Online Content: Is Longer Really Better?

Writing online content is something of a balancing act. For years, SEO experts have pointed out that Google loves longer content.

Your readers? Not necessarily.

As a writer, that means you’re kind of stuck in the middle. Write too little, and your content won’t rank. Write too much, and most people won’t read your content.

‘Tis a conundrum, no?

The good news is, Google has realized that word count and keyword density aren’t always the best predictors of relevance. People care about their on-page experience—not the keyword count.

As a result, Google has placed an increasing focus on user experience. In Moz’s 2015 report on non-keyword ranking factors, 4 of their top 10 factors relate to user experience:

Given this trend, the odds are that as Google gets better at discerning great on-page experiences from the ho-hum ones, many pages with a lot of text but little value will start dropping through the ranks.

As a result, it’s not enough any more to write in-depth, keyword rich content—you have to optimize your content length for user experience. And, to do that, you need to know how much content your audience really wants on a page.

Fortunately, figuring that out isn’t nearly as difficult as you might think. To help you out, let’s take a look at how users interact with content and how you can test your content to maximize its effectiveness.

Is Longer Better?

Since Google has historically prioritized longer content, most companies and blogs have spent years producing long-form content. Often, this content is good, high-quality writing that delivers a lot of value (case in point, the Kissmetrics blog).

But the question is, is longer better?

For some sites, it probably is. But, to tell you the truth, I rarely read through everything on a page, even if I care a lot about the content. As it turns out, most people act the same way online.

In fact, Chartbeat ran a study to see just how far people make it through a typical blog post. Turns out, your average user only reads about half of a blog post:

So, while you may have written an epic, 8,000-word blog post about the psychology behind the Chewbacca Mask Lady’s viral video, most people aren’t going to read the whole thing. They’re going to bail long before your oh-so-compelling conclusion.

Sure, your article might rank well, but if people don’t finish reading it, will your article help your business? That’s debatable.

This idea holds especially true for site pages and landing pages. The internet is littered with enormous pages like this one (I rearranged the page into 3 side-by-side columns to improve your reading experience—see what I did there?):

Pages like this have a lot of good content, but all of that good content gets lost in the length of the page. Yes, the information a potential customer needs is probably on the page, but if they can’t find it, they’re not going to have a very good experience.

The point here is that crafting a compelling user experience doesn’t mean writing a lot of content. In fact, depending on your audience, writing more may mean people read less and therefore convert less.

But how can you know what sort of content length your audience prefers? To answer that, you’ll need to run a simple test.

Testing Out Different Content Lengths

When it comes to conversion rate optimization, a lot of companies focus on major page elements like headlines, hero shots, form fields, CTA buttons, etc. Content length often sits at the bottom of the list.

This is a shame, because content length is a major part of your user experience—especially if you run an active blog.

For example, at Disruptive, we were recently helping OURrescue optimize their site. Now, OURrescue is an amazing group. They travel the world saving kids from sex traffickers. It’s pretty hard to top that.

To fund their rescues, OURrescue runs a regular blog that discusses the (often heart-wrenching) details of their “missions.” Each blog post ends with a call for donations to help fund further rescue efforts.

In keeping with most blogs, OURrescue’s articles were usually a minimum of 1,500 words long and very detailed. The blog was generating decent donations, but my VP of Conversion Rate Optimization, Chris Dayley, started to wonder about the length of their content.

Were they writing too much? Too little? Would OURrescue get more donations if they changed the length of their content?

To answer these questions, Chris asked OURrescue to write short, medium and long versions of a few articles. We then used Optimizely to send traffic to each of the post variants. Similar to Chartbeat, we tracked how far users scrolled through each post (using Hotjar), time on page and the donations generated from each version of the article.

On desktop, the results were about what you’d expect (note, we tested multiple articles, but for simplicity’s sake, we’re only showing the variants for one article):

The longer the posts, the longer people spent on the page. That makes sense, since longer posts take more time to read. However, the mid-length articles actually had the highest completion rate.

So, while readers spent more time on the longest version of the posts, more people actually finished the articles and saw the donation CTA on the medium-length versions.

Things got even more interesting when we looked at our mobile users:

On mobile (which is where most online time is spent these days), the longest post variants had the lowest time on page. The middle-length page variants had the highest time on page.

The shortest version of the posts, however, had the highest completion rate—nearly double the completion rate of the longest variants.

Now, these stats were all very interesting, but none of them really answered the most important question: which length of content provided the best user experience?

Or, to put things in more concrete business terms, which version of the articles produced the most donations?

As it turned out, the “winning length” varied between desktop and mobile:

Compared with the longest version of the articles, the shortest versions drove over 80% more donations on mobile and the medium-length versions drove almost 30% more donations on desktop.

So, was longer content better for OURrescue? Not by a long shot!

What makes this data particularly interesting is the fact that time on page wasn’t a particularly good predictor of donations. Page completion rate, however, was.

If you think about it, this makes sense. After all, with a CTA at the bottom of the article, if people weren’t finishing the article, they weren’t seeing the CTA, which meant they weren’t donating.

Now, it’s possible that adding a floating CTA users could see throughout their reading experience could help improve donations further, but that’s hardly the point of this test. Since the CTA was at the bottom of the article, that meant that people who saw the CTA were having a good enough experience to get to the bottom of the article.

So, what drove donations for OURrescue? It wasn’t the articles with the most words—it was the articles with the best user experience.

All this being said, these were OURrescue’s results. Your audience will be different. It’s very possible that you could run this same sort of test and get completely different results.

But, if you don’t test the length of your content, can you really be sure that you’re providing the optimum user experience?

Conclusion

So, is longer content really better? For years, long content has been a great way to get ranked on Google, but that’s beginning to change.

These days, both Google and your readers are looking for content that provides a great experience. That means your online content needs to be the right length for your audience.

As Google continues to focus their algorithms on providing ever better user experiences, it’s time for online marketers to do the same.

Have you ever tried a test like this one? What were your results? Do you agree that online content should be optimized for user experience, rather than word count or keyword density?

