Conversion Marketing Strategy | - Page 12 of 14

Social Media Measurement Plan: Why It’s OK to be the Rainman

Developing a social media measurement plan could be a bit boring. But we think it’s OK to take a scientific approach to social media. Here’s why it’s OK to be the Rainman.

In my last Conversion Science column I introduced you to the social media landing page. This landing page has the power to bring social media conversations to a measurable, business-building conversion. Let me show you how to develop the perfect social media measurement plan.

Social media is very important to us at Conversion Sciences. We know that education is the key to changing the web into a place where people find what they are looking for and reward companies for being so darn helpful.

Social media is a great way for us to share our educational and (hopefully) helpful stories, posts, columns and presentations. But to know how our efforts are performing, we need to create a social media measurement plan.

Why It’s OK to be the Rainman of Social Media

However, we aren’t really that good at social media conversations. It may come as no surprise that, as scientists, we are like the Rainman of social media. Like Raymond from the move, we are capable of amazing feats of insight and intelligence, but we often miss important social cues, especially when interactions occur 140 characters at a time.

“I’m an excellent Tweeter”

Social media measurement plan: Why It's ok to be the Rainman.

“I’m an excellent dancer.”

Given the fact that people like us sometimes have awkward digital interactions, you may not invite us to your swanky party. However, you certainly want us to participate in your social graph.

People like us provide an important service to the social spheres. Our content-oriented social media strategy feeds those who rely on social media for education and elucidation.

If you spend the bulk of your social time interacting with individuals, you are probably using a conversation-oriented social media strategy.

Choose the right social strategy

A conversion is more than just a conversation without the T&A.

In our studies, we have observed two broad categories of social media behavior:

Conversation-oriented social behavior
Content-oriented social behavior

While the posts, pictures and pokes that make up an online conversation certainly qualify as “content,” we distinguish conversational content from content that is specifically designed to educate, entertain or inform on a particular subject area.

This article is “content.” The comments you will inevitably leave are “conversation.”

We have found that content-oriented social strategies lead to more measurable campaigns. Plus, many conversion scientists don’t have the social skills to implement a conversation-oriented strategy.

Conversation-oriented social media

This strategy centers around conversations. It typically involves one or more personalities that interact with individuals in the social graph. This strategy is ideal for improving customer support, building awareness, personal branding and image marketing.

Conversations may involve content, but it is the interactions that are front-and-center in this strategy.

Results are typically measured using predictive metrics, such as friends, followers, likes, bookmarks, retweets and reach. These soft metrics are often more satisfying to us than definitive metrics such as leads, sales, and conversion rate.

I admire people like Kate Buck Jr. who make this strategy really work for their business and their clients.

Content-oriented social media

Unlike conversation-oriented strategies, this approach focuses on content as we’ve defined it here: communication that is designed to educate, entertain or inform. This strategy is ideal for lead generation, thought-leadership and building targeted social channels.

Content-oriented conversations don’t focus on the authoring brand or individual. Instead, these conversations circle around the content itself. This content will spur conversations, and ideally will be passed around, expanding our reach.

Of greatest interest to conversion scientists is that content draws visitors to social landing pages, where conversion beacons can drive business-building conversions.

Develop the Perfect Social Media Measurement Plan

It’s possible to automate and centralize the measurement of social media marketing efforts, in part thanks to a wireless tracking device that we attach to each status update, tweet and email that ties conversions to specific social conversations. Here’s how.

Step 1: Create some content.

The catch with the content-oriented strategy is that you must create content. Frequency is up to you. In a sixty-plus day experiment conducted here in the labs, five articles and seven blog posts drove 145 status updates, tweets, emails, Flickr images, etc.

We focused on articles that I write at The Conversion Scientist blog, that I contribute here at Search Engine Land and that I contribute at other venues such as ClickZ and the Content Marketing Institute.

Step 2: Devise a way to measure results.

To measure results, traffic must arrive on one of our instrumented pages. However, some of the content we used lived on other sites.

Our strategy was to create a social media landing page for each of our “off-world” articles in the form of a blog post. These posts teased the article and linked to it.

