ShareBloc

On the Biggest Marketing Problems Facing Enterprises

Every client I work with knows they have a problem, but it’s usually the wrong problem. On every engagement, I come in and perform an audit. This means going through their content, their social media activities and their analytics. This audit helps uncover what’s really going on under the hood. For example, a common refrain I hear is that we don’t have enough leads. So there’s a preference to create more content to drive leads. But it may be that they have the content but no one is actively promoting and distributing that content on social media. So their problem isn’t lack of content; it’s getting that content to their users.

On Creating a Great Content Marketing Machine

The most important thing when you’re building a content marketing strategy at your company is to have realistic expectations. A lot of clients think getting a consultant or agency to come in will double or triple their lead-gen after a month, even if they’ve never hit that number before.

Or as I’ve seen with some clients, they recognize they need more content so they start asking their product managers or engineers to produce content. Not everyone’s a writer so it ends up being an inefficient exercise with a disappointing ROI. Good content marketing is still somewhat holistic. The voice has been consistent, repetitive and engaging. This is why when I go into some engagements; I may actually have to write some of the initial content because the company doesn’t have the right personnel yet.

On Social Media Content Optimization

I recently spoke at a conference on how to optimize your social media content. A lot of my clients know they have to be on social but beyond Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter, they don’t know where their audience is. Is it on Instagram or Pinterest? We’re in the Age of the Customer so marketers need to tailor their content for the customer. This means, for example, your content needs to be optimized for sharing on social media or viewed on a mobile device.

On Curating Content for his Twitter Feed

As an active curator of content, I use HootSuite and Tweetdeck, following a lot of the great names in sales & marketing, like Jeff Bullas or Jay Baer. I curate the content myself so it’s an authentic voice. Obviously, I produce a lot of content so I want to promote that on Twitter. But I subscribe to the give to get rule. If you share other people’s content that you enjoyed, some of them will return the favor. This is how I built a large Twitter audience.

Click on the image below to view his Social Intelligence presentation - Social Media Content Optimization: Developing Content That Drives Engagement and ROI

For more information on Rik Walters, visit his blogs and follow him on Twitter. 

What is the most common pain point you see amongst your clients?

The biggest pain point we see amongst our client base is usually a company missing their number and not knowing why. Most companies have a marketing plan for the month or year but after a while, they get into reactive mode. This means sending out emails or running short-term campaigns.

The challenge for many of these companies is that they don’t have a strong understanding of their buyer personas. As a result, they can’t build repeatable, scalable processes for growth.

What are some tactical mistakes companies make around buyer personas?

How well you understand what a qualified prospect is directly related to how well you understand your buyer. Most companies have a misunderstanding of their buyer. What does the buyer care about? What in and around the service attracts the buyer? These are all parts of the buyer journey.

Buyers tend to think about solutions at the end of their buying journey. A typical journey starts with the pain and problem. This leads the buyer to think about what success and a positive outcome looks like. Only then, will they start thinking about solutions.

Studies have shown that 60% of the buying process is already completed by the time the buyer is engaged with the vendor. This means marketing now owns about two-thirds of the buying process. That’s why marketers have to create content that understands where the buyer is coming from.

  How did Matt and Heinz Marketing become a Tastemaker for Tools and Influencers?

Two of our most popular features on our blog are Matt’s App of the Week and the How I Work series. With the App of the Week, it started with us at Heinz Marketing looking to find better tools for ourselves. When we started getting more proficient with certain tools, we started recommending them to clients. After a while, it made sense for us to blog about it. The most amazing thing about this is that we now have PR people pitching me on getting included into Matt’s App of the Week series. We aren’t TechCrunch in terms of traffic but it’s a nice validation of medium-sized and loyal following.

The How I Work series got started in the same way. I liked the idea from a couple of different places I get content and I decided to do one on myself. That worked well with our readers so I asked some of my friends whose work I admired and it snowballed from there. The best part of the series is that each interviewee is asked at the end whom they’d like to see covered in a future post. Sometimes, you get a great suggestion. For example, Ardath Albee recently suggested Doug Kessler to do the series and we got him soon after.

