna way to find a new audience, save money, and get
press.
Dont build a presence on every network under the sun. Assess, test small
campaigns or ad widgets, and pursue what works.
Theres a lot of value in being perceived as cutting-edge.

Action items: Review these 3 questions quarterly

1. What new networks should you be testing for ads and/or a community?
(Snapchat? The next Snapchat?)
2. What could you be using simply to get press (Bots!)
3. What are creative places you could buy ads that are underpriced right now?
(PornHub Yes, Seriously)

Dont be a dont. Dont try to jump on bandwagons (like on fleek)

Lesson #3: Tap into influencers, but dont waste your money

Anyone can call themselves an influencer. They often cost a lot, theyre fickle
(promoting multiple brands), and they often dont drive the interactions or sales
youre looking for.
The ultimate goal is to work with a wide range of influencers, test impact, and
bring on a smaller group as ongoing brand ambassadors. Look to influencers
within your own community, and people who already love your brand.
The ideal: a tight-knit ambassador program of people who use and believe in your
product.

Action items: How to ensure influencer success

1. Dont just look at vanity metrics (e.g. followers) look at social interactions


2. Ask for a case study where theyve relevantly driven sales downloads, or traffic
3. Ask for expected engagements/CTR and tie it to compensation when possible
4. Provide unique trackable codes/links for each influencer to measure actual
impact
5. Work with influencers represented by talent agencies like #PAID (easier to
demand/ensure results)

Lesson #4: You cant care only about brand awareness, or only about conversions.

Some things really only work for awareness and brand-building, such as PR.
Some things work best for conversions: social ads, paid digital,
discounts/promos
Some work for both: email marketing, content marketing, or events.
You need to care about both if you want to build perception, and not just revenue.
The way your company is perceived is almost as important as your bottom line.

Action items:

Lesson #5: Building a personal brand is arguably the most underrated marketing tactic


Building a personal brand helps you build legitimacy, source leads, position
yourself as a thought leader, and raise the profile of your company.

Action items: Framework for building a personal brand

1. What are my goals (fame, the best network in the business, eventually become a
pro speaker)
2. What topic or niche has the biggest opportunity in my industry?
3. Whats a fit for my skillset?
4. How will I get there? (starting a blog, building a personal website)
5. Whats my timeline for the next 3, 6, and 12 months?
6. Is my plan realistic in terms of time commitment, and how will i hold myself
accountable?

Download Erins personal branding workbook: www.88creative.ca/ctaconf

Lesson #6: Your great marketing ideas will never see the light of day. Creating a
culture of risk can help.

You have great ideas. They wont make it past approvals. Its okay.
The key is building a culture of risk, testing, and innovation.
Brands that are willing to try new things and push the envelope are often reward
(but sometimes not so much).

Action items: How to get buy-in for your creative idea

1. Demonstrate why its strategic (potential impact on sales, repositioning your
company as edgy/creative, differentiation from competitors)
2. Find a champion who has decision-making power (your boss, the Creative
Director, someone on your client team)
3. Answer the what-ifs (What if everyone hates it? What if it backfires? What if the
press roast us?)
4. Find a way to test it (Launch a test campaign, do a focus group, share with
trusted industry peers)

At the end of the day, not every idea will make it through. Document the idea and come
back to it at a more opportune time.

10 Lead Gen Strategies From The Worlds Best

Social Marketers (S
lides)
Kevan Lee,

@kevanlee


Leads are exciting! With social media you can get 100s, 1000s of leads. Social
doesnt just have to be a discovery tool it can be a lead gen tool, too.
A lead is anyone who has shown interest in hearing more from you. And has
given you a way to get in touch with them.
Typically how we get a lead: Social -> article -> download brochure -> hot lead

Generic strategies
Link to gated content: Often using social to link to blog posts use social to link
to gated content
Share landing pages
Run a contest: Shortstack to run contest. Be creative; emoji responses, hashtags,
video, multimedia. (Example: Describe most recent customer service experience
using emojis.) Put a link on your bio.
Use Bitly and UTMs to track everything; use BItly for quick data analysis
and use GA for big picture data (Track with UTM and tie into GA to GO
DEEP)
Put CTAs on Pulse and Medium.
Ask be specific about what you want (recommendations, sign up for an
email list). Format headings, italics, emoji, GIFs.

TOP 10 LEAD GEN STRATEGIES

1. Twitter cards
Twitter is a leads machine. 33% of Kevans email list comes from Twitter cards.
With Twitter cards, Kevan gets 1 subscriber per day, and he hasnt done anything
since March 2015. And Twitter cards are totally free!


1. Create your Twitter card

. You will be asked if you have a privacy policy. If not, use
iubenda to create one.
2. Pin Twitter card to your profile page. This will be the first thing people see when
they go to your profile page.
3. Integrate Twitter card with email automation tool (such as Mailchimp). You have
to have a paid Twitter ad account to use the Mailchimp/Twitter card integration.

Takeaways:
5 minutes to create
Use button text, Get or Join
Any image will do
Send at non-peak times; anytime outside business hours; leverage What
happened when you were away, less competition

2. Medium letters
A lot of people think Medium is just for content. Yes, but its also a premium
engagement platform.
Turn followers and readers into leads.
Anyone who follows you on Medium is a lead thanks to, Letters
Very simple to write a Letter: simply add a subject line, body text -- thats
it!

Takeaways:


Shortform; write 500-word follow-up posts

Or move your blog
Posts by people; write posts as people vs. as company
Email 1x per week
Add value

3. LinkedIn Groups
Just for networking? Nope! You can message anyone in any LinkedIn group you belong
to.

Takeaways:
Join groups (4-5)
Participate
Listen for questions
Reach out

4. Facebook card ads

Very similar to Twitter cards.
Cost per click
Facebook = 80 cents
Adwords = $2.50


You can collect all info via Facebook cards and then create custom audiences for
these lead gen cards.

Takeaways:
Start by spending $5 per day
Create custom audiences
Customize some more
Test stock vs. you photo

5. Facebook friends
Just for bdays and wookies? Nope, friends can be leads!

Takeaways
Be generous, not spammy
Reply to comments fast
Deliver fast

6. Slideshare lead capture

You can add lead gen to any slideshare; leads can auto-fill form via LinkedIn. Cost per
lead is $8 so may not be affordable for everyone.


Takeaways:
Use
Canva for slides
Capture the minimum
Add to blog posts boost traffic
Promote on social

7.
Sniply(similar to
Start A Fire
)
Sniply allows you to share a link to content with custom CTA. Often the content is
someone elses but the CTA is your own. Alternatively you can add the custom CTA to
your own content.

Takeaways:
Match content with message
Mask the url
Validate then double down

8. Social/Geo
With social geo you can see who your neighbours are. Use Twitters advanced search to
search places/locations. You can also search for just questions.

Takeaways:
Set up alerts
Brand name, product, topic,


Look up your neighbours

Add to Twitter lists, groups
Schedule a meetup

9. Track your retweets

Wait, retweets are a stat.. but they can also be leads! Theyve expressed interest, so
technically theyre a lead.

Takeaways:
Get a dashboard
Check daily
Follow everyone
Thank influencers

10. Whisper codes:

A whisper code is something you send out on social media to give people a discount for
doing something.

Make sure its...

Unique not being used anywhere else
Trackable can you track via dashboard or analytics tool?
Time-based is there urgency?


Takeaways:
Try on a low-traffic day or
Try on a holiday
Make it worth peoples time
Track, track


Open Rate Enemies (

Slides)
Susan Su,
@susanfsu

Email is the highest ROI marketing channel there is, and you dont have to pay to
play.
yours.
Once you have subscribers, theyre Not Facebook or Twitters users.
But email marketing doesnt work if people dont open your emails.

Enemy #1: Images

Images might seem like theyre your friend, but theyre actually your enemy. (If
youre in ecommerce and need to show your product, theyre your frenemy.)

This is an email from Susans company. The image takes up the entire
above-the-fold real estate of the email.
When is it? Dont know.
Does it cost money? Dont know.
Do I need to sign up? Dont know.


Dont know how, where, why, or what

it is.
The image has obliterated all other elements that could be doing the
real selling.

What stands out in this email? The links.

The main CTA appears not once but twice
above the fold, and all of the
information is plainly visible.

The best marketing starts with explaining. If youre not explaining, go back to the
drawing board.

Next time youre about to send an email, send a test to yourself as a plaintext
email. See if it looks and reads more or less similar to your HTML email.
If it looks a world apart, youve got some work to do. It means the critical
information you need to convey is missing from your email.

Enemy #2: Email Size

If your email is full of blah blah blah, and ends with [Message Clipped] View
Entire Message as your call to action, your email is too long.
This can trigger the Promotions folder, or worse spam.


Its also clipping your message, truncating your content including your call to
action. You dont want to hide content that is doing selling for you.
Its also potentially impacting your open rate stats, since the
tracking pixelcan
be stripped from the email.
If you must send a long email, include one instance of your CTA near the top of
the email.

Enemy #3: Unverified sender identity

You need to verify your sender identity. In this example, the email is
from
WakaWaka, but its signed by someone else. This signals to email providers that
this email might not be from who they say it is or indicate that theyre a
spammer.


