How Organizations are Leveraging Content Across the Buyer Journey

When you hear the word content in a business context, you probably automatically associate it with marketing.

As a tactic, content marketing has been around for hundreds of years, while the term content marketing has only surged into popularity (and regular marketing lexicon) in the past 6-7 years. And it shows no sign of slowing down in 2016, 88% of organizations claim to be using content marketing as a key B2B marketing tactic.

The undeniable popularity and widespread usage of content marketing points to the effectiveness of content. However, content isnt only effective in the strict marketing sense content satisfies the entire buyer journey, from awareness, to engagement, to lead generation, to sales enablement, and even to customer success.

Consequently, the way we think about content is changing: content no longer lives exclusively in the marketers domain. In fact, content is the lifeblood of your entire organization.

Content in every corner

Content certainly starts with marketing, playing important roles in generating awareness, engagement, and of course, leads. But this is only the start of the buyer journey.

As a lead converts to an opportunity and enters the sales realm, content can (and should) be leveraged by sales teams to handle objections, build relationships, and target key accounts. Building a content library for sales enablement is a powerful way to educate and nurture potential customers, clarify value proposition, execute account-based marketing tactics, and ultimately, expedite the sales cycle.

Content plays an equally important role once the prospect has converted into a customer. Your customer support or success team can (and should) leverage content to coach and empower your customers. Building a knowledge base or resource center with product-centric content improves customer marketing effectiveness by allowing the nurturing process to be continued even further. Filling your knowledge base with bottom-of-the-funnel content that enables customer self-service will increase your success teams productivity and, more importantly, improve your customer retention rates.

Why content isnt enough

Understanding why and how content satisfies the entire buyer journey is the easy part, and creating content to better satisfy the journey is an important first step.

Simply creating the content, however, isnt enough. Organizations must be able to easily leverage this content for more than one purpose and one campaign in order to satisfy the buyer journey. This is where marketing automation comes into play content fuels lead nurturing campaigns and helps build up your lead data based on conversions.

But as much as your marketing automation platform can help you deliver the right content to the right person, it cant help you deliver the right content experience for the end user (be it a reader, a prospect, or a customer).

What do I mean by this? Well, your content experience is the place where all the user action takes place. It's the destination that you send your prospects to. It's where your visitors consume your content, where they convert to a lead, and where you can measure how effective your content is at every stage of the journey.

Sending your end user (regardless of where theyre at in the buyer journey) to a non-contextual, generic blog or resource center wont help them find the information they need to move further down the funnel, and it certainly wont compel them to continue their content journey. Your content will be far more effective if youre able to send the end user on a tailored engagement path.

Delivering a well-optimized content experience

Lets take a look at this in action.

Your marketing team produces an eBook. They can leverage this eBook for lead generation, targeting the particular buyer persona for whom they created the eBook using marketing automation and paid promotion tactics. Adding this eBook to your internal library for sales enablement, your sales team can leverage it to speak to a particular pain point that one of their prospects is experiencing. Or, similarly, your customer success team could also leverage this eBook in their knowledge base to provide more high-level information for your customers.

Those are three different use cases from just one eBook, within one organization. Each use case has different end goals and requires different context.

So, how do you optimize the content experience for each?

Tailor the experience Ensure your content is targeted, personalized, and strategically organized for the particular use case. For instance, if its an advanced-level eBook, dont include a CTA to sign up for a beginner-level webinar.

Facilitate further content discoverability Dont let your content pile up by date, or by type of content. Regardless of the use case, people are much more likely to search for a specific answer than they are to search for a white paper.

Include targeted and contextual CTAs Provide a logical and contextual next step to continue the buyer journey.

Conclusion

Content begins with marketing generating awareness, engagement, and leads but it also feeds into sales enablement and customer success, fueling your entire organization and propelling your end users throughout the entire buyer journey.

However, organizations must think beyond individual content assets and start producing relevant and contextual content experiences for the desired end user. By leveraging content experiences at every stage of the buyer journey, your content will not only become more valuable to your end users, but also to your organization.

Content can do a lot of things for your organization, but not if you don't start thinking about it in a larger context. Download theModern Marketing Essentials Guide to Content Marketingand start thinking. And doing.