About the Author: Jacob Baadsgaard is the CEO and fearless leader of Disruptive Advertising, an online marketing agency dedicated to using PPC advertising and website optimization to drive sales. His face is as big as his heart and he loves to help businesses achieve their online potential. Connect with him on LinkedIn or Twitter.

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A Story of How Baseball and Video Helped Create a Winning Sales Development Team

What makes a good salesperson?

No, forget that. What makes a great salesperson? Sure, you can just look at the numbers, at the quotas and accounts and commissions and deals closed…but for Adam Brophy, Manager of the Business Development team at Uberflip, the art of sales is so much more. Recently, I got to chat with Adam  about what he’s passionate about, what he believes in, and what’s next for his team—and his customers.

As we started talking, I expected to hear a fair bit about Uberflip—the company and its product help marketers create, manage, and optimize a “content experience” for buyers at every part of the journey. As a marketer, I could relate; it’s optimal to have incredible content, but also to deliver it in an incredible way to wow your audience. Because, as Uberflip suggests in one of their website videos, a pina colada that you slurp in a dingy, smelly basement just won’t be as enjoyable as a pina colada that you sip while you dig your toes into the sand of a sun-kissed beach. Despite tasting the same, the experience of the pina colada is a hell of a lot different.

But with Uberflip, we’re talking about the marketing world. Adam is a salesman in the sales world. And when he started to describe his work by referencing baseball, I thought, Uh oh. I’m a fish out of water here. Yet as Adam let me into his world, I quickly realized that, just as the realms of marketing and sales are blending more and more together, there is a lot of overlap in what drives and inspires us.

Blue Jays and dogs and people…oh, my!

Adam told me that sales has a reputation for being a ‘dog eat dog’ world: a solo activity where you’re trying to beat everyone else and be the best, biggest, and toughest so you can thrive. Instead, he loves to see the parallel between baseball (go, Blue Jays!) and sales: it’s competitive, and you can be wowed by individual contributions if you work hard and keep trying: “Each conversation with a prospect is like getting up to the plate: you could get a hit, or even hit it out of the park. And, if you strike out, you’ll always have another at-bat.”

Along with the competitive aspect comes the team aspect. The whole experience is much more satisfying when the team works as a whole to strengthen each other and accomplish amazing things together. It’s how Adam manages his team of sales development reps: “We share techniques that work well, and help each other improve when things don’t go the way we hoped. And we celebrate each other’s successes. Because when the team excels, it means more opportunity—quota-wise and career-wise—for everyone.”

As a sales manager, Adam isn’t directly selling anymore; instead he sees himself as the team’s coach. And—like the company he works for—Adam is focused on creating a powerful, incredible, and converting experience. Not just for his team, who benefit from a competitive yet fun and supportive experience, but for their prospects as well: “People want a human experience. It’s why sales exists: it’s the human bridge between a product and the customer.

And that’s exactly why Adam knew that his team was ready to do something different. To leave behind the traditional way to sell.

Marketers are a tough crowd and your Facebook feed is changing.

Uberflip’s target customers are marketers, and marketers, being marketers, have seen everything. They know that just because someone’s first name appears in an email, it doesn’t mean it’s a genuine, personalized message. It’s a challenge to sell to a tough crowd, but that’s also where satisfaction and accomplishment come from: “If you’re just going to send a templated message, you might as well ditch your team and use automation technologies.” Adam was not willing to give in to a robotic approach; Uberflip is all about ‘the experience’, and that same principle drives Adam’s work.

The sales manager found inspiration in his own personal life. He saw that Facebook was massively upping their investment in and commitment to video. And as a consumer, he favored video over other mediums himself: it feels more engaging, more human, more experiential.

Adam was thrilled when he ‘ViewedIt’.

So when Adam heard about ViewedIt, Vidyard’s product that offers anyone the ability to create, send, and track video, he jumped on it. Video felt like a perfect fit for Uberflip, since it’s all about an immersive experience.  

“As a salesperson, I’m never more confident than when I can be in a room with a prospect. But often our work happens over phone or email. With ViewedIt, prospects can see my face and hear my voice. It’s the next best thing to being in the room with them.”

His team adopted the tool, and began recording their own videos for prospects. And of course, Adam made sure to bring the team together for friendly competitions that involved viewing each other’s videos and figuring out which ones worked best. (Want tips on what works well for sales videos? Check out this post.)

They were excited to discover there wasn’t much of a learning curve; it was just about being yourself, and being okay with saying “um” and “ah”. Each video didn’t have to be perfect—that’s what made it more human. Because, “with all the technology and automation out there, it’s so important to show you’re not a robot, and you care and can help your prospect. Just speak from the heart.”

See how personal video can be?

With ViewedIt, prospects finally felt like they were being seen.

Adam’s sales development team incorporated inside their emails ViewedIt videos that were personalized for each prospect—no longer just for an industry or persona, but specifically for each person, creating an experience more genuine than anything their prospects had seen before.

The results spoke for themselves: “My team came to me constantly with success stories of their ViewedIt video emails. They were working to cut through the noise, and helped us connect with people on a human level.” They kept hearing from their prospects how much they enjoyed the videos. As Adam said, “When a prospect compliments you on your selling technique, you know you’ve got something that works!”

Now, the team could work smarter, not harder.

With ViewedIt, the team could see not only who was watching videos, but when they watched and for how long. With these insights, “We could determine who the most engaged prospects were, so we could focus our efforts on the right people, and create more opportunities in less time!”

Adam, ever looking for new ways to innovate, found more ways to take advantage of ViewedIt’s power, including creating videos to train sales reps on anything from new techniques to changes in their CRM that they need to know about. “I enjoy using ViewedIt. It’s fun. And it’s a great way to demonstrate ideas both internally and externally.” It’s also opened his eyes further to the current state of sales, and what the future might hold: “I’ve realized just how much sales is in flux. We need to keep pushing, changing and innovating to break through the noise, and that’s really exciting to me.”

It’s exciting to Uberflip as well. The successes of Adam’s team have “started to change the idea, at Uberflip and in the sales industry, that sales development teams are only capable of the ‘smile and dial’ approach. There’s a creative and strategic role that SDRs can play, and every success we have helps cement that role.” With rave reviews from prospects and customers, and recognition from leaders and peers, Adam and his team have truly hit it out of the park.