This email shows that the email is signed by the same person its from, so it
wont be flagged as suspicious.
Check your domain key status: https://www.mail-tester.com/spf-dkim-check
And your sender score: https://www.mail-tester.com

If youve been blacklisted, you can get yourself removed from the blacklist so
your email is more likely to make it through to its recipient without getting junked.

Susans seen companies reach up to 30% lift in open rates by getting removed from
email blacklists.

Enemy #4: Bad subject lines

What is a bad subject line?

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Bad subject lines:

1. Dont say something meaningful
2. Trigger the promotions filter by using spammy language
3. Make you think I dont care about this


Everyone wants to know trick subject lines. While certain words can trigger
people to open your emails time and time again, the #1 thing to getting more
opens is not a single word.
Good subject lines
Disrupt patterns ;
standing out from other emails in inbox. Once a trend in
subject line writing catches on, its efficacy is reduced over time.
Create curiousity, use humor, and leverage big brand names.
Are highly personal. They look like emails from our friends or our
co-workers. They can contain Re: or Fwd:, personalization flags that
make your emails stand out.
The preview text is your curtain.

Enemy #4: Stinky content

The subject line isnt your only tool nor only enemy. The #1 thing affecting your
future open rates is your content.
The worst thing you can do in your email marketing is spam people. The
second-worst thing is sending emails that say nothing.

works.
This email is personal, text only, and it And it doesnt have a single CTA,
because the CTA comes in the nextemail:


Segmentation, a.k.a. sending good emails to the right people makes GREAT
content.
Segmentation happens at acquisition: know where they came from, their
demographic information, and what theyre interested in.
There isnt one single definition of a good email, but segmentation is the start.
How to segment:
1. By acquisition channel,
2. By acquisition campaign, like a guest post or a paid campaign
3. By demographic or geography (check your analytics)
4. By the offer that brought them in
5. By the type of device (mobile vs desktop)
6. By time and other laterals
7. Ask them

Enemy #6: Dormant subscribers

If your open rate is below 20%, delivery is below 99%, or your unsubscribe rate is
greater than 3%, you either have dormant subscribers or youre about to
60% of your subscribers are dormant. Wake them up.


Activation Formula:
Day 0: Welcome (and activate now)
Day 1: Fear-based activate now (what happens if you DONT)
Day 2: Benefits-based activate now (the promise)
Day 4: Incentivized activate now
Day 7: Get ready for the back burner
Day 8+: Backburner

Activation merely unlocks further activation.

If they opened your email and
clicked through to interact with your product, its time to encourage the next level
of interaction, or a purchase.
If they bought something, its time to encourage a repeat purchase or a
subscription. Activation never stops.
The most important thing: open rate is a vanity metric. Its merely a proxy for
getting conversions, which are what really matters.

Get conversions:
1. Multiple links, same destination
2. No leaks (no links that lead anywhere but the conversion point)
3. Retarget unopens (try using fwd: or re: in the subject line)


Lessons Learned from Building a Fast-Growing

Subscription Business (
Slides)
Morgan Brown,
@morganb

COO of Inman News, 15 years of startup marketing experience.

Doubled business from 4 to almost 10 million dollars through a fast-growing
subscription business

Illusions when it comes to marketing and how companies grow. I spent a lot of
time as an early marketer making mistakes because i couldnt see the
connection between what i was doing and company growth
Observer bias: DropBox is great at PR, super smart with press. But when you talk
to the team at DropBox, they say press had nothing to do with their growth. They
did press for recruiting. The way you get those talented engineers is to make it
seem like your company is on fire -- but its easy to assume they have PR to drive
user base.
No correlation between level of expense or investment and growth rate.
(McKinsey 2014)

Doing it wrong.
How do Airbnb uber linkedin, facebook do it?
Rapid experimentation is key to fast growth. The thing they do different
regardless of business model is they learn faster.
No Guaranteed Success: all faced and overcame critical challenges
Airbnb had to launch 3 times before it got launched

Morgan has interviewed head of growth teams to see

what worked.

Twitter 2010-2012, dramatic change in their growth rate. Only one thing changed:
number of experiments that they ran (2 tests per month > 10 tests per week) put
learnings together to compound growth over the next two years.
The entire company must buy into the experimentation/optimization culture. Not
just on the front end - across the entire customer lifecycle

3 things make it possible:



1. PRODUCT: you need a good product. Trying to grow a shitty product = piss off
more people faster.
2. TEAM: they bring together marketing, design, product, engineering, break down
traditional silos. Bring departments together to solve problems
cross-functionally. They have GROWTH TEAMS.
3. PROCESS: The growth team runs a growth process. Analyze > Ideate > Prioritize
> Test

Heres how it works at Inman: use the same process that other fast growing companies
use to drive our company forward. Weve doubled the business in 18 months while
growing a subscription product from scratch.

Making Inman select a must-have:

We sell content - so it better be damn good.
Always be surveying
Pricing surveys.
Net promoter score surveys,
Customer satisfaction surveys,
on-site surveys with qualaroo,
Google Forms for Product
Free-form email
Focus Groups
Phone Calls
Talk to customers: grab 30 of them buy lunch, ask them if it sounds like a good
idea or a bad idea. Get great qualitative feedback.

One of my greatest lessons in starting and running Twitter and Square is how important
it is to instrument all usage. - Jack Dorsey

Data: Measure what matters

Even if you have GA built out fully, youre missing out on a large part of the
picture still. If you cant see your customer from the moment they touch your
company, all the time to the end of the lifecycle, youre flying blind.
Marketers get comfortably numb with the little data the have.

Build a growth model

Top of funnel (traffic, conversion rates) x Magic moment (create emotional
response) x Core product value (solves real problems) = sustainable growth
Once you do this, once you know where the levers are, you know where to focus.


Set up a tracking plan

Sign up flow
Key conversion steps
Purchase flow
Core value actions
Engagement actions
Notifications
All the things

As we get more into the Machine Learning era, we should let the machines figure
out whats important - and you should track everything happening on your
website. Stuff it into a data warehouse and let it sit there and at least its there for
when its the time to use it.
If you don't have the bandwidth for that, then make sure at the very least that
important user flows are documented properly.

Build & Implement a Tracking Plan: bit.ly/1Uabd7V

Do not settle for anything less than complete waterfalls. You want end-to-end
tracking of your customers. Who cares about click rate if retention is sub
optimal? Go end-to-end. If you cant, bribe an engineer.

Build a growth team

Marketers are always looking to hire more marketers. We dont need more
marketers! We need a developer! Someone who can write some SQL!
An Inman, first marketing hire was a data scientist. She built a data warehouse,
she helps track all flows and funnels.
Second marketing hire was growth hacker: degree in accounting. Treats users
and flow in and out of product the way you would money & a balance sheet. Hes
rigorous - and why not. We can track this stuff, we just choose not to.
Third marketing hire: writes copy, comes up with promotions, knows how to
communicate with people. Together, they are a great team.
If we had hired another Jen, wed have more promotions and less tracking.
Further hires + prioritization were clear: we knew email was instrumental so we
hired an email marketer.

Generate lots of leads

Set key focus area
Prioritize for impact


Full-team collaboration
Growth team nominates ideas for experimentation
Constantly want to be generating ideas. But it's not about throwing spaghetti at
the wall.
Understand your growth levers and ideate toward those inputs that can
actually create growth for you.
And then get everyone involved. CS should talk to Marketing should talk to
engineering should talk to product.

Ideas as hypotheses
Ideas must be testable
Written as hypotheses
Include the null hypothesis
Must be able to learn something
Cant be vague. Google scientific method. Force your team into being more
rigorous in the ideation progress.

Ranking and prioritizing tests.

Figure it out
Use historical data, benchmarks and models
Use ranges, not absolutes
Were not in a world of perfect information. Dont get analysis paralysis.
PRIORITIZE using a model like ICE (Impact, Confidence, Ease) or WiderFunnels
PIE.

A good plan violently executed now is better than a perfect plan executed next week.
George S Patton

Accountability: Weekly growth meeting

Similar to Spring Planning/retro
Full growth team participation
Not for brainstorming
Set velocity targets and hold team accountable
At Inman, 1 hr a week - 4 tests a week

Growth meeting agenda:

Data review and update focus (15 mins)
review last week's testing sprint (10 mins)
Key lessons learned from completed analyze tests (15 mins)


Selected tests for this week (15 mins)

Idea backlog review and favorites (5 mins)

Grab the templates:

Meeting Agenda
&
Testing Template

DRIVING GROWTH AT INMAN

Funnel tests:

Improve conversion rate of funnel for sign up. If you go to exit out of browser,
offer them a discount.
Adding a 25% overlay increased conversions by 32%... a lot of people would be
satisfied with this but they kept going
Tested against a 10% off and increased revenue by 18.9% over control!
Took a hit on the conversion rate but the revenue gain was still greater.
(Done with Bounce Exchange, Unbounce, Optimizely, tools that let you
scale how fast you can move. They send Bounce Exchange ideas and they
set it up, create creative, send preview links. Launch)


Retention tests

Monthly plan retention was brutal, so they decided to test quarterly pricing vs
monthly pricing. THe conversion rate stayed about the same but retention went
up about 30%. Plus they were collecting more revenue up front.