How to REALLY Run a Twitter Lead Generation Campaign

Do you want more qualified leads?

Twitter can generate qualified leads at a lower cost than most of the other major ad platforms. It's true! But not if you follow Twitter's instructions. Why? Because Twitter's advice for creating lead generation cards is completely wrong.

In this post, you'll discover my unusual six-step strategy for using Twitter lead generation cards for ludicrously successful lead gen.

Step 1: Set Up Conversion Tracking. Just Do It!

This is kind of buried in the user interface, but it's actually the most important thing you need to do. Without conversion tracking set up you're blind.

All the major platforms, except for Twitter, have a "universal tag" - where you put in one tag on your site so you can figure out the conversions just by typing in the URL.

But on Twitter you have to create different JavaScript tags for each thank you page. Each one gets a name and you can categorize the type (download, purchase, sign-up) so that you can report on it later.

I'm blown away how many people forget this critical step. Basically you need to define a different conversion pixel for every goal completion on your site so that you can track whether everything is working.

Step 2: Choose Your Twitter Ads Campaign Type Wisely

There are six pay-per-performance campaign types, depending on your marketing objective. You specify the most you're willing to pay for each type of campaign.

Why not just specify $0.01 as your cost per action? Well, basically if you set the bids too low, you'll get no impressions. It's an auction. Chances are other Twitter advertisers are willing to pay more than a penny.

The more you're willing to pay, the more likely your ads will be shown. You have to figure out what it's worth to you; Twitter will figure out how much quantity you'll get for that amount.

As for the campaign types, even though tweet engagements are the most popular type of ad campaign, they offer the absolute worst ROI. Avoid like the plague!

Why? Twitter charges per "engagement." This includes engagements such as a person viewing your profile page, expanding your image, expanding the tweet from the tweet stream, or clicking on a hashtag. Twitter will love taking your money, but these campaigns won't help you achieve any of your marketing objectives as you waste your budget.

What you should really be interested in paying for is website clicks, app installs, followers, leads, or actual video views.

Step 3: Adjust Your Twitter Ad Targeting Options

At the basic level, you can simply target Twitter users by location, gender, and language.

Twitter also provides somewhat more advanced options:

These advanced targeting options include:

• Keywords: You will target specific searches or users who use with certain keywords in tweets.


• Followers: You will target accounts of people with interests similar to followers of those accounts. For example, entering @SMExaminer will target people who are likely to be interested in social media.


• Interests: You will target users interested in any categories you enter.


• Tailored audiences: This is the crown jewel of Twitter advertising. Remarketing and custom lists are so powerful. Spend here first! Tailored audiences offer the best ROI because you have certainty over who you're targeting. People who are more familiar with your brand are more likely to buy - it's your lowest-hanging fruit.


• TV targeting: You will target people who are interested in a specific program, TV network, or TV genre.


• Behaviors: You will target users who share specified online and offline behaviors and characteristics.


• Tweet engager: This is a brand new option - it's kind of like remarketing for Twitter. It's targeting people who interacted with your tweets in the last few days. If you have a business where you need to get lots of people really excited about something (like a political party trying to energize the base ahead of an election), then this can be a powerful type of targeting.


• Event targeting: You will target people who are interested in global or regional events.

Step 4: Create Your Ad - But DON'T Use Twitter Lead Generation Cards!

Now it's time to create your lead gen ad. Twitter tells you to use a lead generation card. WRONG!

Never, ever use Twitter's Lead Generation Cards for lead generation. I have run thousands of campaigns and the lead generation cards consistently lose and lose badly.

Even though it has a nice layout with customizable call-to-action buttons like "buy now" and all sorts of fancy bells and whistles, it looks more like an ad. Twitter people are allergic to advertising; when they see a Twitter ad it makes them want to click on it less!

If something looks like an ad on Twitter, users will ignore you! That means lower engagement and 2-4x higher costs.

Instead you should just attach a funny photo. Use images that have done well organically to save money.

Go nuts on the image you choose. Don't be afraid to be a bit snarky or goofy. Use funny images or memes, even if it means going a bit off-brand. Twitter is a place where you'll be rewarded if your brand shows it can have a bit of fun (within good taste, of course), or you'll be ignored if you go all corporate.

And of course, use emojis to further increase engagement rates by 30%.