While we announce each new article through our social networks, the bulk of our marketing drove friends and followers to the blog post.

Right now, Google Analytics is our favorite single point of collection because of its content filtering and segmented reports.

For click tracking, Bit.ly still can’t be beat for its flexibility and integration with so many tools.

Step 3: Market each content item as if each was its own product.

Each of these content items gets a multi-network, multi-touch treatment designed to expose the maximum number of our friends and followers to this content. We maintain small but targeted social graphs on Facebook (<1000), Twitter (<2000) and LinkedIn (>1000).

On Facebook we did a single status post to my profile as well as “The Conversion Scientist” and “Web Strategies for Business” pages.

On Twitter each content item got between two and four tweets. We tried simply repeating the tweets as well as composing a series of unique tweets.

We did one LinkedIn status update, but did not post discussions on LinkedIn groups because the process couldn’t be automated. We’re looking for tools to help with this.

Several items got supporting posts on our predecessor site, the Customer Chaos blog.

All of this may sound like a lot of work. That is why we need tools to automate the process. Right now, Austin-based Spredfast seems to have the best support of the social networks we use, as well as one great collection point for analytics from across our social graph. Hootsuite is an alternative for those focusing on Twitter.

Note: We turned off all of our cross-network services, such as Ping.fm to implement this strategy.

Step 4: Attach a wireless tracking device.

This is real Hollywood stuff.

The most important feature of our measurement strategy is a wireless tracking device that we attached to each post, tweet, email and image. This is the secret sauce that enables the report shown above.

Bit.ly is the carrier for this wireless device. Google’s link tagging feature provides the micro circuitry.

Each post, tweet, image and email carries with it the following micro-coded information:

Campaign name and date
Send date
Delivery method (Twitter, Facebook, etc.)
Medium (email, microblog, status update, etc.)
Format (text, html, image, video, etc.)
Identifier
Version (for split tests)
Keywords

As an example, here is the fully instrumented URL for the link-tagging spreadsheet offered in this column.

http://conversionscientist.com/resources/#linktagging?utm_campaign=SE+Land+Column-100825&utm_source=Search+Engine+Land&utm_medium=link-text&utm_content=100825-Social+Media+Measurement+Plan&utm_term=google+analytics+link+tagging+spreadsheet

The URL builder provided by Google is quite unsatisfying for us, so we’ve developed a special Google Analytics link tagging spreadsheet that you can use to create and track your micro-coded addresses.

Next time, I’ll show you the queries and reports that reveal which content, social networks and conversations generate the most email subscriptions for us.

In the mean time, let me know the social media distribution and tracking tools that you use and love in the comments section below.

Article originally published on my Search Engine Land column “The Perfect Social Media Measurement Strategy.”

Brian Massey

21 Quick and Easy CRO Copywriting Hacks

Keep these proven copywriting hacks in mind to make your copy convert.

43 Pages with Examples
Assumptive Phrasing
"We" vs. "You"
Pattern Interrupts
The Power of Three

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September 14, 2010/by Brian Massey

Keep Your Content Promises and Increase Conversions

Conversion Marketing Strategy

When we don’t consider what visitors expect when we offer them our content, we set a series of events in motion that results in our visitors feeling… dumb. Don’t let your content break promises to your readers.

These four ways set a series of events in motion that result in our visitors feeling… dumb. Make sure to keep your content promises to increase conversions.

Treat your content as a product

“Have you seen my sunglasses?’’ I yelled out to my wife as I was heading out the door.

“In our room on the night stand,” she yelled back.

Little did she know that she was setting in motion a series of events destined to ruin a fine Saturday.

You see, she unwittingly set an expectation in my mind, an expectation that my sunglasses would be there on the night stand beside the lamp and the book I read before bed.

But when I got to the bedroom, they weren’t there.

The series of events that unfolded next are classic human reactions, reactions that you may be creating in the way you present your content.

I entered stage one: I got angry. Not “throwing things” angry, but “disappointed because I just want to get out and do some errands but I’m attached to wearing my sunglasses when I’m out” angry.