Want to learn more about how other organizations have achieved success with Vidyard? Check out more customer stories.

The post A Story of How Baseball and Video Helped Create a Winning Sales Development Team appeared first on Vidyard.

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Your Customers Don’t Care About Your Product: They Care About Progress

It’s true. Your customers don’t care about your product. Don’t worry, they don’t care about your competitor’s products either. Your customers don’t care about any products. Thankfully, your customers do care about something, which is why they buy your product.

Your customers care about the progress they will make as a result of using your product.

As Growth Marketers and Product Builders, it’s our job to make sure customers understand how our product will change them for the better. Then we can create an efficient customer funnel that turns potential customers into loyal, repeat customers. We use data to optimize each stage of the user lifecycle. However, it’s easy to get bogged down in user data and product features. When we lose sight of whether or not our customers have realized the better life we’ve promised, the customer becomes stuck in our funnel and we lose our customer.

By understanding the progress our customers are hoping to make, we can increase conversions at any stage of the user lifecycle: Acquisition, Activation, Retention, Revenue, and Referral.

Customers Buy Progress

Customers actually don’t buy your product. They aspire to be more awesome, and they believe your product will help them get there. They buy the vision of themselves being more awesome. This visual from Samuel Hulick explains why customers buy products.

Customer progress is a key concept of Jobs To Be Done (JTBD). I was first introduced to the above Super Mario graphic by Alan Klement’s book on JTBD, When Coffee & Kale Compete. The JTBD helps us focus on the customer’s desire to make life better and the progress they are hoping to achieve. With this focus, we can grow faster and build better products.

Alan lists 10 JTBD principles in his book. We’ll focus on two.

1. Customers don’t want your product or what it does; they want help making their lives better.
2. Solutions and Jobs should be thought of as parts of system that work together to deliver progress to customers.

The rest of this article will show how growth and product teams at B2B and B2C orgs have used these two principles to create better top of funnel marketing messages and increase LTV and retention through progress-centric product updates.

Acquisition

• Create ads and content that focus on progress. Progress is overcoming an emotional struggle to make one’s life better.
• Make sure you have the right understanding of progress for your audience.

Case Study

TownHound was a dual-sided marketplace that was picked up by Google just 8 months after launch. It was a mobile app that brought restaurants more patrons during off-peak hours by offering discounts to its users. In just 3 months, TownHound was able to sign on 6x more restaurant partners in the San Jose, CA region than it’s behemoth competitor Groupon.

This is a huge accomplishment because two-sided marketplaces are tricky. You need a high volume of Demand (customers redeeming TownHound deals) in order to build up Supply (restaurant partners that offer deals). Bryan Solar, Co-Founder of TownHound, understood the progress that his customers were hoping to achieve, which he used to guide his paid acquisition strategy.

Early on, his Facebook and Instagram ads were just doing okay. TownHound was bringing on new users, but they weren’t sticky. Users would download the app, redeem a single deal, and then poof, they were gone. He wasn’t acquiring the right users.

He needed more quality users in order to satisfy the balance of his two-sided marketplace. He decided to interview customers that had redeemed more than one deal.

Bryan’s interviews led to a huge discovery. He learned that his best users were dating app users. His repeat customers were using TownHound while on first, second, or third dates.

• TownHound’s Restaurant partners want more patrons during slow hours: Monday – Thursday nights.
• Dating app users typically meet for dinner during the week because weekends are too precious to waste on a potentially traumatic first Tinder date experience.
• It’s a match!

Bryan learned that his best customers didn’t use TownHound to get discounts on meals. They use TownHound in order to find the right person for a relationship. He also understood that his customers didn’t necessarily love to go on dates. Dates are exciting, but they’re also stressful and expensive. For many, dates are a necessary evil.

When TownHound’s ad content changed, quality user growth and restaurant partner growth rapidly increased.

• Before: Ads focused on saving money on dinner.
• After: Ads focused on relieving the pain of going on expensive dates.

Bryan found his core audience and tailored acquisition efforts to focus on their progress, rather than the function of his product.

Activation

• Re-highlight the progress that was promised in acquisition.
• Link onboarding process to progress or overcoming a struggling moment.

Samuel Hulick, the creator of the Super Mario graphic above, runs UserOnboard.com – a site dedicated to onboarding and activating users. He sat down with Ryan Singer of Basecamp and discussed how JTBD can be applied to the onboarding process. Ryan noticed a change in the way he approaches onboarding when customer progress is his goal.

“That’s really interesting to look through a Jobs-to-Be-Done lens, because then the question becomes ‘what can we do to help this person decide that this is the right tool for them?’ That’s a very different task for the designer than ‘how can I thoroughly explain the mechanisms of my products?’”

Case Study

Le Tote is an e-commerce subscription service for women that delivers a personalized box of clothes directly to their customer’s doorstep. Le Tote’s monthly subscription lets customers wear the clothes they receive as long as they want, and then receive a new box in exchange for sending back their previously worn garments. Le Tote is old-school Netflix for women’s clothes.

Le Tote uses style preferences, ratings of previously shipped garments, and sizing info to curate a box of clothes for each customer. In theory, the more you use Le Tote, the better the service is at matching you with clothes you’ll love.

However, Le Tote doesn’t have a history of customer feedback to leverage when shipping a box to a first time user. It’s critical that Le Tote gets the first box right because it’s essentially a “test drive.” Send a bad box to a first time user and the likelihood of them sticking around for a second box is slim.

If the first box is critical to a new user adopting Le Tote, then the onboarding process incredibly important. Le Tote needs to gather as much info about their customer’s style preferences during onboarding as possible in order to make a great first impression, without bombarding users with tedious onboarding tasks. So how does Le Tote get users through a lengthy onboarding process without seeing a drop in conversion?

Here are two steps in the process. The user is met with easy to answer questions about occasions that are hard to dress for and weather, which is uncontrollable.