  Some Parting Thoughts

There are a lot of things we cover at Heinz Marketing because we cover our audience, not a topic. This means we identify a lot of ways to improve demand generation, from content strategy to sales management. It can get overwhelming so just pick one or two things you and your company should focus on and make that happen. Be intentional on where you are going to make an impact.

Aligning Sales and Marketing into a Single, Cohesive Sales-Acceleration Machine from Heinz Marketing Inc

Chad Pollitt (VP of Marketing, DigitalRelevance)

Post: Marketo vs Eloqua vs Pardot: A Massive Review

DigitalRelevance is a content distribution & promotion company that helps content marketing teams deliver more traffic, shares, audience and conversions.

Why did you choose this post?

I chose this post because Marcus Sheridan delivered an epic review on marketing automation software in my opinion.

  Justin Gray (CEO & Chief Marketing Evangelist, LeadMD)

Post: Technology that Drives the Modern MKTG Department

LeadMD is a full service marketing and sales consulting firm specializing in conversational marketing and revenue performance management.

One best practice in Marketing Automation that I love?

STOP. Stop followed by slow down.  Whatever you’re doing today stop and go talk to a customer.  Ask them why they implemented you, ask them how they felt when they signed the contract, ask them their opinion of the people they speak to at your company.  STOP thinking marketing automation success is rooted in anything automatic.  Marketing Automation helps us scale, but to scale we have to speak like a human. Which is hard. We have to address our buyers pains, build their trust and do it over and over again.  Only the final part requires software.  Stop and just go listen.  You will be forever changed and for the better.

  Abhiroop Basu (Content Strategist, Zopim)

Post: The 411 on Marketing Automation

Zopim’s award-winning live chat solution helps businesses increase sales conversion by engaging important leads on their websites.

How do you use marketing automation at your work?

After our customers sign up for Zopim's free 14-day trial, they are placed in our email marketing campaign. Using the emails, we introduce our customers to Zopim and the ways in which it can benefit them. We do this by using behavioural markers to spot what kind of user they are and provide them solutions according to that criteria. For example, if we notice that the user is interacting with a lot of customer’s, we might recommend our Trigger’s feature to ease the process.

  Jessica Miller (Marketing Services Manager. Submitted on behalf of LeadMD client, ReachForce)

Post: SmartForms Survey 

ReachForce helps ensure the quality of your leads and data, by fixing incoming data upon entry and keeping existing data clean and enriched.

How do you use marketing automation at your work?

ReachForce and LeadMD, we rely heavily on all aspects of our Marketing Automation platforms to communicate with our prospects and customers. But my personal favorite tool would have to be the Segmentation and Dynamic Content functionality. We follow a practice of developing Buyer Personas that we utilize throughout our website, content and communications, to enhance the overall user experience. It’s all about having a genuine conversation with your audience.

  Marc Majers (Senior User Experience Designer, Hyland, creator of OnBase)

Post: 10 Strategies for Content Marketing, Events, and Marketing Automation Success

OnBase by Hyland is one of the most flexible and comprehensive ECM products on the market today.

Why did you choose this post?

On Data Signals and Data Science

Most companies are actually data-poor. The reason is intuitive; most web forms have been simplified to increase conversion, which means you may have only the lead’s name, contact, title, company and its source. In the past, this meant a salesperson would have to manually look up the lead online and fill in custom fields on Salesforce.

With Infer, this manual step is not only eliminated, it’s optimized. Infer collects thousands of data signals already from the web. We can tell you how credible the lead’s domain is, its hiring patterns, ad spend or how innovative it is based on patent or trademark filings. Our algorithm determines which of theses signals is a better fit with your company’s product and weighs it accordingly.

On Fit vs. Activity Based Scoring

Most companies use activity based scoring to determine the strength of a lead—if a lead opened an email or clicked on a call-to-action button. They do it because it’s easy to “acquire” these leads. There are a lot of problems with activity based scoring though. For example, some leads can be stuck in a funnel because they haven’t triggered the right activities to move them down. More importantly, activity based scoring doesn’t take into account buyer persona.