Stage two: I got self conscious, so I looked all around the nightstand. Nothing.

Stage three: I got self righteous. I climbed down the stairs down to my wife, building my self-righteousness with every step.

“They’re not there,” I said, my voice dripping with thinly-masked disdain.

She looked at me with a face and stance that would have made our teenager proud.

“Did you look on my nightstand, too?”

Stage four: I questioned my very ability to function in the world. I slinked back up the stairs, retrieved the sunglasses and snuck out the door.

It was no fault of hers that I assumed the sunglasses would be on my night stand, but website visitors are coming with expectations.

When we don’t consider what visitors expect when we offer them our content, we set the exact same series of events in motion. This isn’t good for our business.

Keep Your Content Promises: What is the Psychological Price for Your Content

When you invite someone to read your content, you are making a promise. Your promise is that you will help them solve a problem or entertain them.

Our invitations, be they found in an email, a status update or a blog post must promise something or there would be no clicks.

Visitors may be finding and consuming our content just fine, but we can extract a severe price by making things unintuitive. Just because someone finds your content, doesn’t mean they’re happy about it.

Here are some of the innocent things we do to make our visitors feel frustrated.

1. The Drill Down

If your content link is sending your visitors to your home page or to a “resources” page, you’re setting them up for stage one anger.

Most people expect a click to take them to the very place that content exists. Don’t let them down.

Sure, you may have a logical navigation strategy.

“All they have to do is click on the White Papers menu item then select Case Studies, then pick the one they want,” you might say.

Visitors are saying, “All you had to do was put a link to it on the page you sent me to.”

My wife assumed I would look on both night stands. I assumed she’d have specified the “other” one if that was where it was.

2. The Scroll

For many many visitors, if the content headline isn’t above the “fold” on your page, then it doesn’t exist. Period.

What would push the headline down? Usually, it’s a BAH (big-ass header). The BAH is usually some large stock photo plastered across the top of the page. This is a common feature of websites and is found on both home pages and interior pages.

Bosses love this kind of thing, but it foils visitors.

Your headline and first paragraph should start as close to the top of the page as is politically possible.

3. The Unending Preview

Too often, one BAH isn’t enough, so designers have invented the “flash scroller” also called a “rotator box.” If you are employing one of these to present content choices, you are WAY over-estimating the patience of even the most interested visitor.

Don’t make us sit through a series of cross-fading options.

An image fades in, then we wait.

Another image fades in, then we wait.

Another fade, then we wait.

We won’t last long. I probably lost dozens of readers just writing those three sentences.

4. The Wall of Questions

One of the best ways to generate leads is to promise great content in exchange for contact information. However, you must look at this as a purchase, not a gratuitous grab for their email address. Don’t present them with a wall of form fields and ask them to fill out the form.

This page asks a lot, but doesn’t promise much.

You have to sell them.

To this end, a proper lead generation page will have the following components:

A headline that is as identical to the promise of the ad or link as possible.
A picture of the product. Even an eBook can be formatted to look like a publication, and visitors get it.
Tell them very specifically what they will get when they complete the form. Don’t be afraid to lay some text on the page.
Your form should only ask for information you absolutely need. Your content may not be “worth” their phone number and address in their eyes.NOTE: If you must ask for qualifying information, explain how it will be used and why it is needed.
The text on the button should tell the visitor what is next. “Get Your Report” or “Subscribe” is much more clickable than “Submit”, especially if we aren’t sure to what we’re submitting ourselves.

This is what is expected when someone clicks on an invitation to read or view content.

Deviate from this basic formula only if you must. Otherwise, visitors may leave your site questioning their very ability to function in a digital world.

Brian Massey

21 Quick and Easy CRO Copywriting Hacks

Keep these proven copywriting hacks in mind to make your copy convert.

43 Pages with Examples
Assumptive Phrasing
"We" vs. "You"
Pattern Interrupts
The Power of Three

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September 9, 2010/by Brian Massey

Touchpoint Personas for Persuasion and Empathy

Conversion Marketing Strategy

Why do so many marketing departments have trouble turning personas into actionable marketing gold? I believe it is because traditional “buyer personas” are too broad in their definition.