Step 5: Set Bids - No Automatic Bidding Allowed

OK, first: Never ever use Twitter's Automatic Bidding. It's for suckers.

Automatic bidding will make sure your budget is spent very quickly. Sure, it helps you win ad auctions, but you don't really have to or want to win every auction.

Keep in mind it's not like search advertising where you're bidding on rare priceless keywords that get searched on 10 times per year. This is display advertising and there are plenty of ad spots available to buy.

Always use maximum bidding. For most companies doing lead generation, it's not the end of the world if the lead comes in tomorrow vs. today.

The only time you would use automatic bidding is if you need to promote something heavily and you need those ad impressions today (e.g., you have a 24-hour sale) or if you're targeting a very tight audience, maybe 1,000 people. In these cases, then you do have to use auto bidding - or just bid really high.

OK, so how the heck do you set bids? It's seriously complicated - it's pretty much rocket science.

You need to use The Force.

Basically, you're trying to get as many impressions as you can for as little money as possible. If you bid too low your ads won't show. But if you bid too high your budget will die.

When you bid too high, you're essentially paying for premium next-day air service when usually (99% of the time) a regular postage stamp will suffice. You're paying much more for the same clicks in order to be delivered faster.

Twitter has a tool that shows how your reach changes based on different maximum bid amounts.

Ignore! Ignore! Ignore! It's completely wrong. Even when it says I will get no impressions, I get millions of impressions. It is just trying to get you to raise bids.

I've reverse-engineered the Twitter ad auction. Basically Twitter determines if your ads show or not based on your effective CPM. (Your max bid times applicable predicted engagement rate). So if your bid is $1 per click and you're doing a click campaign using an ad that is averaging a 1% click-through rate, then your predicted effective CPM is $10.

To win more ad auctions, you have two choices: either bid more or post higher engagement stuff.

I love promoting high engagement tweets (15%+ engagement rates) with very low maximum CPCs (5-10 cents). The higher the engagement, the less you'll need to bid for your ads to be eligible to show.

Step 6: Report, Rinse, Repeat

Your last step is to figure out how things did. You can get detailed information about exactly what happened after spending money on Twitter ads: Clicks, Retweets, Followers, Conversions (etc.)

In the above campaign you can see that we were able to generate 440 downloads for just $6.50 per action. That's extremely cost-effective compared to other marketing channels. In comparison search ads in this vertical can cost closer to $5 per click (not per download).

Delete campaigns that aren't working. Double down on stuff that works. Repeat.

Conclusion

Twitter can be very powerful. For example, Twitter ad campaigns can deliver a great return on your investment once you master the Twitter ads quality score algorithm.

But you have to avoid the pitfalls (hello, Tweet Engagement campaigns!). When it comes to advice, Twitter can't be trusted. Forget everything Twitter has tried to tell you about lead generation. Ignore Twitter's "best practice" advice on bidding, creative, audience targeting, campaign types ... and pretty much everything else.

Instead, do Twitter lead generation my way. The RIGHT way. :)

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2015 Testing Year in Review: 2 key discoveries to increase clickthrough and conversions

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As Test Database Specialist at MECLABS Institute (parent company of MarketingExperiments), my days are spent sifting through thousands of tests, analyzing the results and searching for insights to inform future testing. While looking through our hundreds of tests from 2015, two top testing categories emerged for increasing clickthrough and conversion rates: value copy and friction reduction.

Value copy

Value copy testing stood out in 2015 with high rates of success and low levels of failure. Testing in this area was often successful and appears to be of high value to Internet users. Specifically, improving product descriptions and differentiation had the highest number of favorable tests for MECLABS. Understanding the motivation and pain points of your customers can help you tailor a precise, powerful message that will allow them to discover that your product is perfect for them.

Friction

Friction is the second largest category of testing. The chart above shows that reducing friction often results in an increase in clickthrough and conversion rates. Let's look deeper. Compare presentation to layout and process. Presentation, process and layout all had high success rates last year. Presentation had a 24% failure rate. Layout and process had the lowest failure rate at 5% and 9%. Presentation is the way a site looks, layout is more about how it feels and flows when you use it. The distinction between these two is functionality.