Minimum viable tests



We sent simple text email to re-engage people who had only visiting once in last
3 weeks. Triggered it out of mixpanel. Heres some awesome news you might be
missing out on.
Dramatic uptake in the number of subscribers
It was the easiest thing we could think of testing. We just wanted to get it out and
see if it matters - see if it impacts our business. Once we determined it mattered,
then we built out an entire drip campaign

Activation Tests:

They wanted to test social sign in. Took it off the sign up form and the
conversion rate went up.


Tested give us your email to read this article - it works well for them. Test your
assumptions

Acquisition Tests


Worked with Annie Cushing and casey armstrong and grew search traffic 56%.
Work with smart people!
Knew SEO was important for acquisition, so found support.

Overall...
594 test ideas
78 completed tests

Lessons learned
Product / Team / Process: Figure out where the gaps are and then fill em in
Dont compromise on data.
Know whats important first. Know your growth model.
Move fast and learn things. Constantly be learning, document so people who
come after you can use that info.
Aim for impact. Work on stuff that will actually move the needle.
Keep moving. Growth is never done. FB growth team is celebrating their 10th
anniversary last year. It's never done. Keep experimenting, keep trying, keep
learning.


The Growth Canvas (Stop Searching for Nuggets

- Build a Goldmine) (
Slides
)
Andre Morys,
@morys

We go to conferences because we expect to get gold nuggets valuable insights.

You see three things that you can copy for optimization:
1. most marketers see a tool -- massive ROI page construction instant uplift tool
2. someone operating it
3. some process we dont understand

Principles you need so you can scale:

Systems should always be clear and transparent.
Leverage instant gratification and scarcity.

Profit is a result of user motivation. We always talk about conversion and data,
but what we call conversion is a result of user motivation.
If we look at tests that reduce friction theres an average uplift, but theres
an uplift thats 5 times higher and you start to motivate people. Higher
potential to convert people when you motivate people vs. just reduce
friction.
Most websites look like a stockroom full of boxed food everything in one
place. But a good website is like a good supermarket it uses the right music,
scents, lighting, etc. to motivate people.
Conversions are people. And if we forget that we wont succeed. All the data we
get are a result of user motivation.
If you want to get an uplift, you conduct a psychological experiment: stimulus->
result.
Marshmallow test : Give a child a marshmallow. They have the choice to
either eat it right away or wait to get two. 85% of the children are not able
to wait.
What does this have to do with my website? Its the same part of the brain
people are using when theyre on your website. The nucleus accumbens =
reward system of the brain (drugs, alcohol, apple products). Triggers
release of dopamine.


The principle were talking about is called

instant gratification
. Successful
business models rely on this model (i.e., Facebook notifications).

Growth canvas
Every time user goals and business goals are aligned = conversion
To find out what motivates people, do surveys, observe people, ask Who is your
customer? What problem are you solving? What real problem are you
solving? (implicit goals).

Instant gratification
Instant gratification on Amazon -> Buy Now
Amazon prime members convert at 74%
With an all you can eat buffet, you already paid for it, so you eat everything! You
already paid for Amazon Prime, so youll use it. This is called
cognitive bias
.

If you double the number of experiments you do per year youre going to double your
inventiveness, Jeff Bezos, CEO amazon

Growth is about engineering the right stuff together.

How can you rate the impact if youve done no testing? Think about the 3
psychological factors for impact. Ask yourself, Will the change be perceived? Is
the change relevant? Can it change behaviour?

Scarcity
Booking.com perfect example of scarcity and group pressure.
Example of Group pressure: The Asch Elevator Experiment , 1962 (example of
group pressure)
Group pressure is the base you need to leverage scarcity -- show what people are
doing on the website

To show the decision makers you need to optimize

Do the math: whats the impact of different scenarios? Show the cost of
opportunity.
Have a plan; if you have a plan analyze. Prioritize. Build. Measure and learn.


Five Tips to Get Your Google Analytics Account

Runway Ready (...In Plain English) (S
lides)
Annie Cushing, @anniecushing

Your analytics data is often used as the bookends of your campaigns: on the
front-end to find opportunities, and on the back-end to measure the effectiveness
of those campaigns.
But if your data isnt reliable, it isnt useful. These are some tips to keep your
Google Analytics data pure.

Tag your campaigns

Not a single client of Annies has ever come close to getting this right. Over a
dozen reports are affected by campaign tags. If you get your tags wrong, all of
your reports will be thrown off.
You can find your broken campaign tags by navigating to:
Acquisition > All Traffic > Channels > Other
Other is the Google Analytics junk drawer. When you enter this view,
change the primary dimension from Source to
Medium.
Googles medium case-sensitive
tag are medium
. If you dont tag your as
one that Google recognizes, in all lower-case, Google Analytics wont be
able to parse it.
Even if you filter
your mediums as lower-case, Google will rely on the
original data before filtering.
If you use untagged links in an email campaign, the majority of the traffic
from that link will be counted as direct traffic.
If you get nothing else right with campaign tagging, get mediums right.

Googles official channel definitions:

bit.ly/ga-channel-definitions
Get Annie Cushings guide to campaign tagging:
bit.ly/ga-campaign-tagging

Customize your channels

Google provides a certain number of default channels, but they dont cover
everything. For example: if you tag your paid social campaigns as PPC
, Google
Analytics will interpret this as paid
search.
Annie has custom channels for resources she creates for her audience, like
Google Docs and Templates (for Microsoft Word), which would otherwise be


counted as Referrals medium

traffic. If the matches gdoc, its sorted as Google
Docs traffic under Channels.
Find opportunities to create custom channels to make your data more legible and
useful.
Custom channels arent retroactive, so they only apply from the date you create
them. But theres a hack to reclaim your historical data.\

bit.ly/channels-ga

Avoid achy breaky views

When you use a view filter, the data is still there in the background, even if it isnt
visible.
Nobody wants to pay for Google Analytics Premium; thats why most marketers
are creating different views.

Dont send visitors away

You send traffic to sites like PayPal or Eventbrite, but when someone leaves your
site,
they take their data with them.
It can be extremely difficult to set up on-site transactions, but the data during the
conversion process is some of the most important data.
Referral Exclusion List: add your own domain as a excluded referral along with
third-party sites you send traffic to. This allows the cookie to pass back and forth
between your site and the site youre sending traffic to without it being counted
as a referral.
Cross-Domain Tracking lets you track what your user is doing on the site you
sent traffic too by passing a Google Analytics parameter through the URL.

Filter out bots

Under View Settings, check Bot Filtering to keep your data limited to real
visitors.
If youre seeing a lot of spam traffic (lots of domains ending in .ru, for example).
include
Set up an filter to limit traffic from your own hostname should be
showing up in your reports.


...

[Tuesday, June 21st]

The Measure of a Marketers Worth (

Slides
)
Rand Fishkin,
@randfish



Rands Fitbit Story
Rand has degenerative disc disease and does three things to lessen his daily pain:
walking, back exercises, losing weight.

When he got his Fitbit, he didnt realize how much improvement potential he had. But his
Fitbit quickly showed that he wasnt as fit as he thought. He became obsessed with
hitting his targets.

Tracking his activity has made him happier.

Tracking WORK, not just progress, made the difference.

In analytics, we assume that we know the right inputs. (More citations, more links
= better ranking.)
We also assume that we know what work matters vs what doesnt (Dont bother
vs. do it every day.)
Were assuming that focusing on outcome/success metrics will bring us
success.
But we dont have any report about the work that went into improving rankings.
Here are the results not here are the inputs.
We dont know if the assumptions we make about moving the needle are
right/wrong - are we doing the right things that lead to our success metrics?

Three big goals in analytics:

1. Reporting
2. Diagnosing (what caused change)
3. Generating targets (aka uncovering which inputs are required to produce
successful outcomes)


Were good at #1 and #2, but #3,

we almost dont do at all.

The challenge with generating targets is that we have to uncover what works and
what doesnt.
And uncovering what works is hard. These elements might be well correlated
with sites that tend to rank well, but that doesnt mean theyre the best
investments in your site
that you can make.
The process of experimentation, failure and discovery is rarely embraced by
managers or clients.

We need to know what works to create success. If you can figure out the work that
maps to the success in a repeatable fashion, then you can keep investing in it.

Rather than just measuring the output of our various tasks (relying on data), we rely on
intuition, small sample sets, case studies, things that other folks in the field have told
us.

Rand thinks this is the greatest analytics challenge facing marketers today: measuring
the work and mapping that to our success. We measure the results - we ignore the
inputs that create those results.

Its about finding the work that creates improvement

And about finding effective targets that impact the right metrics What are the
everyday actions that consistently improve your marketing performance?