In this post, I introduce you to Touchpoint Personas and identify their key components.

I will compare the concept of touchpoint personas vs buyer personas. If you are interested in user personas check them out on this article.

Personas are fictional representations of your customers designed to help you understand what to say to prospects and how to deliver content to them.

There is no better predictor of conversion success than the availability of personas.

“Your market research with an attitude, your analytics in a skirt.”

The Anatomy of a Great Online Persona

Melanie is your market research with an attitude, your analytics in a skirt. Bill is the voice that rings through the headsets of your customer service support people, unwavering in his desire to get what he wants. Amy is that segment of your house list who got distracted before she finished ordering online.

None of these people exist, but they are powerful guides for any business that wants to grow in an age of digital content.

Melanie, Bill and Amy are touchpoint personas, and they can walk right into any meeting you have and “lay down the law.” They know what they want, and they are your ally in getting the resources you need to deliver.

Read on to learn why a touchpoint persona is so powerful and to figure out what information you should include to help you understand the customer.

Creating online Touchpoint Personas for increased persuasion and conversions.

How is a touchpoint persona different from a buyer persona?

Those businesses with the most effective content marketing strategies are using buyer personas as their guide. But, buyer personas have the following limitations when it comes to creating a customer journey and its implementation:

They may not be found in every channel. A buyer persona that visits your brick and mortar store may never buy online.
They often do not comprehend the limits and strengths of individual channels. In the store, the salesperson is the primary way customers interact with your brand. Online, there are far more communication options.
The demographics associated with each are open to interpretation. What kind of home does a person making $175,000 a year live in? Some may say a mansion. Some may say a small ranch.
Touchpoint personas focus the team on one channel: the store, the website, the phone, the social graph, etc. The result is fewer personas per channel and more specific personas, which means a more consistent effort on the part of your production teams.

Creating online touchpoint personas: the 7 Components

Here are the components of the touchpoint personas that Conversion Sciences creates for clients. Much of this has been adopted from the book Waiting for Your Cat to Bark? by Bryan and Jeffrey Eisenberg.

1Demographics

Demographics play only a small part in the touchpoint persona. Age and gender give us an idea of their technical savvy and possible communication styles. Business role will be important for B2B and some B2C sales.

Don’t muddy the water with demographics that don’t apply. For example, marital status may not be helpful in a B2B sale. If not, don’t include it.

2Customer Commentary

The customer commentary answers the question, “Why are they coming to this site at this time in their lives?”

Unlike buyer personas, the customer commentary is written in the voice of the persona. This helps the marketing team empathize with the people visiting your site. It provides the proper vocabulary for writing and keyword research. Answer this question, and you will know exactly how to create content and ad copy for them.

3Mode of Persuasion

The customer commentary will tell you much about the way a certain kind of visitor is going to make a decision, from which you can identify their mode of persuasion.

Will they decide to take action quickly or slowly? Will they seek to decide emotionally or logically? The Eisenbergs outline four primary modes of persuasion to guide your designers and writers: Competitive, Methodical, Humanist and Spontaneous.

4Funnel Points or Customer Touchpoints

What is bringing the persona to this touchpoint, and where are they arriving?

Did a referral drive them to type in your domain?
Did an online search bring them to your home page?
Did a banner ad or email bring them to a landing page?

List these scenarios here, and strive to get visitors close to their points of resolution as directly as possible. Don’t limit these touch points or funnel points to those currently in your marketing mix, but consider new outreach methods based on how these types of customers will find you.

5Points of Resolution

What are the important pieces of information this kind of visitor needs to feel comfortable and confident in taking action? This is your content guide, from which your editorial calendar will rise. Points of resolution may be as simple as “price and delivery” or as complex as “a full understanding of our manufacturing process.”

6Conversion Beacons and Conversion Points

The conversion beacon calls a visitor to action. A conversion point tells you that a visitor has taken action. In the online world, a big red button may serve as a conversion beacon, and a confirmation page may be the conversion point that tells you that a visitor has completed a form.