Now, think about the progress that Le Tote’s customers are hoping to achieve. They want access to new, trendy clothes in order to feel confident in situations that matter. Buying a new garment from a traditional e-commerce site for every special occasion can get expensive. Plus, ‘that perfect new shirt’ tends to lose it’s magic after a few wears and a couple months in the closet. A Le Tote customer wants to feel confident in new clothes while maintaining wallet-friendly peace of mind.

Le Tote communicates progress by highlighting a few occasions that customers have struggled to get ready for in the past. This reminds the user why she’s jumping through onboarding hoops — to overcome these struggling moments and make progress. This is easily forgotten when onboarding focuses too much on the product and not the user, and we activate fewer users as a result.

Retention

• Use data to track changes in usage behavior.
• Interview customers when behaviors change to understand if customers are making progress.
• Make product changes when features are standing in the way of progress.

Your marketing and sales efforts have promised the solution to a struggling moment, and your customer has chosen your product to take them from ‘Normal Mario’ to ‘Awesome Fireball Throwing Mario’.

If you don’t deliver progress, your customers will churn. How do we know that we’re delivering progress?

Behavioral data helps us understand which features are being used and how often customers are coming back. This data is incredibly actionable, but it doesn’t tell us if our customers are actually making progress.

Customer interviews are key to improving retention. Data will help uncover behavior changes of our customers, but interviews will reveal the why behind those changes. Alan Klement gives us examples of behavior changes to investigate through customer interviews: “When someone purchases a product, begins to use a new product, stops using a product, suddenly uses a product more, and suddenly uses a product less.” (p. 190).

Case Study

Wade Warren, Co-Founder of Resource, is using JTBD to guide the product roadmap of his candidate sourcing platform. Resource finds candidates and then writes personalized, custom outreach that comes from an internal recruiter’s identity. It’s a platform that helps recruiters with limited hiring bandwidth to build teams faster.

Resource has a feature where new candidates are automatically screened in – which means that they are contacted without explicit recruiter approval.

Wade noticed a decline in usage in the product. People were signing up for Resource, adding a number of roles and using it for a few weeks, before suddenly pausing their roles and stopping usage. His team interviewed customers to understand the root of the issue. One of his interviewees was a user that had stopped using Resource, but then began to use it again.

She got responses from a few candidates who had been automatically screened and was forced to speak with candidates that weren’t a good fit, which caused anxiety. She paused her Resource roles and went back to contacting candidates through Linkedin.

Then, she saw a recruiter on her team using a buried feature that allowed her to individually pick the candidates to be contacted: “I saw Sarah clicking approve and asked, ‘what is that’. She explained to me that you can screen each individual candidate in Resource if you change this setting.” She immediately went back to Resource.

Wade heard this same story from a few different customers, so his team made a product change. Automated screening was switched from a default feature to a feature that must be toggled on by the user. Once this switch was made, he saw usage go up and churn decrease across all of his customers.

Although the original feature performed its intended function of reducing work for his customers, it caused anxiety. Wade’s interviews helped him better understand the progress his customers wanted to achieve: “We didn’t think that giving our customers more work in the product would mean them making more progress, but counterintuitively did.”

Revenue

• You’ve already delivered some progress. Find ways to deliver more progress.
• Add features that make progress easier to achieve.

Case Study

When Bryan’s team at TownHound focused their acquisition strategy on dating app users, he started acquiring quality users. He noticed an increase in quality feedback as a result. The feedback he got informed a product update that increased both retention and revenue because it helped to deliver more progress for his users.

TownHound rolled out a new feature that is similar to a feature in the expense reporting app, Expensify. The new feature allowed users to redeem their discounts by snapping a photo of the paper receipt in the app after the meal was over. Before this feature, the user could only redeem a discount by showing a waiter or waitress a confirmation page in the app during the meal.

At its surface, this new feature provides TownHound users more flexibility when redeeming their discounts while at dinner. It could even allow a user to redeem a discount after leaving the restaurant if they forgot to show their waiter the in app coupon.

The new snap-a-photo feature does offer flexibility, but more importantly, it contributes to progress for users who are on dates. Dates are stressful because first, second, and third impressions matter. We want to impress the person sitting across the table. Although most would agree that living frugally where we can is an admirable characteristic, a first date typically isn’t the place to tout this trait. The new snap-a-photo feature allows a TownHound user to redeem their discount without their date knowing. They don’t have to worry about being perceived as cheap!

TownHound is used to help create a meaningful dining experience for users that are looking for a new relationship. Bryan’s team at TownHound had a deep understanding of the progress his customers were hoping to make and the role that TownHound played in delivering that progress. If he had viewed his product simply as a “deals app”, he wouldn’t have been able to make a key product update that brought in more revenue as more users redeemed second, third, and fourth deals.

Referral

• Use incentives that align with progress to influence referrals.
• Don’t assume increased credits, storage, or currency equals progress.

If you help your customers make progress, it’s likely that their friends will hear about your product. Unfortunately, word of mouth alone won’t raise our K Factor above 1, so we must encourage referrals. Social networks like Linkedin and Twitter have had huge wins through productized referrals. Josh Elman explains how his teams at Twitter and Linkedin created winning referral programs in this video called 3 Growth Hacks: The Secrets To Driving Massive User Growth:

Linkedin and Twitter are social networks, so the “better with friends” referral play works incredibly well. What about products that aren’t social? How do we build an effective referral program for customers?

The common referral incentive we see looks like this: “If you use my referral code when you sign up, we each get $10 off our purchase.” Sometimes the reward for the referrer is delayed until the new user makes a purchase, but there is usually a give and a get incentive. In other words, “I give you $10, I get $10.”

Case Study

Le Tote used the standard give/get strategy early on, but couldn’t find the right mix of give/get secret sauce in order for their referral program to take off. Le Tote is not a social product.

Before working as Director of Growth at Le Tote, Luke Langon implemented referral programs at Lyft and two other mobile apps that he co-founded. Luke interviewed his customers in order to find out what give/get incentive would work best. His goal was to increase the percentage of users participating in referrals.