7 ONGOING INVESTMENTS TO EXPERIMENT WITH AND MEASURE IN THE NEAR

FUTURE

1. Old school SEO stuff that still works surprisingly well: INTERNAL LINKING
You have full control over this and its easy to improve
Identify important keywords and pages that dont yet rank well
Use a query like his to identify relevant pages for internal linking Keyword
research site:moz.com
[slide required]
[slide required] in url: moz.com site: moz.com
If its a broadly important page across the site, you can use a query like
this to ID good pages for internal links
Add in-content, relevant, useful links from those pages to the target page.


In our experiments, and based on the research of others, these tactics still work.

2. Create new content targeting long tail KWs

Identify keywords with low volume, low difficulty and high opportunity, for some
long tail content creation.
Just a little content curation and a tap of the publish button, and if you have a
reasonably established site, you can rank. 0-10 searches a month can really add
up.

3. Convert mentions to equity-passing links

Get people who talk about you on the internet to also link to you
Set up alerts for your brand names, and youll see lots of sites that talk
about you, but fail to link, costing you traffic and rankings.
You dont necessarily need to pay for a tool; Googles temporal search will
let you find these too.
You can manually edit the query string (the tbs parameter) to get
as granular as you want with Googles timing.
When you find a mention lacking a link, leave a comment, email the author, or use
Twitter to send a ping.

4. Test new titles and headlines on ranking pages

When theres lots of pages using a standard template of keyword use, small
changes can have a big impact.
Case study: ConcertHotels.com


If you have lots of pages that follow a similar format, identify sections that use
templated format and do keyword research and Craft a keyword list of potential
alternatives or addition to compare volume metrics
Test alterations on sizeable part of the site and figure out the effect
Depending on size of your site, it can really move the needle

5. Vary social sharing automation and scheduling

Automating and scheduling a few more social updates than you currently do can
have big rewards. Experimenting with crafting social updates and automating
them - HUGE spike in impressions when the experiment started
(appswithoutcode blog)
Choose some of your best stuff to share
Craft unique compelling updates
Bump up your current sharing level
Tami Brehese ran a process just like this, and experienced dramatic gains
in social following and referral traffic
Oz had great success testing and refining our social sharing across channels to
find the right balance of quantity, diversity and repetition.

6. Add related topics to your KW-Targeted pages.

This page looks nice, but totally lacks the terms and phrases needed for Google
to think its relevant to the keywords Im targeting :(
Uncover the terms/phrases most commonly used on the pages that do rank well
for a search term, and youve got a great starting point.

7. Contact non-converting folks in your audience and use their feedback to improve
Keyword Explorer: This might be the worst landing page Ive ever designed.
Converts ~0.11% of visitors (and those folks already clicked on pricing,
suggesting theyre interested).
I dropped a line to folks whod signed in to use the tool for free, looked at the
pricing but didnt buy. He emailed these people:
Is there anything youd like to see added? Did anything in particular stop
you from considering a purchase?
65 responses, almost all saying the same thing:
They need to try before theyd buy . So we added a free trial CTA.
We saw dramatic, rapid improvement. So now Im going through all the
other feedback to see what else we can fix and tweak.

Every tactic can be broken down into:



The work
The metrics
The goal

Use this format when deciding what work to do and how to engage in it.

Workthat can be measured

Metrics that can show how that work did
And the goalthat youre trying to achieve through that work and metrics
Set both work items and metrics to monitor
Uncover what works moves which metrics

Measure the work against *work* targets, not just metrics goals. Did we do
enough work that we said we were going to do to be able to influence the metric?
right
We didnt do the work,
work, we didnt do enough we didnt give enough time
work
for the to
work
And then double down on the work that improves the metrics you actually care
about.

Some tools: Google calendar goals, Strides, Nozbe, Wunderlist

CTA: Lets experiment. Find what your 10,000 steps are for your marketing. To measure
both the metric goals and the work that goes into them.


Evolve or Die: How Authenticity Builds Durable

Brands (
Slides)
Mackenzie Fogelson,
@mackfogelson

Imagine youre a fast food company. You offer something different, fresh and new, but
you have some hefty competition (and they have huge budgets, like McDonalds). How
would your company compete?

Chipotle did. They spent less than $10 million on their marketing. They challenged the
fast food community to think about where their food comes from. They invested in how
they operated.

This isnt just marketing.

This is the way Chipotle operates.

The result? From 2006-2015, Chipotle grew from $820 million to $4.5 billion.

What will grow your business in the digital age?

In todays digital world, everything is moving and changing at a rapid pace. As a
company, you definitely have to have an amazing product or service. You have to
offer a stellar experience at every touch point.
But you have to do better than that. You have to build an authentic company or
brand.
63% of consumers would rather purchase from an authentic company
73% of people care more about the company than about the product

Its not about how your company is packaged. Its about who your company is. If
you want to grow in the digital age, you need these 3 things.
purpose
people
promises

Purpose
How does building an authentic brand help growth? Because authentic brands have a
purpose.
Business are challenged with unrelenting change, including the way people make
purchasing decisions.


Employees want more meaning in their work, too. Purpose offers a solution to all
of these challenges.

Purpose drives focus (the people you hire, your marketing, the product you sell).
Start by positioning around purpose.


Check out: ogilvy.com/thebigideal

Your companys purpose is the intersection of cultural tension and your brands
best self.
Example: Dove did research and found that only 2% of women are happy with
their body. Their cultural tension is trying to address this. The best self intention
is to provide products that deliver self care. The big ideal is to live in a place
where women feel good about their bodies. Dove experienced a 1.5 billion jump
in sales over a decade because of this approach.
Is this a b2b, b2c thing? Its not either its a people connecting with people
thing. Its building a business thats worth connecting to.

Read: bit.ly/buildpurposefulbrands

People
Every day a new piece of technology comes out that claims to build your
audience but this isnt enough.


Example: Traveling Vineyard wanted to change lives by offering fulfilling work.

For two and a half years,
Genuinely worked with them to find their people. The
result? 200% increase in lead submissions. Increased revenue 40% year over
year. They started by identifying personas aligned with Traveling Vineyards
values (Sarah Supermom, Tracy Transition, Rona Restless). Most companies
stop there. Genuinely matched personas with real people from the community of
Wine Guides.

Read/Watch: bit.ly/conversiongoesbeyond (Unbounce webinar)

Finding the right people is about understanding them.

Download: mappingexperiences.com

Take the personas youve created and consider what theyre thinking, feeling,
doing:
Thinking - Is this company legit? Will I make any money? Do I have to be a
wine expert?
Feeling - Are they nervous about trusting the company? Are they anxious?
Are they excited?
Doing - Are they investigating other companies? Are they talking to friends
and family? Are they watching videos on the website?


Use behaviour to understand what gets in the way of conversions, not their age,
hobbies, etc. Youre trying to address their hurdles.
Then, design a content strategy around this information.
Remember: Your customers journey is not in your control. Yes you need to
understand your funnel, but dont kid yourself into thinking its linear.
Building an authentic brand is an exercise in personalization.

Promise
Back to Chipotle; they had a rough go this year (outbreaks of e. Coli, etc. across
the country.) Chipotle took this as an opportunity and came at it from their
purpose they admitted they blew it, they vowed to be a leader in food safety.
If Chipotle had not build all that trust with their customers over the past 10 years,
theres no way they would have recovered from the incident.


We love Chipotle because theyre real, theyre authentic, they blow it, but then
they hustle to make things better.

bit.ly/buildtrustandhumanize

Conclusion
People want businesses to do more. When you build from purpose, it gives your
business focus and gives people something to believe in.
Growth comes from doing the work to connect with people. No tool, no
technology can do that for you. Use the technology to do the high-level data
mining, but then use humans to apply what youre finding. Get in touch with real
people to find out their joy, hurdles, etc.
Its not about how your company is packaged, its about who your company is.
Yes you need a great product/service, but you also need to be saying to your
customer through your actions that youre worth their money.
Ask yourself, is what youre doing now really working? The alternative approach
may be hard and may take time, but it will be worth it to shift.

Syncing Facebook Ads with Mobile Landing Page

Conversions (S
lides
)
Brian Davidson,
@matchnode

Facebook is the mobile traffic store

, so you better have a mobile landing page
that converts.
Focusing on Facebook means:
Thinking mobile-first with your design.
Better tracking.
Building intelligent audiences.
See what new tools are available, and take advantage of whats next.
Marketers focused on desktop are facing higher and higher cost per click and
lower ROI. Opportunities are on mobile and video.
Facebooks algorithm wants to serve the best ads possible, with the highest
clickthrough rate, to increase inventory and sell more ads.

Matchnodes process:
Campaign Live > Iteration > Analyze Data > Repeat
One of the reasons Matchnode loves Unbounce is that it makes it easy to launch
campaigns and start collecting data.


Mobile-first design
Unbounce makes it incredibly easy to launch mobile-first landing pages.

New Balance Chicago is a franchise that sells all of their goods in-store. Because
of this, theyre reluctant to send traffic to their website. But they were seeing
diminishing returns from their old-school tactics.
Weve covered this New Balance case study in-depth on the blog:
http://unbounce.com/landing-pages/new-balance-case-study/
They used Facebook Offers instead to distribute coupons. But Facebook controls
that data. New Balance wanted those email addresses so they could market to
their customers.
Then Unbounce launched mobile-responsive landing pages. Matchnode cloned
the New Balance website in the landing page builder and sent Facebook ad
traffic to it, and distributed coupons via email.
This allowed Matchnode to optimize the campaign for conversions.