These map the visitors’ buying processes to the businesses’ selling processes. They also tell you which key performance indicators will gauge the success of your changes.

7Priority

Touchpoint personas are quite thorough and will generate more ideas than can be reasonably implemented, but one conversion beacon or one content item may have a significant impact on leads and sales.

The Eisenbergs recommend listing out the actions generated from these personas. Estimate the minimum time, positive impact and smallest effort for each of them on a scale from one to five. Add these three values together and start working on those with the highest total.

Keep your customer personas out of the drawer

Your touchpoint personas should influence your decisions, and they should evolve as you learn what is working and what is not. Don’t put them in a drawer when you’re done. Print them out and put them in your conference room or break room.

Consider placing them on a collaborative system so that the organization can change them organically.

Like Frankenstein’s monster, it is easy to create personas and customer journey maps, but it is more difficult to breathe life into them.

To thoroughly explore the power of touchpoint personas, I strongly recommend the book Waiting for your Cat to Bark? by Jeffrey and Bryan Eisenberg. For more on touchpoints please read Social Media Marketing: An Hour a Day by David Evans.

Do you use touchpoint personas or something similar? If so, are there additional things that you include?

The Anatomy of a Great Web Persona was originally published on a post for the Content Marketing Institute

P. S. Get full access to the Lab when you join The Conversion Scientist email list.

August 30, 2010/by Brian Massey

Social Media Appending: How Far We Have Come

Conversion Marketing Strategy, Lead Generation

New Tool Makes it Easy to Find Prospects on Social Networks via Social Appending.

In my most recent ClickZ column, I reflect back on my days as a marketing cog in the corporate machine, a time in which the practice of “appending” was considered “black hat.”

Appending is the practice of adding contact information to records in your prospect database. If you have someone’s name and company, you could “append” their email address and mailing address through a number of services that keep that kind of information.

Companies that sell mailing lists often provide this kind of service.

The thinking was that the prospect hadn’t given you permission to contact them through these other channels, and that it violated the “submit button contract” that is implied when they completed an online form.

Social Media Appending: How Far We Have Come. Source: Unbounce.

We’ve come a long way

Oli Gardner has an interesting infographic on the Unbounce blog. The graphic highlights a tool called FlowTown. This is a social media appending tool. Marketers can use it to find the social media accounts of their prospect list, and begin marketing to them through those social media channels like Facebook and LinkedIn.

This is where those of us who have been around the block groan, and then secretly cheer.

Social Media Appending: Why this is different

While appending has not been considered a best practice, it happens. In fact, the best way to do this is to send ask your prospects for permission after appending the data; sending them an email asking if they want email messages, for example.

Many social media platforms allow us to easily “unfriend” or block unsavory marketers. This puts the opt-out capability in our hands. So asking for permission ahead of time is less of a problem.

But there is a right way to inject yourself into someone else’s conversations. It’s called a Content-oriented Social Media Strategy.

Only “append” people who have expressed an interest in your industry or products. This is how you know your content will be relevant.
Begin with non-promotional content. “How-to” and “10 Ways” style articles test well.
Use social landing pages, such as a blog or Facebook page to “keep it social”
Measure what you send. Stop sending content that doesn’t generate clicks, shares or comments.

If you’re going to jump into the social conversations, do it right, or it will backfire in a very public, viral way.

August 4, 2010/by Brian Massey

Visual Live Blog: Andy Beal Reputation Management

Conversion Marketing Strategy

Your Google Reputation Stinks and other Revelations

Here are my notes from Andy Beal’s excellent PubCon Masters Group Training on reputation management.

You can see Andy as well as an incredible lineup of talent at the PubCon Las Vegas Masters Group Training, November 8.

Reputation Management Infographic

Andy Beal: Your Google Reputation Stinks Infographic.

Andy Beal Reputation Management Favorite Excerpts

Six key tips from Andy:

Rethink your keywords.
Be spider friendly.
Me, myself and we: Avoid third party copy.
Use good anchor text.
Build your super brand.
We’re going to make people love your business through your Web site at Conversion Sciences.