He learned that many of his customers weren’t referring friends because their give of $25 only covered half the cost of their friend’s Le Tote box. This means that their friend would still have to pay in order to test drive Le Tote. His customers didn’t like the idea of recommending a new product that forced their friends to pay. The get of $15 was intended to incentivize a referral, but not all customers were motivated by saving money on their next Le Tote box.

Le Tote’s referral program became a top acquisition channel when it shifted from ‘Give $25/Get $15’, to ‘Give a free box, Get nothing.’ Referrals achieved the lowest Cost Per Acquisition compared to all other acquisition channels and ranked second in volume of new subscribers.

Le Tote’s subscription does help customers save money on new clothes, but this isn’t how they make progress. Le Tote’s customers make progress by feeling confident during important occasions involving people they want to maintain or create a healthy relationship with. This progress is more important than saving money, which is why the old referral program didn’t work for many customers.

How to start using progress to benefit you and your customers

Customer interviews will help you discover what progress means to your customers. Remember, progress is overcoming an emotional struggle to make one’s life better. You need to uncover an emotional hurdle that has nothing to do with your product. When you use progress as your guide, you will create more wins throughout the entire customer lifecycle.

If you’re interested in learning more about Jobs To Be Done, JTBD.info is a great place to start. It’s run by Alan Klement, who’s book I linked at the beginning of this article.

If you have any questions or thoughts, please comment below or feel free to reach out!

About the Author: Chris Brophy likes to drive growth for consumer-focused startups. He’s currently consulting startups on growth strategy at Tradecraft and exploring his next adventure. If you’d like to chat about growth, JTBD, or live music, reach him at cabrophy89[at]gmail[dot]com.

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How to Repackage Webinars Into Lots of Awesome Content

Webinars are an excellent way to connect with users, directly engage, promote services, generate leads, and build authority.

Webinars are among the most effective promotional tactics out there providing you with lots of opportunities from marketing to sales.

A single webinar can provide benefits for years to come.

There is no doubt that webinars are incredible resources. But they don’t end at the webinar itself. You can repackage that content into new content, which will stretch even further.

As you may know, I am big fan of repackaging and writing productivity and I see webinars as the huge opportunity to try the tactic.

Here are some ideas to get you started..

Offer It As A Video

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The easiest way to get more from your webinar is to offer it to people who couldn’t be there for the live version. You just take the recorded video, stamp on a title card and ending card, enhance it for your chosen video platform, and post it. You can see how SEMrush is doing it masterfully turning their webinars into valuable content (including videos and downloadable Slideshare files) and using it to collect leads.

You have a couple of options here. First is just to put it somewhere like Youtube, but I would hold off on that. The same with platforms like Vimeo, DailyMotion, etc. You will get there eventually, but think of it as your secondary form of promotion.

Another option is to host it directly on your site. For the first few months, put it behind a sign-up wall. Ask people for their email addresses to access the video. Sites like Hootsuite use this method, and it is an excellent way to build email subscriber lists.

Ask them during sign-up if they also want to subscribe to your newsletter. Never make it mandatory, or start sending them newsletter just because they gave you their email address. You will get on their nerves. Just asking will still give you plenty of addresses, so you will have a double tier benefit from the collection.

Once you have had the video up this way for awhile, you can re-release it for people on YouTube, Vimeo, etc. This has the added benefit of making those who go to your site to sign-up to view feel like they are part of an exclusive group.

If you do a series of webinars, you can also consolidate them into a Udemy course.

Break It Into Blog Posts

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Everyone is always looking for regular ideas for blog posts, right? Your webinars will provide you with plenty, if you look hard enough.

Think outside of the box and go for a stream of consciousness association. Turn your webinar sub-sections into separate blog posts. If you have any questions during the webinar, cover them in separate blog posts too!

Don’t forget to link to your video (and / or Udemy course) from each blog post you publish. That’s how you’ll generate more views and engagement.

Create A Downloadable Tutorial

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You are already going to (presumably) offering step by step advice of some kind. You can create a tutorial by breaking down these steps into even more basic ideas, and offering them on their own.

How you do this will be up to you. If you have published a series of blog posts (see the step above), you can easily turn them into one complete pdf file and offer your readers to subscribe to download.

If you have the skills, or know someone who does you can ask/hire, you can even make an infographic showing it off. Those are viral fodder for websites like Pinterest, so you would be doing yourself a real favor there.

Re-Use Your Presentation

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Slideshare is a great platform with a very active community, most of them professionals. But it isn’t overly crowded, so with a bit of meta data optimization you will get plenty of views.

You are most likely to have had your presentations ready for the webinar, so just optimize it a bit for the Slideshare and upload it there!

Be sure to take a look at the top presentations on Slideshare to get an idea of what works.

Use The Q&A For A FAQ

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Most webinars have a portion that is dedicated to Q&A’s. If your own doesn’t, it should. Either this will be done in real time by connecting through a tool like Hangouts/Tweetchats/etc, or you can take questions ahead of time and read them out during the Q&A with credit to the asker.

These are so helpful for content. Not only do they show you the questions people have so you can make fitting blog posts/videos/tutorials/etc. in the future, but you can make something from the Q&A itself. It also offers a chance to link to the video, hidden behind that sign-up wall.

Here are some tools to find even more questions people tend to ask when they discuss your webinar topic (In case you didn’t get enough during the event).

Conclusion

Webinars are the best, period. They are a great way to connect with your audience. They are a means of asserting your authority on any given topic. They are even a way to build email lists, which remain among your most crucial weapons in marketing. Everyone should be creating them.

Everyone should also be creating other content from them. Hopefully, this post has given you some ideas. If you have others you should post them below, I would love to hear about them. You can never have too many tools at your disposal.

The post How to Repackage Webinars Into Lots of Awesome Content appeared first on Internet Marketing Ninjas Blog.

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Do Your Tweets Deliver Revenue? Here’s How to Use Kissmetrics to Find Out

The average social media manager gets paid roughly $47,190.

They tweet, post, share, like, favorite, comment, and reply to make sure your company’s social media is covered.