Some leads are a poor fit for your company and product. They could be in the wrong space, wrong size or may not have the authority. Infer can tell you which of your leads are actually fit for your product. This is your explicit lead score whereas activity is more implicit. The fit leads are more likely to convert, which means better sales efficiency and more accurate forecasting.

For more information on Infer: 

90-100 hours a week is a huge workload. How do you balance the two roles?

I have no regrets in juggling a military and marketing career. The discipline, leadership and communication skills developed as a war fighter have prepared me for the rigors of the fast-paced world of marketing. The Army also teaches you how to compartmentalize stress and plow through it. What freaks the average person out merely gets a shoulder shrug from me. At the end of the day there’s no enemy mortars popping off or danger close by. The year I spent in Iraq puts common corporate pressure and stress in perspective

How did you get into inbound and social media marketing?

My path to a marketing career is probably not very typical. I started off in Sales and eventually found myself doing online marketing to fill up my sales pipeline. I got pretty good at it. As a salesperson it was my responsibility to sell websites. Little did I know that selling websites meant that I’d be doing account management, content creation, SEO, social media marketing and even some rudimentary design work for my clients. It got to the point where the marketing I was doing was far more valuable and enjoyable than pounding the pavement slinging websites. I haven’t looked back since.

You're an active blogger. How do you get inspired on blog ideas? What does your publishing schedule look like?

Inspired? It’s not so much that I get inspired. While I’m working during the day blog title ideas pop into my head and I drop them in a Word document. When I sit down to write I visit that folder and review some of the titles – typically choosing one and writing it out. I don’t really have much of a publishing schedule and try to write a post on the weekend for HuffPo or SocialMediaToday. Anything else that gets written during the week happens because I had a sliver of free time. I also try and stretch my content out, meaning, I’ll create a slide deck and turn that into a blog post or write an ebook and turn that into several posts – always looking at how to get the most out of the content produced.

Your blogs tend to be very direct and to the point. What do you try to convey to your readers?

Anyone that knows me well has heard me say this a thousand times, “I’m not a good writer.” It’s true; I’m a mediocre writer at best. I just happen to be passionate about online marketing and it’s this passion that makes it look like I know what I’m doing behind a keyboard. I’ve been doing this inbound content marketing game for so long now and I’m still waiting for someone to call me out for being a poor writer.

My tendency to be direct and to the point in my writing has a lot to do with my military background. Military writing style eliminates fluff and color from the English language. This is done on purpose because on the battlefield communication has to be direct and to the point. Lives are on the line and any perceived confusion in communication can mean the difference in who lives and who dies.

For the most part, my writing is a view into my mind and what I’m thinking at the time. Whether a reader agrees with me or not, I wish to convey passion and be as helpful as possible. In my marketing career I’m approaching 600 articles written. It seems like a lot, but they add up quickly over the years. One of the coolest things about creating that much content is that occasionally you’ll get to meet someone at a conference who references something you wrote years ago and shares the impact it had on them. It just goes to show you that creating helpful content is one of the best kinds of marketing a person or brand can do.

You're also a very good curator on Twitter. How do you curate your content? Where do you go for content? What would make your life easier in this regard?

I curate so much content because I actually read so much content. The digital marketing landscape changes on an almost daily basis. Marketers who aren’t consuming content on a daily basis are the ones that risk getting left behind. The content I find, consume and curate come from several different sources. I use ShareBloc, Twitter, Klout and LinkedIn Pulse. What would make my life easier regarding curation? It’s hard to say – I don’t know what I don’t know. Is there an easier way? Maybe, but I haven’t the foggiest idea what that would look like.

Describe an average day for Chad Pollitt.

The average workday for me starts at 7am and kicks off with at least an hour of reading, sharing and curation. By 8am I usually know what the buzz is in our industry for the day. The next hour I spend staring at analytics. This allows me to understand the pulse of our marketing team’s efforts. At any given time I can have two or more huge projects I’m juggling so the rest of the day is spent managing that or going in and out of meetings. If there’s any time left between those two I try to write. I’m headed home sometime between 6 and 7pm.