You should be in the #1 position for your brand. No one should be able to knock you off.

When Under Attack

Be sure to get an early alert. Do a Google audit monthly.

Look beyond the top 10 for rising threats. Add “&num=100” to your search URL to see top 100 results.
DON’T PANIC. Bad press may fade quickly.
Consider asking author to remove negative article or post. A legal threat may be used.
Be benevolent. Choose the lesser of two evils.
Look for legal loopholes. Is the publication violating Adsense T&Cs of they use Adsense? Is there defamation?
Cease and desist letters go a long way.
If all else fails, sue the bastards.

Protect your online reputation.

21 Quick and Easy CRO Copywriting Hacks

Keep these proven copywriting hacks in mind to make your copy convert.

43 Pages with Examples
Assumptive Phrasing
"We" vs. "You"
Pattern Interrupts
The Power of Three

"*" indicates required fields

July 26, 2010/by Brian Massey

Social Media and Search – Visual Live Blog: Innotech Portland-Giovanni Gallucci

Conversion Marketing Strategy

I love to watch Social Media Ninja Giovanni Gallucci present. He imparted a great deal of info on the intersection of social media and search to the audience at the Innotech PDX 2010 eMarketing Summit last week.

If you weren’t there, you can enjoy it through the lense of my pen.

Here is the visual live blog from that presentation.

For more of Gio, visit LearnSocialMedia.tv for hours of good stuff from the Social Media Ninja.

Visual Live Blog Innotech Portland -Giovanni Gallucci

Notes from Giovanni Gallucci Presentation on Social Media Part 1 of 2

Click to Enlarge Part 1

social media Portland -Giovanni Gallucci

Notes from Giovanni Gallucci presentation on Social Media Part 2 of 2

Click to Enlarge Part 2

We’re going to make people love your business through your Web site at The Conversion Scientist. There is plenty you can do to increase online sales conversions, and we share it all. Learn what that you can do to convert more of your visitors into leads and sales.

May 10, 2010/by Brian Massey

Visual Live Blog: Scott Stratten Breaks up with Social Media at PubCon

Conversion Marketing Strategy

At PubCon 2010 in Dallas, UnMarketer (@unmarketing) Scott Stratten’s keynote “Social Media, We Have to Talk” was, well, Scott. That means funny, frank, and contrarian. The audience loved him.

His keynote rant ranged from “Breaking up with Social Media” to the fallacy of getting rich quickly from social media, to Twitter etiquette. However, it was his constant assertion that great content is the source and sustenance of social success that endeared me to Scott.

Coincidentally, the best conversion strategy is to produce great content.

Click to enlarge.

Scott Stratten Keynote PubCon 2010 Dallas

Click to enlarge

Additional Coverage

PubCon South 2010 Day 2, Elmer Boutin

Live from PubCon South: Keynote by Scott Stratten, Janet Driscoll Miller

April 16, 2010/by Brian Massey

7 Things Marketers Can Learn from Pro Wrestling

Conversion Marketing Strategy

Playing it safe will keep you from getting hurt — and from getting customers

Fast Company columnist Sam Ford offers an insightful and entertaining treatise on how Corporations — and brands and small businesses – can take a page from the world of “professional” wresting.

In short, Ford follows his own advice with this column.

His assertions are well-suited to illustrating what it takes to communicate online; to communicate in a way that gets visitors to stick around and take action.

Pro wrestling marketing lessons.

“An Appropriate Level of Spectacle Is Crucial”

The outrageous costumes, the drama, the crowd: all contribute to an air of excitement that inevitably makes you stop for a moment while channel surfing. This will also stop the visitor that is surfing the Web.

On your site, you need a hook to draw your visitor in. To assume that they are visiting because they know they want to learn about your company is naive. You’ve got to hook them first.

“Humor and Charisma Always Make a Connection”

It is especially true in the B2B world that humor and charisma seem to have no place. “After all, we’re all serious business people here.” If this is your attitude, kiss the customers goodbye.

“Create a Serialized Connection with Your Audience”

Conversion happens around great content. Great content happens more than once.