Functionality

Think of your website as a hotel. Part of what people love about a staying at a high-class hotel is the staff's ability to remove many of the tedious obstacles we encounter in daily life. Excellent service is made up of thoughtful efforts of a well-trained staff. When the staff is able to anticipate and meet our needs, life feels effortless and frees us up to focus on our pleasant surroundings. A well-thought-out website that alleviates friction works the same way. If the online experience is smooth and seamless, it encourages visitors to focus on the product benefits, and how much more wonderful their life becomes once they purchase your product.

Customers are more informed today than at any time in history. They visit your site to learn about your product. Testing has shown that they do not like to be overwhelmed with a wall of text. Instead, they like to have access to information in easy to navigate tabs and drop-downs. A site that provides effortless navigation and easy access to valuable information stands out.

Remove the roadblocks

Once a visitor has been dazzled with your sparkling value copy, they just want to click and convert. All the funnel steps that stand in the way of that conversion are roadblocks. Think of it like driving home after work. You just want to get home, and any impediments that stand in your way start to make you think about all the alternative routes you could be taking. Removing the roadblocks will allow your customer to reach their destination without thinking how much better the other interstate may be. Improvements in functionality that increase access to information and reduce check-out times may be the most effective strategies for increasing clickthrough and conversion rates in 2016.

Examples of product-based testing

In the below table, you'll find some examples of real-world results from MECLABS' research lab, as well as result interpretations from our in-house research analysts and scientists. Many of these results not only focus on the value copy itself, but the level of that value.

Test Result	Interpretation
Favorable	The addition of product-level value improved visitor's perception of subscription value
Favorable	We saw a significant increase in visitors adding products to their cart likely due to the increased value copy and more prominent quick links that drove more people to category pages
Favorable	Control visitors may have struggled due to a lack of product and process-level value, causing an increase in friction and anxiety
Favorable	Homepage provided value and credibility for those who does not know [company] well. Homepage may provide easier ways to navigate products search and more products views for visits who are interesting in purchasing more products in one order
Favorable	By reducing the difficulty friction of package selection, finding information and page length, we able to get more qualified traffic into the funnel by adding primary-, product- and process-level value to the page
Mix	Hotel call-to-action's functionality effectively reinforced the product-level value proposition and reduced difficulty-based friction; elements of friction still present in Treatment A most likely counteracted anticipated positive effects of the optimized communication of "product-level" value proposition
Mix	Results indicate that utilizing a single page to present the benefits and products instead of having a two-step process significantly increases clickthrough rate, suggesting that Treatment A's experience reduces friction
Mix	Adding product level value messaging the different content offered by [newspaper] across each week significantly increased clickthrough rate
Mix	The increase in traffic into the Home Delivery funnel by the Treatment is likely due to decreasing friction by removing another perceived step in the visitor's mind
Mix	The large relative decrease recorded by the Treatment indicates that ecommerce landing page visitors are significantly more likely to sign up for a product tour when presented with the image above the form, multiple sources reinforcing credibility and current product messaging in the headline and bullet points
Mix	Addition of value copy significantly increased clickthrough rate when the links were buttons, but underperformed when the links were text
Mix	Product-level value copy was removed to reduce friction and attempted to increase motivation of visitors to move through the funnel, which resulted in a decrease in the quality of traffic but it wasn't enough to yield a difference in conversion rate
Inconclusive	Video at the product level did not increase the chance of conversions, contrary to perception the additional value of video did not increase the likelihood of conversion
Inconclusive	By removing competing CTAs, condensing the product tab and pricing sections and highlighting the information provided in each banner (through naming their tabs), we saw a 31.8% increase in clickthrough to the Try Free Funnel, at a 94% LoC
Inconclusive	We saw an increase in clickthrough to the freemium funnel on the Treatment which could be due to the Treatment having the value of the products higher up on the page value proposition
Inconclusive	Although the Control email received the higher clickthrough rate, both emails consisted of the same value points. It's possible that the smaller number of customers that chose to clickthrough to the product page from the treatment are primarily motivated by the price over anything else
Inconclusive	Cold-call users are significantly less likely to clickthrough when presented with less calls-to-actions. Although results didn't validate, normal cold-call and active cold-call users responded positively to the product tour link. Active users (both cold and lead) were not heavily influenced by the removal of multiple text links and buttons, which may indicate that these users are already more likely to read through a large portion of the email before making a decision on the white paper
Unfavorable	When attempting to improve the value proposition through the addition product-level value combined with an effort to improve the presentation of value through a refreshed look and feel, we successfully increased the quality of traffic entering the funnel
Unfavorable	The large relative decrease recorded by the Treatment indicates that CRM landing page visitors are significantly more likely to sign up for a product tour when presented with more value reinforcing the benefits and credibility of [company's] CRM platform