For more great stuff on Chad, download his ebook or find him on Twitter and ShareBloc.

Tell Me Where It Hurts

In the last quarterly investor analyst call, LinkedIn saw a 50% increase in organic engagement. The company attributes this growth to their emphasis in growing their publishing platform with acquisitions in SlideShare and Pulse and the introduction of features like Influencers. In spite of these developments, LinkedIn engagement continues to underperform compared to their social media competitors like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and Pinterest. Nevertheless, it’s clear LinkedIn has made incredible strides since this report by the Wall Street Journal two years ago, where the average minutes per visitor for LinkedIn was 17 minutes compared to Facebook’s 405 minutes. LinkedIn knew it had an engagement problem and they expertly made large moves to cure this malady. 

We Got a Pulse!

In 2011, LinkedIn Today launched with the strategic hiring of Dan Roth, Fortune’s former editor. Dan and his team of editors worked with machine-learning algorithms to deliver relevant content to LinkedIn members. To bolster engagement, LinkedIn then acquired SlideShare in 2012 for $119 million, the pre-eminent platform for online presentation sharing. LinkedIn wasn’t done with acquisitions. Recognizing a need to deliver a high-quality mobile/tablet experience, LinkedIn acquired Pulse for $90 million in 2013. Pulse’s incredible value proposition was simple: they could deliver relevant content from more than 750 leading publishers to their 30 million users. LinkedIn Today re-branded as Pulse and LinkedIn members could now get content from anywhere on the web delivered to them through the web or mobile app. But engagement still lagged.

First Do No Harm

The question I’m dancing around is even with the best professional content properties, the best machine-learning algorithms and the largest professional network, why is LinkedIn having a tough time increasing their engagement numbers? Let me revisit the last quarterly call. When asked why user engagement was down two consecutive quarters, CEO Jeff Weiner and CFO/SVP Steve Sordello gave some great answers, but one stood out:

“[The Endorsements product] has reached a very large scale and there was an effort to improve the quality on endorsements, which impacted transactional volume somewhat. So part of the delta, for example, our unique visitor growth was around 31%. That probably would have been 40%, 41% without that change.”

LinkedIn had to throttle back on some of their engagement levers to maintain the quality of their feed (sound familiar?).

LinkedIn’s biggest problem is a product of their success. As a platform for managing your professional profile, LinkedIn is without parallel. Their most successful application continues to be their Talent Solutions product, which represents 55% of their revenue. The primary use case for most LinkedIn members is still getting a job. In addition, as you may notice from your LinkedIn network, it includes connections from all walks of your professional life. I work at an Internet startup in the b2b content space, but because of my work and academic history, I have connections to solar engineers, doctors, teachers, chefs and even one celebrity. Pulse’s machine learning algorithm has to balance delivering me content that is relevant to my industry while serving me updates from my professional network, most of which is not relevant to my work. LinkedIn has built a wildly successful professional social graph but it does not yet have a comparably successful interest graph. This is the very same problem Facebook (another victim of its massive success) is facing and trying to solve with their mobile app, Paper.

The Doctor is In

Which begs the question: Do we need another publishing platform? LinkedIn users could already post their content from their Wordpress, Tumblr or Medium blog and receive relevant analytics on engagement. However, by posting content from their own site or other publishers, LinkedIn loses the coveted “time spent on site” engagement metric to the source. In fact, because professional content tends to be higher-quality and long-form, LinkedIn already has a history of delivering great engagement post-click. However, if LinkedIn hosted the content, engagement on LinkedIn would increase. To boost their own engagement metrics, is LinkedIn creating a direct competitor to their publishing partners by taking away from their referrals?

I readily admit as the founder of ShareBloc, I’m completely biased. We believe in content curation and sharing, which means our content links directly to the publisher, similar to StumbleUpon or Reddit. My opinions are completely my own, speculative and not substantiated by LinkedIn. But if I ran a $22 billion public company with 277 million users and I needed to increase engagement, I’d do exactly the same thing.