Some companies use social media differently. Slack, for instance, uses Twitter to communicate the brand and notify followers on product updates. Here at Kissmetrics, we’re tweeting links to our content. Expedia tweets sales offers to the hottest (pun intended) destinations.

So with all this tweeting and sharing, does any of it really convert to revenue? Granted, some companies couldn’t care less if the tweets to their product announcements lead to signups. But some companies are invested heavily in social, with managers and interns making sure their bases are covered. But for those that are promoting their deals 10x a day (I’m looking at you, JCPenney) is it worth it? Do those tweets convert to revenue?

Here’s how to use Kissmetrics to find out.

Tracking Links Back to Revenue

UTM tagging makes a marketers job infinitely easier. Any campaign you’re promoting, just tag the URL with some UTM parameters and watch the traffic come in.

You can apply these UTMs to the links you share on social as well, even if you’re using a link shortener like bit.ly. They’ll simply redirect to the URL containing the UTMs.

So let’s say we’re a marketer for a small e-commerce company. We have a moderate Facebook and Twitter following, combining for about 25k fans. We regularly tweet out sales and other promos to our followers.

But there’s a gap – we don’t know if anyone actually purchases after clicking the links.

Enter the solution: Kissmetrics. With Kissmetrics, we’ll track who is clicking these links and if any of them actually convert to purchasing.

So if we have this link, tagged properly with UTMs to promote our upcoming sale:

http://ift.tt/2kBXI99

Then we’ll share it on our Twitter page. We can make the same link for our Facebook followers, just switch the Campaign Medium and Campaign Content from twitter to facebook.

Now comes the fun stuff – tracking it to see if anyone is converting!

We’ll load the Kissmetrics People Report and set it find the people who did these two steps in order – viewed the url listed above, and then converted.

So we have a couple things here – we’re telling Kissmetrics to find the people who have viewed the URL http://ift.tt/2kBXI99 and then purchased. Our date range is set for the last 7 days.

We can do anything else to replace Purchased. Maybe added item to cart, signed up for newsletter, viewed product video, etc. But for now, we’ll keep it as Purchased.

And because we’re tracking revenue with Kissmetrics, we’ll create another column to see the total purchase amount each customer made:

We’ll run the report and get our list of people and their revenue:

This shows us that 5 people made purchases from that link we shared on Twitter. We also see each customer’s purchase amounts, ranging from $9.97 to $47.26.

Tracking Social Media Campaigns

Some of you may have social media campaigns. You may be using a hashtag for your campaigns, and want to track all the links coming in from the campaign. For this, you can use UTMs and keep the same Campaign Medium.

For example, if you’re promoting your winter campaign on Twitter and have hundreds of links pointing back to your site, you can change all the UTM parameters but keep the Campaign Medium the same. This will make it much easier to track.

Let’s see how this plays out in a Funnel Report. Here’s how our setup looks, step-by-step:

1. We’re looking for people who came to our site via a UTM with the campaign medium being twitter. Anyone who came to our site without that campaign medium will not be included in this funnel.
2. These people will have to add a product to the shopping cart to be included in step 2.
3. And they’ll need to make a purchase.

Let’s run the report and get the data:

We see that in the 30 day span, we had about 7500 people visit us from this campaign medium, of which 102 people ended up purchasing. From here we can judge the campaigns performance to see if the cost and effort was worth the returns.

Conclusion

What’s the return on your social media?

For many companies, it’s been almost impossible to quantify. Most social media tools cannot tell you your return. But with Kissmetrics, where you can tie revenue to campaigns, you’ll see the returns you’re getting for every tweet, hashtag, and influencer mention.

Questions? Put them in the comments.

About the Author: Zach Bulygo (Twitter) is the Blog Manager for Kissmetrics.

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WebmasterWorld’s Top Discussions of 2016 And More: Weekly Forum Update

Greetings once again, SEO fans! We’ve got a big t-bone steak of an update for you this week. WebmasterWorld’s administrator, engine, was kind enough to put together a “Best of 2016” thread which I’m dying to share.

If you know the caliber of discussion that happens on WebmasterWorld, then the idea of a “best-of” thread should already have you salivating. We also have threads about Google news, like Google’s new AdWords report about bad advertising practices.

On Cre8asiteforums, Kim and the gang have an eye-opening thread about Google’s new interstitial penalty.

Finally, I wrote up a little post on SEO Chat to help SEO newbies understand the difference between being indexed and ranking for keywords. Let’s dive in!

Top WebmasterWorld Discussions and News of 2016

Whatever your feelings are about 2016, negative or positive, it certainly brought a lot of change to the world. The world of SEO was no exception! WebmasterWorld admin engine’s list of top discussions from 2016 proves that it was an eventful year.

He’s broken it down to the top stories and discussions from every month, which is quite a feat! You can start in January with the very first announcement about AMP and go all the way to November, when it was revealed that publishers were giving “mixed reviews” to AMP’s progress.

Along the way, make sure to dip into great discussions like “Making Links Usable Again,” “I’m Tired of The ‘Is SEO Dead?’ Question,” and “The Problem With SEO ‘As Usual’.” If you ever wanted a textbook for advanced SEO…this is pretty close!

Chrome 56 Arrives With “Not Secure” Notices and 28% Faster Reload Capability

Here it is! This is the version of Chrome that Google has been warning about – if you have password or credit card forms and they’re still HTTP, Chrome 56 will mark them as “Not Secure.”

As WebmasterWorld’s admin engine describes,

“Google says it offers 29% faster reloading and 60% less validation requests.”

Neat!

YouTube – Quality or Quantity?

If you’ve ever taken a break from the SEO world, then you know how tricky it can be to get back in. Things change so quickly that if you aren’t following the daily or weekly updates, you can lose your edge in a hurry. In this SEO Chat thread, a new member is returning to the SEO world with a few questions.

Their colleagues have a peculiar idea about YouTube:

“Their idea is that quantity is everything! However,” writes the member, “back when I was doing SEO the first time round, this was very much wrong!”

Basically, this member’s colleagues believe that to be successful in the world of YouTube, they need to post dozens of 10 – 20 second long videos which,

“…to put it politely, are absolutely terrible!!”