Facebook Custom Conversions

Create a few custom conversions, some higher in the funnel (like your cart or
registration pages).
Create them in Google Tag Manager as well.
Install Facebook Pixel Helper Chrome extension to make sure your standard
events are being tracked properly.


clicks
Optimize your campaign for so that you can collect more data early on and
start iterating.

Then you can start developing your Facebook audiences.

First, look at audience insights. Look up the emails and phone numbers you have
and analyze the demographic data where they live, their income, what they Like
(capital L).
But theres a key piece of demographic data thats missing:
Middle of funnel traffic needs to be based on your website. Export people
whove purchased from you to include or exclude them.
Now you can create lookalike audiences, or target based on pageviews on your
site or actions (video views, specific pages theyve visited).
Then you can start optimizing for conversion.

Matchnode built a lookalike audience that stepped through the top of the funnel,
meaning they could target more people that were
likely to convert.


Matchnode built different ads for different audiences based on different events.
For example, Matchnode ran a video ad targeted at the top of the funnel to
begin generating demand. Then they built an ad based on people who
viewed 95% of the video.

Canvas Ads and Lead Ads

are two new types of ad formats Facebook has
launched. However, the risk is that Facebook owns this data, which limits how
you can utilize it and remarked based on it outside of Facebook.

Key takeaways:

1. Design Facebook Landing Pages Mobile First (on Unbounce!)

2. Install the New Facebook Standard Pixel, Events, Custom Conversions, and Pixel
Helper
3. Switch from Clicks to Conversions AFTER Building Intelligent Audiences and
Event History

Authenticity in a World of Automations: The New

Psychology Behind Top Performing Campaigns
(
Slides
)
Matthew Sweezey,
@msweezey


Were in a new media era where old marketing ideas do not work.
Previously there were businesses and there were consumers, and the media
connected the two. In 1960 there were only 5 media channels -- limited in
creation, distribution and who consumed it.
This set the foundation for what marketing was at the time.
NOW, more people have access to a cell phone than access to fresh water
By 2020 connected devices will outnumber humans 7 to 1

You cant compete anymore. (whitepaper vs. video of god children singing happy
birthday)
The new era is different (its not just re)

Authenticity
: Is not just your actions, its the experiences you create. Authenticity is
heuristic.

How do you manage email?

a) Do you open an email, scan it, decide to read it or delete, go to the next one?
b) Do you scan the inbox, delete the junk and delete the rest?

Answer: You (b), disqualify before you qualify.

No one taught you how to do that. You learn by doing. Its heuristic.
In a fraction
of a second you can delete something that you know came from a marketer.


How do you download content?

a) Download a piece, log off and read it, go back and repeat?
b) Download a bunch, log off and hope to read it?

Answer: You (b), batch research.

Wanted to find out (specific to B2B)

How many times do you go back to Google
to ask different questions when buying something over $1000?

Answer: 3-4 times; 3 batch research cycles.

If you want to understand context you have to understand context as to where

the person is.
Ex. Sitting at the singles table at a wedding. What do you do? Marketing. I
use exacttarget and i hate it, it doesnt do good enough segmentation.
What do you mean by segmentation? Every time someone opts out of an
email, I want to add them to another list. You need automation, you dont
need segmentation.
Authentic content needs to be tailored to what the person expects and what they
want.
No one ever says, I want content. 51% of the time a CEO picks up their mobile
device its because theyre bored. - PEW Research
This is the modern day smoke break. We need to help people escape.

Ex. Cat Products building a giant game of Jenga

Ex. Kronos

Discovery is authentic
The top 7 websites in the world are self discovery portals. This is active
discovery.
There is more power in a Google search than NASA had in 1969 to land on the
moon
Surfing is passive discovery. You dont know what youre looking for , but you do
when you find it.
Amazon does this. You found it via passive discovery. You found it, so its
authentic. This is why Amazon does this. Their two most important metrics are
conversions and customer experience. Amazon hires 473 data scientist it
fucking works.

Self discovery= authentic content

When you find it on your own you trust it, when people put it in front of you you
dont trust it.
We looked at 1 million visitors sessions across 100s of site, the avg page views
per session is 1.7
How many pages have content?
Whats the avg number of pages a person sees?


Dynamic content delivery.

This is one of the best ways to increase engagement with out creating more
content.
Room & board switched their website to dynamic content delivery. Optimize
based on what youve looked at. Sales jumped by 50% they saw over $700k in
sales in a month
Demandbase saw lead flow increased by 400% when they dynamically changed
the content they displayed
Fill up the batch - use dynamic content with the idea of batch research and you
can easily increase conversions
If a person says yes once they are more likely to give you another yes
Landing page-> form-> person has given you a yes. Give them more
opportunities to say yes again. Once the form is completed it disappears
to show more content.
Tip: have a piece of content for the next stage

Nurturing

The goal of nurturing is not to take a person from a whitepaper download and
then convert them to a lead at the end of the nurture campaign
The goal should only be to move that person to the next stage. By keeping it that
granular you can serve up authentic content.
No one is gonna read more than 20% of the email youre sending, so just cut it
out.
Anything online with a URL is content -- doesnt need to be your content.
Challenge the idea that everything you say has to be from you.
You cant force people through the funnel.
First cta is relevant to them at the moment
Second cta is for the next stage in the buying cycle

Fuck HTML!

It doesnt belong in nurture emails, and let me prove you why

You could make yourself appear legit by having nicely formatted direct mail
In the digital age, HTML was really hard to create to begin with, so it too made it
look legit
Now HTML is ubiquitous, anyone can do it.
Rich text is authentic. Its how humans write emails to each other. Short, to the
point and without formatting.


Increased engagement by 4x - 15th largest bank in the us. Did a side by side with
HTML vs. rich text

Authentic means more than just being genuine. It means helping people have the
experience they believe they should be having. In the new era this means you have to
leverage new technology, new tactics, and new types of content because without it your
messages will never rise above the noise.

Video Analytics: Whats Normal, Whats Not, and

What to Do About It (
Slides
)
Kristen Craft,
@thecrafty

Check out: content.wistia.com/ctaconf

IBM Marketing Cloud, SilverPop video: when the video ended, Kristen wanted
more. But there was no call to action or guidance on the video. She searched the
page for a CTA and couldnt find anything.
The bad news: few companies are using video strategically

What does it mean to use video strategically?

1. The video and the page must work together.

2. Identify what you want to get out of your video.
3. Viewing metrics should inform your video strategy.
a. View Count/Plays: the number of people who click play and begin
watching your video.
b. Play rate: the percent of page visitors who click play. Indicates if your lp is
well built and how appealing the thumbnail is.
c. Average engagement rate: the percentage of your video that the average
viewer watches. Indicates how engaged your audience is. Did the video
hold their attention?

Whats normal, whats not and what to do about it

(Least important to most important)

1. Play count (vanity metric): Normal depends on the type of video.

a. Blog videos: go alongside written content, few hundred views per blog
video. Of course it depends on traffic to your site, but in general,
200-400
plays as a good number to shoot for.
b. Hero videos: for feature launch, conference some big event you want a
lot of attention for. Typically more expensive, for Wistias feature launch
vids,
~7K views. In the realm of a few thousand is pretty typical (with the
caveat that it depends on the size of your audience).
c. Sales videos: The goal is to get someone from buy from you or call you
back take some kind of next step with you. RE: Play count, if you get
even asingle play,youve won. Authenticity is important.


Improving play count

Make video more prominent on the page
Promote and share with influencers
Use selective auto-play from email click through. Kristen is not into
autoplay she thinks its rude. But if youre sending an email with video
as the CTA - and someone clicks on the thumbnail, theyre expecting for
the video to play right then.

2. Play rate:
Blog video:
30%is typical
Feature video:
50% is typical

Improving play rate

Above the fold =
90% increase
Custom thumbnails, strategically selected = 35% increase
Use human faces
Use faes that are smiling/happy
Custom player color =
20% increase
A player colour that aligns with your brand identity/logo

3. Engagement rate: The percentage of the video on average that people tend to watch
Under 30 secs: over 80% and then drops the longer the video gets


Under 30% = bad

Over 60%+ = pretty good
Over 80% = wizardry<<
Take a close look at whats going on and replicate.
Format? Content?

Improving engagement rate

Make shorter videos
Take the time to script your video: content.wistia.com/ctaconf (grab
Wistias scripting questionnaire)
Sell less, teach more. No one wants to watch an ad. Focus on sharing
something usefull,
and people will want to stick around and listen.

Metrics #ftw

Its pretty remarkable what you can see when you look at the analytics for the video -
you have a more in depth look than blog posts, even. You can see exactlywhere people
dropped off, rewatched.

Thats the beauty of video analytics. Every time you make one, you learn more about
what your audience likes, so you can give them more of it.