Scumbag Steve

If you’ve never wandered over to /r/AdviceAnimals on Reddit, you still may have seen its social reach in your Twitter and Facebook feeds. It’s in this sub-Reddit that memes are organically generated with photos that are cute and innocuous like Doge, semi-humorous social commentary like First World Problems or public shaming like Scumbag Steve (and his less popular female counterpart, Scumbag Stacy). While there is a real “Scumbag Steve”, the Scumbag Steve meme is used primarily to shame someone when he is acting inappropriately or unethically, particularly when it comes to “hedonistic behavior.”

On Reddit, that someone is typically anonymous and poor “Scumbag Steve” is the focal point of our shared disgust. But on Secret and Whisper, that someone is likely a real person. Famously, some VCs like Marc Andreessen and Mark Suster have come out against these anonymous social networks because of the potential for bullying and slanderous nasty posts. Here’s one Mark found when he logged on:

This has caused a backlash amongst VCs who have backed these social networks, like Keith Rabois from Khosla Ventures who says “Secret is the most misunderstood app since Twitter.” It doesn’t mean that the two Mar(c/k)s are not without merit. YikYak, an app more geared towards younger people, has already been banned at a number of schools. When I signed up for Whisper, I was asked to verify I was over 17 but that’s hardly stopped kids before. In addition to Scumbag Steve, there are a number of other popular memes that can be ported over to anonymous networks and produce similar nastiness: Condescending Wonka, Overly Attached Girlfriend, Annoying Facebook Girl, College Liberal, etc. But what about Good Guy Greg? After all, all memes aren’t mean.

First Day on the Internet Kid

When networks like Reddit, HackerNews and our own ShareBloc rely on the karma of strangers to propel a community, I have to assume there’s some good on the Internet. Data doesn’t lie so I did some analysis of six popular memes to see how popular they were. I chose two I would categorize as bad (Scumbag Steve, Condescending Wonka), two I would categorize as good (Good Guy Greg, Actual Advice Mallard) and two I would categorize as neutral (Confession Bear, Doge). Here were my results:

Admittedly, the data is equally non-comprehensive and not statistically accurate but I think it’s a decent proxy of what the Internet thinks. In this case, the neutral memes trump everyone else, with good barely beating bad. The neutral memes had a combined average rank of 6.0, whereas the good memes ended at 7.0 and bad ended at 8.0. Of course, this was just a small selection of the memes. I arbitrarily ranked the entire KnowYourMemes selection of Advice Animal memes and came away with 64 neutral memes, 26 bad memes and 12 good memes. With so many conflicting data points, what this tells us is that the Internet is neither good nor bad: it’s a reflection of who we are.

Sudden Clarity Clarence

If users, particularly young people, are moving towards anonymous social networks to share their secrets, what does that mean for advertisers and monetization? Not long ago, there were other UGC sites that could “never be monetized” because of illegal content or bad behavior. Then we had a string of hits to prove otherwise: YouTube got acquired for $1.65 billion, Instagram was acquired for $1 billion and Twitter is now worth $28 billion. What is so different from Whisper and Secret that makes them un-monetizable?

One valid argument to be made is that there is no meta data on the users. In this regard, that is mostly true. Unlike Facebook or LinkedIn, which collect a lot of your biographical personal data, these anonymous social networks have nothing on you. Advertisers cannot target a mid-30s college-educated woman from Missouri on Whisper because it’s possible Whisper doesn’t know who its users are. Meta tags from your mobile device can give you some idea on things like location but much of your biographic data is unavailable by design. What is available is what Twitter calls the Interest Graph and that’s how Twitter makes its money.

I’ve written extensively about the interest graph before and how powerful it is for advertisers. For example, users who tweet about the NCAA tournament may get an in-stream native ad from a sports-related brand. Similarly, a user who posts a message on Whisper or Secret about some shared experience can potentially get a related ad in-stream. If we were all at SXSW, for example, posting insightful comments about Edward Snowden or posting snarky remarks about Tyler the Creator, we could've been served an ad to an Austin-based restaurant. Some whiz-bang natural language processing (NLP) can give some assurances that the brands won’t be associated with anything too unsavory. Then again, advertisers work with sites like Huffington Post, Yahoo News and Politico all the time and no one has complained (too loudly) about the negative vitriol you may find in the comments section.