You might also like

Strengthen Your Copy in 35 Minutes: Proven strategies to boost the effectiveness of your words [Web clinic replay]

Landing Page Optimization: What a 29% drop in conversion can teach you about friction

Copywriting: How to tip the scale so customers act

Landing Page Optimization online course [From MECLABS, MarketingExperiments' parent research organization]

Are All Email Unsubscribe Services Created Equal?

I am sure that from time to time, all of us have been tempted to try out one of the many “unsubscribe” services out there, in a desperate attempt to get a handle on our out of control Inboxes. There are several of these services that float around out there. I find it strange the way these services can just about “go viral” with a mention in an article or a video. On the Oracle side, we will get several inquiries in a short period of time, asking about what senders should be worrying about, and how to stop people from using these services.

It’s an interesting dynamic in which people will use a service that they know nothing about, and trust them more than they do the sender of the email. People will give one of these services blind faith access to their email account, instead of clicking an unsubscribe link. What does that say about certain email programs? I think there’s a lot to be learned from this behavior. There’s also a lot to be learned from recent developments in the “unsubscribe” world.

Unroll.me is one of the more popular of these services. Unroll.me has been around for many years. I know that I have tried them several times over the years as part of my due diligence. Recently, unroll.me has been on quite a roll themselves. They have released new version of apps that purport to make unsubscribing from email even easier than ever before. People seem to be flocking to try out the new features. Here at Oracle, we saw one of those increased periods for tickets and questions about the service.

I must admit, as the first few questions came in, we gave the standard answer. Something was different about this time however, as the questions took a different track than before. Senders were seeing large amount of data coming in that they had never seen before.

What was happening?

Unroll.me, the service that had always promoted the fact that they would unsubscribe you from email, wasn’t actually unsubscribing anybody! That’s right; the service it turns out has been suppressing mail somewhere between the junk folder and the inbox, in kind of a state of suspended animation. Now recently, for whatever reason unroll.me decided they should go ahead and send the unsubscribes to the senders. The problem is that these are so old; some of the addresses don’t even exist anymore, leaving responsible senders scratching their heads.

I’ll fast forward in the story. Due to some great work by the Email Service Providers Coalition (ESPC), the team at Unroll.me has agreed to build a feedback loop platform which is a great outcome for everyone. It does beg a few questions. How did this happen? How should you treat these services? What’s next with these unroll.me addresses? Let’s address.

How Did This Happen? – People become so frustrated with their inboxes, that sometimes these services seem like a way to press the reset version without changing email accounts. I don’t believe people get that satisfaction very often, the mail generally keeps coming. When you are desperate, you will try anything. This says a lot about the way some senders treat email. If you treat the medium like it means nothing, your customers will return the favor with your messages.

How Should You Treat These Services? – No matter what, if someone is trying to unsubscribe from your messages, you need to let them go. The fight to keep a disgruntled subscriber is a losing one with real consequences. Email reputation can be ruined by continuing to mail to unengaged or disgruntled customers or prospects.

What’s next for Unroll.me? – In the next few months as unroll.me decides how and how far back they truly want to go, you should treat any of these requests like legit unsubscribe attempts. Again, it’s not worth the risk of trying to decipher who wanted to do what. The simple fact they were in this app should be enough to show intent.

This interesting tale ties back to my recurring theme for deliverability success, and that’s engagement. This is the most single important factor in the success of your email program. People shouldn’t feel so untrusting of you that they need to go to a 3rd party to unsubscribe from an email. They shouldn’t get email they don’t care about. They should be engaged and feel in control of the process. Opening up and ceding control is a difficult decision, but in the long-run will help you avoid pitfalls such as this one.

For more help and insight when it comes to email deliverability, download Email Deliverability: Guide for Modern Marketers.