The 5 Best-Kept PPC Secrets I Discovered

Through Millions of Ad Spend (
Slides
)
Jonathan Dane,
@JonathanDane

The secrets are for one purpose: to make more money

Principles apply to all verticals, no matter your budget

#1: The iceberg effect

For every iceberg what you have above the surface is smaller than whats below.
The top is keywords, but bottom is search terms. If you take a traditional search
term report, theres a much bigger opportunity. On the right you have keywords,
on the left you have search terms, which is what youre paying for. Even though
theyre relevant they dont match up. You have way less control than you think.
Theres only one metric that matters: click through or engagement rate.

50 search terms to 1 keyword

You wanna take all those icebergs and make them into smaller icebergs
Find the placements that are working well for you and run them into
smaller icebergs, and then you have a steady flow of conversions.


Granulate everything you can to be as small as possible

Turn your search network ad groups into single keyword ad groups
Extract your search terms
Extract your automatic placements
Extract your audience and interest groups into smaller targets

POOP EMOJI SCALE:

Regular poop: No themes - theres no real structure to the keywords in your ad
groups or campaigns
Gold poop: Themed ad groups - Youre grouping keywords, placements, and
audiences in similar ad groups and sets
Diamond poop: 1:1 ratio - You almost have no discrepancy from search terms to
keywords and youre always extracAng

#2: The importance of micro conversions

Micro conversions mean you dont have enough budget
Time on site
Scroll depth - how long are people going down the page
Form field completion
Button click -
Your micro conversion path is linear in nature
Time on site-> scroll depth-> form field completion-> button click ->
conversion
Where are your visitors dropping off? How do you track it?
Valuetrack parameters and track in GA
Use hotjar

POOP EMOJI SCALE:

Regular poop: Getting more clicks - Youre changing bids and tesAng ads, but not
moving the needle
Gold poop: Getting lower costs - Your finding new ad winners and lowering
average CPCs
Diamond poop: Getting higher profits - Youre increasing conversions and
lowering your cost per conversion

#3: PPC channel temperatures

Cold visitors: They dont know you and theyre not looking for what you offer.


Warn visitors: Theyre interested in what you offer, but not sure if youre their
solution.
Hot visitors: Theyre searching for your brand name and want to do business with
you.
Ex. womens clothing rental service, le tote. Tried to replicate for display
network. Created landing page with benefits of the newsletter vs. offering
discounts. As soon as people signed up for the newsletter, we up-selled
them with the original offer.

Sometimes, you just havent matched your offer with the temperature of your prospect.
Ex. uber started asking does your car qualify for uber rather than asking ppl to
register right away
Youre using the same offer for all channels
Testing new search offers but not onsite funnel
New offers and new conversion funnels

#4: Optimize for sales not conversion

Once you figure out which keywords give you the lowest cost per sale. Less ad
spend, same sales.
How do you track keyword level or placement level sales - automatic value
tracking
Add to hidden Unbounce fields
Now gathering data which keywords are producing the most sales

POOP EMOJI SCALE

Regular poop: No conversion tracking - Youre getting conversions, but not which
sure which keywords, placements, or audiences are responsible
Golden poop: Have conversion tracking - You know which keywords, placements,
and audiences are getting conversions
Diamond poop: Sales tracking - You know which keywords, placements, and
audiences are getting

Now you can bid more aggressively against your competitors because you know what
will make you money

#5: Fuck your metrics

There are so many acronyms that we can get inundated with, but when you look
at the columns you can create and theyre endless. Theyre just guiding lights.
Dont be romantic about Quality Scores, etc.


POOP EMOJI SCALE:

Regular poop: Youre worrying about CPCs, CTRs, Quality Scores and relevancy
Golden poop: Youre focusing on conversion rates, conversion volume and cost
per conversion
Diamond poop: You care about cost per sale and sales volume, and okay
increasing cost per conversion


The Homepage is Dead: A Personalization Story

(
Slides
)
Cara Harshman,
@caraharshman

1998 was a big year for the internet. A lot happened. Google had just launched its
first version. Apple released the iMac. Titanic was out in theatres a crucial part
of pop culture.
And ecommerce was just starting to become a thing. Amazon was four years old
at the time, and they were taking the internet by storm. Jeff Bezos would
frequently discuss his visions for the future of the internet with the press.

If we have 4.5 million customers, we shouldnt have one store. We should have 4.5
million stores. Jeff Bezos, 1998

He was planting the seed for the future of personalization.

Now were all accustomed to seeing personalized content in retail. We know that
if we view an item, it will follow us around the internet. But the rest of the internet
hasnt caught up with that idea.
Today, most websites still say come on come all. We develop personas, but we
dont expand the idea into how we build our websites. Its time to kill the
homepage.
As marketers, we reveal our secret tips & tricks then use said tips & tricks to beat
each other.
Optimizely went from one highly optimized homepage to custom homepages for
large brands they were targeting, or customized per vertical (e.g. retail copy and
imagery for retailers), or even the time of day you visited. Over 26 in total.

1. Why redesign and personalize?

It took 8 peoples time for 8 weeks. So why invest the effort?

They had iterated their page for four years, and it was very well optimized.
Conversions were high but flatlining, and many of these leads were low quality.
They needed to be more educated before entering the sales process. Optimizely
wanted to shift from the local maximum to the
global maximum.
Account-based marketing is a new trend in B2B marketing that results in
higher-value leads.
Demand/Lead Gen: What? > Where? > Who?


Account-based marketing is developed in the opposite order: Who do we

want to reach? What do we want to say? Where does the message go
(what is the channel)?

Optimizelys redesign was built to support account-based marketing.

The redesign also brings focus to Optimizelys own personalization product by
using it to create great marketing experiences. But they also needed to
show the
value they had to make it overtly clear that the page was being personalized.
Optimizely added a button reading Whats going on here? which would display
how the content was being personalized by Optimizelys product.
The value of your product should be clear to users within five seconds of hitting
your site.

ABM is not just a blip on the radar. Learn more about it:
1. View Engagio Slideshare on ABM
2. Read ConversionXL and HelpScout on Local Maximum
3. Do a 5-second value audit on your website

2. What did we change?

Optimizely started by creating 26 audiences for the redesign.

Audiences should be:
x
identifiable (visitor y
fits into column )
valuable (either high-volume of visitors or highly-valuable accounts)
differentiated (they should all be unique from each other)

behavioural
Audiences will fall onto two axes: demographic.
and Behaviour is
what they do, and demographic is who they are.Both are equally important.
Optimizely made a list of target accounts, found the IP addresses of their
offices, and used Optimizely to target unique experiences at those IP
addresses.
They then segmented based on geography. For example, showing social
proof from customers located in the same country as the visitor.
Finally they segmented based on industry verticals.
They redesigned the homepage to be completely personalized, which
necessitated adding a lot of new content. If you want to personalize, you
need to make space for personalized content. You need to rethink the
structure of the page.


Additional content was used to educate visitors on what Optimizely does

in exactly the way best suited to that audience, transforming them into
higher-quality leads.

personalization boxes
The pages headline, calls to action, and modular
content that can be swapped in and out automatically are all customized
based on the audience.
They can recommend local events to visitors based on where they are.

1. Define Audiences optimize.ly/p13n-template

2. Content: Print out homepage, circle areas you can personalize w/ content
3. More details optimize.ly/homepage-story

3. How did it perform?

This was an A/B test in true data-driven fashion, they werent going to launch
this cold. They measured it compared to the previous index.
When personalizing, its still vital to measure the results of what youre doing.
Qualitative Impact: Lots of praise from visitors.


When people are tweeting about your homepage, its a good sign.

Quantitative Impact:
1.5% increase in engagement
+113% increase in views of Solutions page
+117% increase in users who start account-create process
No effect on lead quality

This personalized page framework opens up many opportunities for testing and
optimization.

Ask yourself:

1. Who are your most important customers?

2. What can I say or do to show them how important they are?
3. Where is the best place to deliver this message? Is it on your website, or in another
channel?

Lets Get Rejected: 3 Counter-Intuitive Tactics for

Successful & Brand Defining Content ( Slides)
Aaron Orendorff,

@iconiContent

How to create content.. But not just content for the sake of content. But successful and
brand defining content.

Problem: when you set out to create content, you believe a lie 3 lies in fact.

Lies about
popular content
sales-worthy content
brand-defining content

Lie #1: When it comes to creating popular content, you think its about you. Its about
them.

It goes against the grain, but when it comes to popular content, we need to talk about
vanity metrics. On the internet, popularity is the same as highschool.
Popular content = vanity
Popular content is discovered.

First
use a tool to gauge social media buzz,
such as
buzzsumo
.

Even though Aaron wasnt targeting Forbes, he knew he was targeting people
who read Forbes. When digging, he discovered an article on punctuality that
performed really well.
Aaron had previously tried to crack lifehacker, but was rejected many times.
Based on the buzzsumo results, he pitched an article re: business tips. And the
first pitch was about punctuality.