Can you truly blame Whisper, Secret or YikYak for the content that is being shared? Some say that these anonymous social networks bring about the juvenile clique mentality of high school and that these apps are just digitized versions of a Mean Girls burn book. In my high school, the nastiest things written about other students could sometimes be found on the bathroom stall door. We never blamed the bathroom stall door for the nastiness; why should we blame Secret?

Noah Kagan

Noah was employee #30 at Facebook and employee #4 at Mint. It was at Mint where he famously helped grow the user base to over a million users in the first six months. 

Lesson: Noah put together the famous Mint marketing plan on how to grow users with a quant-based method. In his marketing plan, Noah broke down his marketing outreach by strategy, by channel and by property. He assigned weighted probabilities on outcome based on the channel’s reach and his ability to convert. We took Noah’s lesson in stride and put together on our quant-based marketing plan.

“Most people have the tendency to wait for their thing to launch, email a few friend, tweet about it and get on their knees to pray it works. There are two columns, total users and confirmed users. When you setup your metrics on the pre-launch like above and then confirm the marketing channels you cannot fail. Only confirmed matters!! You must confirm the marketing ahead of time: blogs, twitterers, ad buys, etc… Don’t leave it up to chance.”

Relevant Post: Marketing for Startups: Quant Based Marketing

Sean Ellis

Sean was the first to coin the term “growth hacker.” He’s currently CEO of Qualaroo and previously ran marketing at LogMeIn and Uproar from launch to IPO filings. He’s also helped bring Dropbox, Lookout, Xobni and Grockit to market and helped accelerate growth at Eventbrite, Webs, World Golf Tour and Songkick.

Lesson: One of the biggest challenges we face at ShareBloc is developing a “must-have” experience for our users. For example, while we enjoy growing visits to our site www.sharebloc.com, we find it’s hard to change people’s behavior in coming to the site every day. Whereas, when we launched our weekly newsletter, we saw open rates in the 30-40% range. It turns out that our users consume content every day through email and it was a must-have experience that didn’t need to be learned. We double-downed on this with our daily email and the open rates are comparable.

“Sustainable growth programs are built on a core understanding of the value of your solution in the minds of your most passionate customers.  Your drive to develop growth hacks should be based on a burning desire to get this “must have” experience into the hands of more and more of the right customers.  Growth hacks built from this frame of mind are the ones that build large sustainable businesses.”

Relevant Post: Stacking the Odds for Authentic Growth [Slideshare]

Andrew Chen

If Sean is known for coining “growth hacker,” Andrew is known for popularizing it. In addition to acting as an advisor to multiple startups, Andrew’s writing is well-known in Silicon Valley for providing clarity to topics like product life cycle and community building.

Lesson: We’ve learned a lot of lessons from Andrew but his most recent post on feedback loops in social products  is the most relevant. As part of building a community like ShareBloc, we recognized we needed a few things to work out well: 1) we wanted to reward our most active users; 2) we want to provide value to our passive users; 3) we wanted to make sure our users felt a sense of community.At ShareBloc, we do a few things to reward our most active users (call-outs in tweets, special tools, upcoming leaderboard) and as a result, our passive users benefit from the activity. We’re finding the community building the hardest challenge so far so we’re working on that!

“I’ve come to believe there’s 3 main feedback loops that drive the success of these social product designs – here’s the trifecta:

A feedback loop that rewards content posters when they push new content into the network

A feedback loop that rewards passive content consumers with relevant and valuable content

A feedback loop that rewards (and culls) connections within the network” 

Relevant Post: How to design successful social products with 3 habit-forming feedback loops

Ligaya Tichy

Ligaya formerly launched new markets for Yelp and led community for Airbnb. She now advises startups including Skillshare and Threadflip, and serves as a mentor for 500 Startups. 