Senior SEO Chat members affirm that, yes, this is a bad idea!

Google Reports on AdWords Bad Advertising Practices 2016

Google had its hands full of spam and malware last year, it seems. Their recently released report about bad ads, practices, and actors indicates that

“…in 2016 Google took down 1.7 billion ads that broke its ad policies, which the company says was more than double that of 2015,” writes WebmasterWorld’s admin engine.

The report details the different kinds of bad ads and actors that were taken down, which is quite interesting. As engine puts it,

“It begs the question, are there more bad ads, or is Google getting better at catching them, or both?”

Surprisingly, click fraud in AdWords and AdSense was a topic that received no mention.

Pulling Your Hair Out Over Google and Demoting Pages With Interstitials

On Cre8asiteforums, some members are finding it difficult to convince clients to take Google’s interstitial penalty seriously. And even if you do take Google seriously, there are a lot of questions about when and how the penalty might be applied!

Cre8asiteforums member iamlost has some very interesting musings about how to test interstitials and how to analyze what they’re for and if they’re worth the annoyance. You can always find a technical discussion on Cre8asiteforums!

Up to 350,000 Fake Twitter Accounts Discovered in One Network

Twitter has a fake account problem. Researchers who study Twitter have known about that for a while, but they’ve only just now discovered the extent of the networks that fake accounts have created. These accounts are sometimes run by bots which are programmed to

“…help boost follower numbers, to tweet spam messages, and promote specific interests, amongst other reasons.”

WebmasterWorld member Dimitri writes that

“…that’s only 0.10% of the total number of Twitter accounts, if I don’t make mistake. However, I wonder how they managed to create that many accounts. I thought that now, you needed a phone number to open an account.”

Burner phones are one solution – and other members of WebmasterWorld write that, sometimes, you can link multiple accounts to the same number. Twitter is a useful tool, especially for journalists and artists. But if these bots are able to manipulate conversations and create a false impression of authority for certain users of the platform, Twitter’s value goes soaring out the window.

The Difference Between Being Indexed and Ranking

Oftentimes on SEO Chat, a newbie member will post that their site hasn’t been indexed. Sometimes they write that it has been months, and still not a single page has been indexed! But when I or a senior member do a simple “site:” search, we’ll find hundreds of pages turning up.

It’s a common mistake – they aren’t ranking, and they’re under the mistaken impression that they aren’t indexed either. You can find plenty of great resources for how to get indexed faster, as well as tips for link building and on-page SEO, in this thread! Tackle indexing and ranking as their own unique issues. As Ann writes,

“Crawl = spider links; Index = save in database; Rank = decide where to show in search results.”

Simple, right?

New Bing Ads Automation to Import Google AdWords

This should make it easier for any Google AdWords users to get involved with Bing Ads! You can now import your Google AdWords campaigns right over to Bing Ads automatically.

This Threadwatch notice links to a WebmasterWorld discussion, where forum member buckworks has an important clarification:

“A word to the wise: in another thread, Ogletree [another member] cautioned us to be very careful with broad matches in AdWords-to-Bing transfers. On one of his keywords Bing wasted a painful amount of money with broad matching that was a lot broader than AdWords had been doing.”

Just like any other automated SEO tool – remember to step in and use your own experience and sense of context to be safe!

DuckDuckGo Reaches Past 10 Billion Searches – 4 Billion Were in 2016

The “plucky duck” search engine has hit another major milestone! As one of our Threadwatch members writes, it’s

“…good news for those of you who support search engine alternatives to Google and Bing…”

Of course, Google claims to handle around 2 trillion searches every year. So DuckDuckGo still has a lot of catching up to do. But the increase in searches from 2015 to 2016 is still worth celebrating!

Bravo, DuckDuckGo!

The post WebmasterWorld’s Top Discussions of 2016 And More: Weekly Forum Update appeared first on Internet Marketing Ninjas Blog.

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How to Evaluate the ROI of Branded Content

In 2011, Google’s Zero Moment of Truth report struck fear into the hearts of marketers and companies alike with its finding that the average consumer reviews 10.4 pieces of content before converting.

What made this finding so scary? It underlined the importance of content to modern marketing strategies, and many companies feared they weren’t producing nearly enough content to drive conversions.

To remain competitive, marketers and small businesses jumped in feet first.

Their version of “shoot first; ask questions later” resulted in a lot of content produced on websites that wasn’t actually doing much converting.

The Benefits of Branded Content

Soon, astute businesses realized that publishing high-quality content instead of high volumes of content was what really counted. These businesses began reaching out to pay to get their content published beyond their own websites, on the sites of complementary online publications — often those with more traffic.

This type of content, called “branded content” (or “sponsored content”), is a way for brands to expose their content to a much larger audience than their own websites, while possibly building a collection of trustworthy backlinks to their site and getting their brand in front of more eyes.

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An example is this branded article that New York Times’ T Brand Studio produced for Netflix. While this piece doesn’t mention the benefits of Netflix services or products in a traditional advertising sense, it does provide original and thought-provoking insight into the topic of female inmates — a topic that also serves as the main focus of a Netflix original series. Instead of spending their dollars on a banner ad telling consumers to watch Orange is the New Black, Netflix put their resources towards getting an intriguing piece of content in front of the eyes of over 1 million New York Times readers; content that may inspire many of those readers to watch the related Netflix series.

Marketers and advertisers are embracing branded content because branded content pieces have been shown to be more engaging than banner ads. Studies show that the use of ad-blocking software is on the rise, and 45% of AdBlock users expressed a desire to remove as many ads as possible from their web experience. Engagement with branded content is more robust; while viewers spend an average of 1.6 seconds looking at a banner ad, they spend much longer engaging with branded content (anywhere from 60 seconds for branded news content, to 323 seconds for branded finance content).

A 2015 study from Business Insider’s BI Intelligence estimates that marketing spend for branded content (called “sponsored” content in the study, and represented in red in the graph below) will continue to rise significantly over the next few years.