Figure out whats trending right now

Example: celebrity meets business -> Mindy Kaling, Stephen Colbert, NWA
Put together the Mindy Kaling Guide to Entrepreneurial Domination -- sent
to Entrepreneur.com


Opened the door to ongoing contribution to entrepreneur.com

Did the same thing for Success when Stephen Colbert was trending, when
NWA was trending, pitched Unbounce
These regular contributions got him an ongoing contribution spot at The
Next Web

You can do this with your own most popular content, too.
Aaron took an existing piece -- a checklist -- and he tweaked it for copyblogger:
The Ultimate Copy Checklist. This post cracked 10,000 shares.
Giving your audience what they already want. Find out...
From social
From search
From your own site

But What if I actually want to sell something?

Lie #2: When it comes to producing sales-worthy content you think its about sales. Its
not, its about salvation.

Anytime you put up a landing page a product description page.. Ask yourself
What is the hell this will save people from?
What is the heaven this will deliver them unto?

You should not answer these questions yourself, though you should steal from your
audience. Rip em off.
look at qualitative research
if somethings broken ask people why (Rands talk)
go after user-generated content
comments (blog comments, youtube, social media Twitter advanced
search!), form, customer FAQs, help desk request
reviews (amazon, yelp, angies list, trustradius, app stores, g2 crowd)

Example: Yale appliance; locally owned Boston lighting retailer. Review after
review after review on the site. Click through to the lame review and you find a
few stock photos or vine that were shot on some dudes mobile phone. BUT at
the bottom of every post is a simple call to action based on a specific product.
Online visitors tripled annually. Leads from 800 to 2300. Now yale reaches 5.5
million blog readers per year. They did all of this by holding weekly sales
meetings from their staff and asking, Who got a new question this week from a


customer? and whoever raised their hand wrote the review. They used
qualitative vs. quantitative.

Lie #3: Brand defining content is about success

Brand defining content is about failure. Examples:

Rand Fishkin did it in his
postabout depression
Bing did it with Bing it On campaign
Dominos did it with The Pizza Turnaround. They created a documentary
to address customer complaints such as: the crust is cardboard and the
sauce is ketchup

Why does this work?

Being human. Are you willing to share the dark stuff? You define your
brand by telling stories. Its neat you have a mission statement. Its cool
you have core values. Tell me a story and dont make yourself the hero.

Aaron lost his freedom: he was arrested. Lost his family. Lost his job.

Since then hes lived by the motto: Get rejected. Make it about them, not you. Make it
about salvation, not sales. Make it about failure, not success. #letsgetrejected


Sell Out Your Event - Marketing Tips to Pack the

House (Slides
)
Stefanie Grieser,
@smgrieser

In event marketing, mistakes happen all the time and nothing goes perfectly.
Some cant be helped.
Every interaction with your audience is an opportunity to either delight or
disappoint.
Last CTA Conf, we bought a drone for the boat party and crashed it into
the water when its signal was lost. But Unbounce transformed it into an
opportunity to delight when Felix made a video of its final moments.
The intention is to delight the audience 100% of the time, to meet and exceed
expectations.
You can optimize an event. Dont think of it as a marketing campaign; think of it
product.
as a Crafting an event that people care about is the most important
thing.

Unbounce uses a framework to develop its events.



1. Gather some smart people. 5 or 10 brains is better than one. Generate a lot of
ideas.
2. List out all of the features of your product (the event) the venue, wi-fi, speakers,
etc.
3. Whats the value? What are other events doing? What are the pain points of
conferences and events?

Transform pain points (the struggle to take notes during a conference) and
turned it into an opportunity to delight (by taking the notes for you hope you
like em!)

You need to nurture your audience.

56% of the CTA Conferences website were returning visitors, which makes
sense: maybe theyre thinking about it, maybe they need to ask their boss. Most
people dont register for a conference the first time they visit the site.

Both pages have the option to do both, but the order in which theyre presented is
changed.
Keep me in the loop version generated 595% more emails and lead to an
increase of 7% in revenue because Unbounce could nurture the audience and
convince them to come.


Create urgency: Huge spikes in ticket sales for CTA Conf were caused by
time-limited discounts. Everyone is a procrastinator, so you need to create real
deadlines.
Be specific:
This offer wont last long! Space is limited! Limited Time Offer! Get
em while they last! Seats are selling fast! These sound like lies.

By explaining the time commitment involved, the anxiety of the required effort is
reduced.

increasing
But urgency-based marketing relies on anxiety.
exactly
Example: Unbounce sent this email saying how many spots were
remaining at an event.

Follow the Smart Marketers Checklist for Urgency and Specificity:

Be human
Unbounce sends a few more oops emails than wed like to admit swag
NAME
mix-ups, writing someones name in an email literally as . But those
emails have had 3x the opens and 5x the clickthrough.
Some tips for writing those kinds of emails:

Be prompt, but dont rush it.

Use humour to soften the blow.
And own up to it but only once. One apology is enough..
And of course, give a deeper discount if you can.

Dont make mistakes on purpose to increase engagement rates. Please dont do

humans
that. People like to engage with , not
robotic marketers.
You can write incredibly personal email copy without having to mess it up.


Example: Theres a portion of people that are opening and clicking

Unbounce event emails, but not buying.So Stefanie sent an email asking if
there was a reason that they hadnt committed to come yet. Just emailing
and
them to ask resulted in 1.5% jump in sales a ton of feedback.

Find out what other conferences or events your audience is interested in; a lot of
the feedback indicated that people were going to Mozcon instead.
Far too often marketers default to their marketing automation tool, and start
using language that they wouldnt normally say. Start by writing your emails
in
your regular email client.
Stefanie sends herself the email in Gmail, waits a day, and then reads it
out loud to make sure it sounds authentic.

Remember: Every interaction, good or bad, is an opportunity to delight or disappoint!



Cat Videos, List Posts and Other Myths About

High-Converting Content (S lides
)
Hana Abaza,
@hanaabaza

Content marketing has become a huge part of Uberflips marketing strategy.

Content is the atomic particle of all digital marketing. Rebecca Lieb
Content is so prevalent, so its gotten a lot harder. There are over 600,000
mind-blowing marketing posts, 500,000 ultimate guides and too many list posts
to count.
We have to think beyond the content thats being created in our own industry.
Think about content that sucks people in online (e.g., cat videos).
Theres a type of content that unites people (Why everyone hates nickelback, plus
5 ways to be genuine lol).
When youre thinking about content marketing, you have to think about everything
thats coming at you text messages, emails, the stuff friends and family send.
Stuff from friends and family trumps ultimate guides.

Myth #1: Your Business Competitors Are Your Content Competitors



How do we create better content that converts?

Relevance: When I send an email to my best friend with an article, I know shes
going to open and love it, because i know her really well. You dont have the same
feeling when you send and email to your list.
How do you know whats relevant?
People (ask internal teams, customer, followers, audience surveys)
Tools
Data

Caveats
Treat it like a customer dev for content
Cant send the survey with all the questions
just
Dont send the survey; call them!

Tools youll need:

buzzsumo
or
answerthepublic.com

Data
Highest traffic
Highest converting
What Andy said in his talk


Myth #2: All you need is really great content

Nope. Heres a dirty secret: great content isnt enough. You need a great content
experience.
Example: I love pina coladas, but dont want to drink one in a basement I
want to drink it on a beach. Tastes the same, same drink, but the
experience drives results and gets conversions

How do we create a high converting content experience? With these 3 principles:

readable, actionable, tailored.

Readable - Buffer blog is easy to read. The font, formatting and images make it
easy to scan and digest.

Actionable- When it comes to content marketing, it needs to be actionable in 2

ways: Have you created an engagment path and are there CTAs?
Engagement path - Ikea uses arrows to lead the way through the store.
They want you to walk through and grab the random pillow or lamp. And
theyve created shortcuts. Marketers need to think of their content like
that. The buyer journey for content is not linear, but point people in the
right direction. How do we keep people more engaged?
Recommend content
Internal linking
Ask them to subscribe
Theres not shortage of ideas

CTAs
- Whats the 1 rule about CTAs? Have a f#cking call to action.
Consider clarity, context, targeting
Clarity - is the action and value obvious
Context - context is everything, eliminate jargon with this chrome
extension
Targeting - Bat Signal; if youre using content to get results and lead
gen, your CTAs need to be targeted.

Tailored - When we think about how we tailor our content we think about tofu,
mofu.. And then separate the content into types (think webinars and whitepapers
and ebooks all in one spot). Make sure you have tailored content and separate
it by type, topic, vertical, segment, persona, account
Avanti does this really well; split resources up by role


Backoffice splits up by industry

Uberflip content feed does that, too - offer marketo targeted content

Myth #3: More is more

92% of marketers think theyre productive; 90% of marketers also work on
evenings and weekends.
60% of marketers have delayed going to the bathroom to meet a deadline. We
dont have time to pee!
What does productivity actually mean? More is not more. Better is more.
How do we get more back for our buck without creating more content? Heres
what Uberflip did:
Uberflip playing around with ideas
Took a content hiatus - no new content
So what will the content team do all day? They shifted focus to do things
that will help reach their goals

The problem with most marketing teams isnt a lack of ideas. Its the lack of clarity and
focus.