Lesson: We had coffee with Ligaya a few months ago as part of our 500Statups office hours. She gave us two key pieces of advice. One, she told us to run a contest. We ran two (thanks, Ligaya!). The second centered on a dialogue around our users. She asked how we acquired them but then she asked how we nurtured them.  One of the challenges we face at ShareBloc is after we on-board our new users, how do we get them to keep engaging and share? With Ligaya’s advice, we embarked on a few really successful community-building tactics, like our “community phone-call” where we have all our power users on a call at the same time. This helps our users get to know each other and put a voice to the person who’s posting and upvoting their content.

“While many Community tactics overlap with marketing, the core difference is the audience. Are you speaking to prospective customers or people that already know and use your service? Email and social media are mediums for information and ideas, tools used to connect and engage with people. With social, some of those people may be existing users, others are ripe for the recruiting. Same mediums, different goals.”

Relevant Post: The Difference between Community and Marketing

While there are more all-stars on our list, we think this is a great start. Thanks guys for the direct (and indirect) support.

Be sure to check out The Content Marketing Nation Contest for a chance to WIN a free ticket to Marketo's Marketing Nation Summit on April 7-9.

Unbounce’s Most Surprising CRO Win was a Qualaroo Survey on their Templates Page

The most surprisingly CRO win came during a test Unbounce ran on their templates page. Oli asked a few questions with Qualaroo and discovered three questions consistently being raised:

How much are the templates?

Where can I download them?

Can I use them with Wordpress?

Since none of these questions were relevant (the landing pages are used WITHIN Unbounce), they introduced a demonstration of “Context of Use,” which they added to the top of the page. Unbounce hypothesized that visitors who are better informed about how the templates can be used will lead to more and better-qualified signups.

The result was a 43% lift in new trial starts! In addition, people who touch that page convert better than those who don't. Average site conversion rate is 1.75%, and when the templates page is viewed it goes up to 2.3%. 

Things to Avoid When Testing Landing Pages

Oli offers that improper (or no) documentation can lead to false positives and correlation/causation fallacies. For example, Unbounce ran a test on their pricing page that lifted paid trial start conversions, but because it was a longer page, it pushed the free signup option further down the page. This decimated their free signup numbers (who upgrade at a later date). Because of inadequate documentation, it took them three weeks to figure out what had changed.

In addition, there is some danger to “test for the hell of it.” Before starting a test you need to at least have some understanding of how a feature impacts your (potential) customers. Changing something that people value is disrespectful to your users. If you can determine pain points through research and usability testing you'll be better positioned to start in the right place. Recently, Oli ran a test where he changed the CTA on the Unbounce.com homepage to "See plans and pricing.” The click-through rate on the button went up 80%. But the full funnel goal (new trial starts) went down 19%. In this situation, it was important to look beyond CRO alone.

2. On Increasing Social Selling

Oli’s favorite methodology in social sharing is to offer two methods to get an eBook or marketing asset: “pay” with your email address or tweet it out. This increases shares because it's a requirement if you don't want to give up your email. It's also a great way to maintain momentum on a landing page that you are no longer actively promoting through a campaign.

There is some friction that users may be reluctant to tweet if they don’t know the quality of the asset they’re sharing. To lift conversions on landing pages for eBooks, try adding a preview (such as a chapter or a slide deck) to alleviate that friction. This will result in more tweets and email captures. Oli isn’t concerned that Google or comparable authorities will penalize this type of social sharing because you’re delivering something of value and on-topic. Here’s another example of the popular social sharing methodology at work.

Jonathan Crowe, the person who had originally asked Oli the question, suggested Hubspot’s take on this popular strategy:

Download the File

Email to a Friend

Pay with a Tweet to Get a Bonu 

3. On How He Built His Twitter Following

Oli described his process for systemically building his Twitter following:

Use a site like Twellow or FollowerWonk to find your target follower. For Oli, it was marketers whose bios contained keywords relevant to their audience (lead gen, conversion, optimization, a/b testing etc.).