There are so many ways to send serial content – email, social media, news wires, blogs – that you should be frothing from the mouth to crank out the articles, posts, papers, audio and video to feed the monster. This monster poops business.

You can even serialize an article. For instance, there are 10 tweets in this post alone. Can you guess what they are?

“Shiny New Objects” Don’t Last

This is a corollary to the last item: Big ideas may carry the day, but what about the next day and the day after that?

Marketers need an editorial calendar for your communications. Get the budget and the resources to be a content machine.

“Your Audience Uses You as an Excuse to Build Community”

Facebook groups can work. LinkedIn groups can become vibrant. When this happens, it is because you have found a seed group of fans who love the product and the opportunity to associate themselves with it.

This doesn’t happen because of price discounts. It happens when you join the conversation.
Wrestlers throw each other into the crowd. What are you throwing in to your crowd?

“Your Audience Is Always Performing”

The other thing that works in Social Media is giving your “crowd” a stage on which to become a performer. Blogs offer comment sections, for example. Let them post, upload, rate, review and comment. Give them a stage.

Photo courtesy Flickr

February 15, 2010/by Brian Massey

Build a Marketing “Battery” that Stores Purchase Power

Conversion Marketing Strategy

How to build a marketing database that keeps prospects engaged

It sounded like the perfect market:

A large and growing marketplace
A need so critical that it strikes at the very foundations of the family
Increasing competition for scarce supply
A marketplace actively using the Internet to solve the problem

How to build a marketing database that generates engagement.

JobCannon for Job Search.

Add to these the fact that existing solutions were failing miserably, and you’ve got a market ready for an effective online solution.

I’m describing the unemployed job seeker marketplace. Few marketplaces have the natural alignment of trends that this marketplace does. JobCannon (formerly CardboardResume) sought to create an online job search solution that actually worked, and build a business in the bargain.

First, let me disclose that JobCannon is a client of Conversion Sciences.

You might have thought that this would be an easy sell. We knew it wouldn’t be. We needed to keep skeptical, frugal job seekers engaged and informed. Here’s how we did it.

Before you read any further…

If you’re on Twitter, please visit and play along.

Building the Battery with Informational Marketing

Since no tag line was going to help JobCannon rise above the noise, and since new job seekers needed advice as much as the software, we lead with an informational approach.

JobCannon commissioned an eBook to help break job seekers of their job board habit. It turns out that spending hours a day on Monster and CareerBuilder was the least effective way to find work, especially in a crowded job market.

I wrote the eBook for them. My primary qualification was my fundamental inability to hold a job. Get your copy of The Market for Me.

A book blog was setup to catch job seekers searching the Internet. I began speaking at job clubs on to help seed the marketplace promoting the book heavily.

Charging the Battery

To receive the book, prospects provided a name and email address, and asked the prospect why they wanted to read the book. About 10% of the attendees to a live presentation requested a free copy.

Of the people who visited the book request page 30% completed the form. This is a relatively high conversion rate.

The presentation model was not easy to scale, as I could only speak so many times. But the pipeline proved that we could engage and educate an audience with informational marketing.

The book/blog strategy was proven when one of my presentations was featured on applicant.com, an influential blog. It was subsequently picked up by Slideshare as a featured presentation. Over the space of three weeks, almost 30,000 people viewed the presentation. A link to the free eBook in the description drew viewers to our educational content.

This one presentation doubled the size of our email database. It charged our battery.

This is proof that high conversion rates amplify all of your online marketing efforts.

Tapping the Battery’s Energy

Informational posts generated for the blog became email newsletters that were sent to the book database.

This was an efficient battery. When we sent educational emails to the list, open rates were astronomical, between 77% and 98%. I’m usually ecstatic at 30% open rates. Click-through rates were as high as 22% and unsubscribe rates were near zero.

Because this market was bombarded by solutions to help them find work, we were dealing with a skeptical group. We found out it took as many as seven relevant contacts to generate a JobCannon trial: One reference from a friend, one presentation, one free eBook, and four informational emails.

Without our marketing battery, we would never have been able to generate the number of “touches” necessary to make prospects feel comfortable trying the software.