79% of marketers cant measure the success of their content

Uberflip content team started with a blog audit to identify high traffic pages that
arent converting, high converting pages that arent getting traffic


But what about the blog subscribers? They expect emails from us!
Still sent them emails
Sent specific posts that we wanted them to see
Saw increase in open rates and clickthroughs
All about focus

Before you write another blog post, ask yourself:

What do people really want? Is it really relevant?
What will the experience be like?
Do you really need another blog post?
Why are cat videos so cute?

Is Your Copy Selling You Short? (How to Find Out

and Fix It) (S
lides
)
Amy Harrison,
@harrisonamy

not committed
What is cheating copy? Like cheating in a relationship, its .
Nobody says, You know, I really love Kevin because he has hair, and
specific
teeth. Theyre about the reasons they love someone or
something. Your copy should be a love letterto your product.
Amy did a survey about writing persuading copy, and their biggest fear was
writing copy that was too sales-y, pushy, or forceful.
You want a balance. You want to be confident about your product and
back it up with proof.

One sign your copy is cheating on you?

When you see it hanging around on other sites.

Amy was researching time tracking software, and wanted to see how they were
describing their product. But they all said the same thing:

track time and expense

powerful software
powerful features
powerful reports
Easy-to-use
As a customer, you cant visualize what something like a powerful
report looks like in your life.

This makes your product look like a commodity, and makes it difficult customers to
know if your product is right for them. Instead, be specific:

new features every month

start using in 10 minutes
Our employees actually use it
Google apps integration
Sync across mobile and tablet devices
Complex billing cycles


In a script, characters should speak so uniquely that they would be identifiable

even if you removed their names.
You want your customers to feel like the copy theyre reading is written for them
,
and has a unique character.
Sometimes copy cheats on you in different industries.
What does unlock your
potential look like? What does it mean? And why does this happen?

When marketers write copy, we try to sum up various features and benefits as
succinctly as possible. A set of great features can make a product powerful, but
describing those features
instead of , we end up using the word powerful.
Cheating copy means you could be anyone, not theone.

This is pretty generic for the first thing a customer sees when they come to a
site. But scrolling down, the features were much more specific:


These are far more important. They shouldnt be buried down the page. So Amy
incorporated those features into the value proposition:


Make your copy fall in love with you all over again:

1. Surveys

If Id asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.
Henry Ford. (Maybe. The idea works.)
Dont listen to customers on what features they want
Amys dad had a problem; his music collection was disorganized and he wanted
it all in one place. He asked Amy to sit down with him, go through his physical
music collection, find the songs he liked, move them onto a computer, and then
onto an MP3 player.
She showed him Spotify instead.
How do you survey customers? Ask them about their challenges
and
questions
they have. The responses you get will likely fall into broad themes and categories,
and you can address them directly in your copy.
Challenges:
Billing clients is a nightmare but I havent got time to learn a brand new
system
We have so many services and pricing structures I dont know how wed
bring it together without spending a lot of money.

2. Symptoms

If you walk into your doctors office and he hands you a prescription without
looking at you, youre probably not going to fill it. Youd be more receptive if he
took the time to address your issues with you.


Its gross, but its powerful and direct. If you were to ask Do you have a problem
with bleeding gums? well, what constitutes a problem?
A more business-oriented example:
Is social media working for your business? This is vague. But these
questions:
Are you struggling to get customers engaged on social media?
Can you track which sales come through social media activities?
Are you spending too much time updating individual accounts with
the same content?
These are direct problems that you can address.

Symptoms bring you closer to your customer. They are:

Specific
Vivid
Evocative

Emotions: Think about the emotions of your audience. Marketers tend to focus
on a handful: annoyed, frustrated. Check out the list of emotions in Wikipedia and
try to appeal to different ones, maybe ones that others dont try to address.
The remaining symptoms: time and money (the costs of something), and any
physical manifestations of the problem (pain or discomfort).

3. Spying


A character monologue is written from a characters point of view. Write in first

person about your customers problem.
Customer profile (external):
Hotel-owner looking to get more leads and bookings so they can increase
capacity.
Customer monologue (internal):
I hate how the hotel industry is dominated by big chains with no
character. It kills me when customers tell me were so much better than X,
but that they found us by accident and decided to take a chance. Hotel
booking sites take too much money and I just dont know how to compete
online without a massive budget.

about
When you write the customer, its easy for the language to be generic. But
when you write from your customers perspectives, its easier to understand their
problem.

Interview your customers.

A social network for kids where they can upload pics of their artwork. When you
like a pic, you can give it a bubble. Its a totally positive atmosphere for kids to
share part of themselves and build their confidence. In terms of features:

Safe online social network for children

Children upload and share artwork
Used in schools
Creators from around the world

They also had eight hours of interviews with teachers about the product, which
were far more descriptive about the sites real value.
8 hours of interview later:
Connecting families with the classrooms
New friendships - shy children building confidence and getting involved
Deeper understanding of diversity
Art as a universal language - transcending time-zones
Makes thinking visible
Travelling the world, beyond their community, through art

This was a strong source to use for writing about the product in the real terms
that users perceive it and value it.


Crib sheet:

Once you follow this framework, youll better understand your customers and
how to address their needs. Put an end to cheating copy, because you deserve so
much more than that.


Youre Making My Brain Hurt! The Psychology

Behind Terrible Conversion Experiences (S
lides)
Michael Aagaard,
@ContentVerve

Michael clicked on an ad for mobile marketing automation - see a live demo!

Lands on a page with 107 links
Only interested in 1
Headline: get the real feeling of marketing automation
Subhead: Touch our main features
CTA: log in To log in please leave your details and click the button below
See demo button: page just reloads
Dropdown: see live demo: page reloads
Click icon: form again to log in and leave details
Chat: live chat not live, but you can print and email the convo (youre not
having)
Homepage: nope
Pricing page: nope
Fill out the form: nope, not a demo, its a dummy account
Mobile automation: locked
Talk to support: George is still not there

If we want to be able to avoid creating these experiences we should

figure out why
theyre so bad.

Every time i thought something was going to happen, something weird happened. Had
to switch between intuitive mode and analytical mode
.

2 fundamentally different modes of thinking:

1. Intuitive thinking: a machine for jumping to conclusions
a. Intuitive = 2 x 2 = 4.
b. Even if you didnt want to see the number 4 you see it, its automatic
c. Fast, automatic, emotional, subconscious, in the moment
d. Something that happens to you
2. Analytical thinking: the lazy controller
a. Analytic - 17 x 24 = 408.
b. Slow, effortful, logical conscious, planning ahead
c. Something you do


Why do we spend so much time in system 1?

General law of least effort. We will gravitate to the easiest way of doing
something. System 1 is automatic, called cognitive ease. System 2 is
cognitive strain.
Higher the cognitive load the higher the cognitive strain
To max out cognitive load, show all the options right away
Page attention ratio should be 1:1
The higher the cognitive strain, the more frustrated, tired and harder to
control ourselves; burn glucose the more analytical thinking you have to
do

Every step in a funnel provides an opportunity to make peoples brains hurt

Create a conversion experience that facilitates cognitive ease

Summary:
System 1, system 2
More we use system 2 the more our brains hurt
Goal is to create an experience that doesnt hurt system 2

Cognitive biases: mental shortcuts

Because of the relationship between systems 1 and 2 we can use them to our
advantage
Priming effect ; exposure to a certain stimulus will affect how you interact with
another stimulus
Unbounce free 30 day trial
Priming you with free, free, free, trial but then you have to put your credit
card info in. People see addl form fields for credit card info goodbye!
Managed expectations by adding 3 steps, including billing info

Every single step in your funnel primes for the next

Need to have a logical progression

System 1 very susceptible for priming and makes your brain hurt less
Conduct usability test to understand your primes


Use session recording to find critical points in the funnel - if you show a video like
that to your boss, theyre going to listen

Framing effect
The way you present something has a direct impact on how it will be recd

52% of people got it wrong - theyre the same!

Talk about what im going to get vs. what im going to do
Order vs. get
Get -> nearly 15% more leads
The way you deliver a message has impact
We react differently to identical situations depending on how theyre presented
Framing can make your brain hurt less
Interview customers to understand whats important to them
Ask yourself, can i communicate this in a better way?

WYSIATI:
What you see is all there is
Test to remove cancellation policy text ->9% increase in CTR
With policy conversion down; without conversions up
At the last second they highlight cancellation
What your customers see is all there is
Humans dont spend a lot of time on analysis


Tell us a little bit about you: Why are you asking me for this info? Wasnt
suspicious.. But now i am. Im going to be talking to support a lot.Who are
these agents?

We know that what you see is not all there is. We have to do the thinking so our
prospects dont have to think.
We dont do much analysis, rather we take was is in front of us and turn it into
the best story we can
WYSIATI is a dangerous pitfall for marketers
Conduct interviews with sales and support to identify your customers
questions and concerns
Use feedback polls to get specific insight. Hotjar

Audience - system 1 - they dont understand, they dont know the product like we
do
Marketers - system 2 - we know the whole story, everything is logical
Creates a wall between us; us against them. Need to get to a place where were
all on the same side. Use the insights to create delightful experiences, not for
evil.