Manually follow a few hundred per day. This produces ~30% return in people following you back.

Share about 10 pieces of excellent content per day (including 0-1 of your own).

Retweet 5-10 pieces of content from the new people you followed.

Use tools to weed out inactive accounts and unfollow them. Oli forgets what he used but Tweepi and JustUnfollow can help. He also manually purged his account every few days.

Oli warns that for a time, this will give you a higher following than followers count, which looks bad, but a necessary evil to accelerate the process. The “follow-so-they-follow-back” approach isn't ideal but four years ago, it was an effective way to get your follower count up. Today, Oli would prefer to be more organic, even though it can be terribly slow.

4. On Marketing Content

Oli approaches marketing content in a deliberate manner. According to Oli, content reuse gets you the most value.

His procedure:

Write a big piece of content like an eBook and put up a lead-gen landing page

Write a blog post introducing it and link it to the landing page

Share the post and landing page on social

Email the landing page to leads and customers

Create a Slideshare deck with highlights from the eBook

Run a webinar based on the concept of the eBook

Write a guest post on the topic and link to the eBook landing page

If you’re struggling for a marketing asset idea, Oli suggests contacting a group of influencers in your target subject and ask them for a single tip. Compile their suggestions into a post/eBook. This also encourages your influencers to share your asset to their network.

5. Here are all the resources referenced by Oli throughout the AMA:

Guides and Best Practices

Landing pages and conversion

Landing pages for content marketing

Design vs. Function on landing pages

Social sharing

Email marketing

Copywriting

Copyblogger 

Tools and Vendors (other than Unbounce)

Qualaroo

KISSmetrics

Google Analytics

FollowerWonk

GoToWebinar

Zapier

Twellow

Slideshare

Customer.io

We want to make sure Inbound.org is getting the credit for this. We’re big fans. Find Oli here and on Twitter.

Our Sponsors and Partners

LeadMD is the main sponsor of the contest and one of the leading Marketo partners and marketing automation experts. Their clients include some of the world’s largest companies including Symantec, Ricoh and PayScale. LeadMD is participating because they understand that traditional marketing software didn’t leverage modern marketing assets like content marketing and emphasized the wrong KPIs. Marketing automation enables marketers like LeadMD to focus on developing great workflows so their clients can put the right content in front of the right buyer personas.

Heinz Marketing is a Seattle marketing agency focused on sales acceleration. We help our clients achieve sustained sales success by growing revenue from existing customers and cost effectively identifying and winning new customers. Heinz Marketing is participating because we’re big believers that revenue generation from new and existing customers is better with the buyer personas and workflows enabled by marketing automation. We work with clients every day whose marketing assets and leads are better leveraged with vendors like Marketo.

Infer delivers data-powered business applications that help companies win more customers. Its cloud-based solutions leverage proven data science to rapidly model the untapped data sitting in enterprises, along with hundreds of external signals from the web. Infer is participating because we collect internal and external signals to score your best leads. We can more effectively score leads if we’re collecting information about your customers all along the marketing and sales funnel. Marketing automation and CRM vendors like Marketo, Eloqua and Salesforce enable this data collection.

RingLead is the leading vendor for removing duplicate entries in your marketing automation and CRM platforms. RingLead has worked with over 2,000 companies, ranging from small businesses to Fortune 500 enterprises, all across the globe. RingLead is participating because we all remember a world before marketing automation. Sales teams will struggle with unqualified leads with multiple duplicates sitting in different silo-ed spreadsheets. Marketing automation, powered by RingLead, removes these duplicates and gets you marketing and selling more effectively.

Cloudwords is the first cloud-based technology built to help companies automate, manage and analyze their content localization process. Cloudwords works with some of the largest brands in the world to help localize their content, including Groupon American Airlines and Marketo. Cloudwords is participating because marketing is a global opportunity and we need the right workflows to get the most out of your leads. With Cloudwords and marketing automation vendors like Marketo, we can help organizations better streamline their international customers, push global content to local sales teams and empower local stakeholders to manage their own leads.