Like batteries marketing databases “lose charge” over time

As a rule of thumb, we assume that 25% of the contacts become invalid over the course of a year.

Prospects become customers
Email addresses change
Prospects choose to stop receiving email (opt-out)
Prospects choose alternative solutions
Prospects just stop paying attention to your emails

Many marketers drain their battery by sending promotional content. Discounts, feature-oriented posts and irrelevant information drain the battery very quickly.

In our case, many of our prospects find work, even though they’re not using JobCannon. Hopefully, they’ll continue to network and search for new opportunities even though they have found work.

Build your own battery with informational content

You may not have an eBook available, but your business generates informational content every month. Press releases, product descriptions, old blog posts, and sales presentations all can be transformed to charge your marketing batteries.

Join us on December 10 in Austin for BYOContent: The Extreme Conversion Makeover Workshop.

We’re going to transform a blog, a white paper, some video and an email newsletter into lead-generating and sales-generating tools.

Brian Massey, The Conversion Scientist

P. S. Get more conversion tips by subscribing to The Conversion Blog.

November 27, 2009/by Brian Massey

Is it smart to advertise free stuff?

Conversion Marketing Strategy

Why would I pay to advertise free information? Does it make sense?

The answer is, “Yes.” On December 10, I’m going to show you the techniques marketers use to make it pay, and I’m going to do it with your content.
Why, you might ask, does it make sense to use your scarce marketing dollars to advertise free stuff? The answer is this:

At any given time, more people are considering a product or service like yours than are ready to buy a product or service like yours.

Many more.

Thus, if you can get the attention of someone while they’re still thinking about how to solve a problem, you can expect more of them to visit you when they ARE ready to buy.

The key is content that converts, the kind of educational, helpful, informative content that your business generates all of the time. You may say, “My business doesn’t generate any online information.” Oh, but it does.

It’s hiding in plain site. It’s in the product specifications you write. It’s in the sales presentations you’ve created. It’s in the blog posts that you’ve written. It’s in the emails that your most grateful customers have written you.

Is it smart to advertise free stuff? It’s not actually free if you’re generating leads

If you are doing lead generation, your information isn’t free. The consumer of this helpful and informative knowledge pays with their attention, with a little information about themselves and by extending you some permission – on credit – to continue conversing with them.

Is it smart to advertise free stuff? The key is content that converts, the kind of educational, helpful, informative content that your business generates all of the time.

The key is content that converts, the kind of educational, helpful, informative content that your business generates all of the time.

The results may well be better than your benefit-oriented ad copy

If I have decided to solve my problem with a product or service like yours, a benefit- or discount-oriented ad will do the trick. However, if I am part of the much larger audience that is still “in the question,” I won’t even know how to process your offer.

Content can help me decide. It can help me make cost tradeoffs. It can help me sell a solution to my boss. It can help me understand the real cost of not solving the problem. It can help me rationalize a purchase.

Which desk drawer is your gold hiding in?

You’re invited to spend a day with me and a panel of smart marketers as we transform plain, everyday information into content that sells.

Join us on December 10 in Austin, Texas for BYOContent: The Extreme Conversion Makeover Workshop.

By the time you leave, you will know:

How to identify ordinary content that your visitors will find extraordinary
How to present it in ads and on your website so that visitors can’t miss it
How to use it to generate leads with it
How to use it to entice prospects to buy
Where to find the free and inexpensive tools needed to transform and deliver your content

Join me, Apogee Search’s Alissa Ruehl, online marketing expert Jane Dueease and a room full of smart people like you as we turn ordinary information into online content that will grow our businesses.

Act before Thanksgiving, and we’ll knock $50 off the price. Breakfast, lunch, and a snack are on us.

If the Web is important to your business, this will be one of the most eye-opening events of the year.

Of course, I’d appreciate you sharing this email with other businesses, but don’t send it on until you’ve secured your own seat. I like to keep my workshops somewhat intimate.

Get the details and reserve your place in the room. This is going to be a fun one.

Best regards,

Brian Massey

November 18, 2009/by Brian Massey