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Branded Content Strategy Challenges

Measuring the success of these content pieces accurately and clearly in order to assess return on investment (ROI) is one of the biggest challenges that brands and advertisers face when implementing a branded content strategy. Without a solid understanding of ROI, it’s difficult to steer a successful campaign, and even more difficult to get buy-in from executives who control the advertising budget and want to see that their dollars are well spent.

Research from the Content Marketing Institute reveals that 33% of B2B marketers and 41% of B2C marketers cite “the inability to measure (ROI) as a significant challenge” to producing branded content.

As a relatively new avenue of marketing, measuring the ROI of branded content can be a challenge. The good news is that it can be measured; and those who do measure their branded content are more likely to receive buy-in (and budget approval) from executives, and obtain stronger insights to cater their marketing strategy to their target market.

If your senior management team is hesitant with using branded content as an advertising opportunity, having clear metrics to measure success may be what you need to tip the scales. There are five different metrics that you can track to show the ROI of branded content you have produced.

The Metrics to Measure

The metrics to use when determining how content contributes to a company’s bottom line include:

Consumption Metrics

Important because they reveal brand awareness and “reach,” consumption metrics can include:

• Page views
• Blog/infographic/video views
• Downloads
• Social chatter: Social-listening services like Mention and Radian6 can tally how often your name comes up on social channels, blog posts, and forums.

Consumption data measures brand awareness and web traffic. The key is to measure these metrics before the content rolls out; set a goal for desired increase in each metric, and track these increases after the release of a branded piece.

Lead Generation Metrics

Most brands today offer a free download in exchange for an email address. The addresses that come in are leads. The company can then send the leads helpful blog posts and offers on a regular basis through email marketing campaigns. Each of these leads indicates that your content has impressed or intrigued the reader enough to convert.

Form submissions are also counted as leads. These indicate that your website’s content is compelling enough to get a visitor to ask for a phone call from you.

Track leads generated through either your email management system or a customer relationship management (CRM) system to evaluate your efforts and see where most of your leads are coming from. You should also consider adding a “how did you hear about us?” question to your newsletter sign-up form.

Conversion Rates

The best content gets people to take action. A click from a blog post on your website — and, eventually, a sales page or email sign-up page — indicates the post has pulled its weight.

Google Analytics is one of the best tools to use for conversion tracking for branded content. With accurate tracking, (the Campaign URL Builder is a huge help here) content that funnels significant traffic to popular sales pages can be given proper credit and used to guide efforts in the future.

Sharing Metrics

Social likes, comments, shares, and email forwards all indicate that the reader agrees with or appreciates the information enough to pass it along to friends. They may even view sharing it as a way to increase their own social clout.

Most publications will have buttons or metrics on published branded content to show shares, and there are tools, like Coverage Book or Share Tally, that can be used to track how many people have shared a branded post with their networks.

Sales Metrics

C-suite inhabitants tend to want to go right to the ultimate goal: sales metrics. “How many sales has this content generated?” Unfortunately, in an era where consumers expect to be wooed and educated before buying, sales metrics aren’t the easiest to attribute to content.

It’s common knowledge that prospects require multiple touches before deciding to buy. Content tends to take the role of lead nurturer, providing the multiple touch points required to warm up a prospect.

With Google Analytics and marketing automation working together, however, marketers can see how many web visitors came in from different content pieces. When a web visitor goes from a post to a sales page, marketers should count that action as an “assist.”

Surveys: Content Measurement from a Different Angle

When combined, the five metrics above are powerful tools for assessing your branded content’s ROI — but the monetary measure of a piece of content can still be difficult to fully comprehend. You can build a more robust picture and add context to many of the above metrics through consumer surveys.

With an easily accessible, brief, and well-designed survey, you can gain insight into consumer reactions to your content and your brand’s overall reputation. When paired with metrics like social shares, downloads, or form submissions, you’ll uncover a clearer picture of why and how your content is driving the conversions you see — allowing you to adjust your strategy according to what works and what doesn’t.

Sometimes brands can even get the publisher that hosted their content to conduct a survey for them. Publishers want to demonstrate how the content their clients pay dearly for is swaying and even motivating customers to buy. They must show their results if they expect to get return customers.

In one example, BuzzFeed surveyed two audiences: one that had seen five to nine of its client’s “sponsored” (paid) posts and another that hadn’t. The client, cell carrier Virgin Mobile, worked with BuzzFeed to come up with articles that would appeal to BuzzFeed readers.

After running the articles for a few months, BuzzFeed asked two yes-or-no questions:

“Virgin Mobile is a brand I’d investigate for my next phone purchase.”

and

“Virgin Mobile is a brand that understands me and the things I like.”

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Recipients that had been exposed to Virgin Mobile’s articles were 150% more likely to report that they’d consider the brand when it came time to purchase another phone. Those that had seen the articles were also three times more likely to conclude that Virgin Mobile was aware of their values and interests. Both answers typically lead to brand lift and better sales. For many companies’ marketing goals, this “lift” can be considered part of the ROI for their branded content.

Is Branded Content the Future?

The era of banner-ad dominance is at an end. Studies show that ad blocking is on the rise, and 60% of clicks on banner ads are accidental. Marketers and advertisers know this; and they recognize that branded content may be a good alternative. Branded content is one way to provide connection to prospects that will make them grateful or amazed, and more engaged with their brand. What most marketers need to achieve now is buy-in on the part of their superiors, and tangible metrics that can guide their strategies to success.

By using these tips to monitor and assess branded content, marketers can take the extra step and measure the traffic, leads, and even the affinity their content drives. The BI Intelligence study mentioned above found that consumers have far more goodwill toward branded content than disruptive advertising. Consumers come to a website or publication looking for useful information or entertainment. When they get what they came for, you’ve got satisfied consumers and built positive relationships with your brand. As a marketer, you’ve always known this is the key to positive ROI — and now you can prove it.

About the Author: Andrew Lovasz is the CEO of Main Path Marketing, a leading digital marketing firm providing enterprise level solutions to SMB and mid-market companies. He has 17 years of experience as an executive in the digital marketing industry, with clients ranging from Verizon Wireless to thousands of small and mid-market car dealers, restaurants and hotels.

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