Hey everyone! In today’s episode, I share the mic with Tyson Quick, the CEO of Instapage, which turns your ad clicks into conversions by providing an end-to-end solution for optimizing post click experiences at scale.
Tune in to hear Tyson discuss how Instapage was founded based off a common problem they faced, how the company figured out how to improve ad conversion rates and why serving to a larger market might benefit your company.
Time-Stamped Show Notes:
[00:41] Before we jump into today’s interview, please rate, review, and subscribe to the Growth Everywhere Podcast!
[01:45] Almost 7 years ago, when Tyson was working at another company, they ran a digital ad campaign when they were kicking off.
[02:10] What they found was that their conversions were low.
[02:35] So they spent time building more unique, relevant pages and saw their conversions increase.
[03:00] They figured building out a solution to this conversion problem would be more lucrative than what they were currently working on.
[05:25] When they pivoted, Tyson told investors that they discovered a more obvious product and business model that would serve a larger market.
[06:47] Instapage charges monthly or annually.
[06:56] One model is self-service and the other is model is enterprise.
[07:30] They manage to increase conversions significantly for their clients.
[10:00] Experimentation is an important part of informing your results.
[11:10] Unique content is more important than custom design.
[14:55] Instapage is planning on releasing more products in the coming months.
[15:25] The company is valued at over 9 figures.
[17:45] Bootstrapping proved difficult and was a big challenge.
[19:30] They hired their VP’s when they were still bootstrapping.
[20:57] One tool that Tyson thinks has added value to their product organization is Product Board.
[24:07] One must-read book that Tyson recommends is The Sales Acceleration Formula.
Hey everyone! Today I share the mic with Amanda Bradford, CEO of The League, a dating app for aspiring power couples.
Tune in to hear Amanda share why her dating app for intellectuals has a 500K wait list and how it’s converting in high volumes, the effects of monetizing the app for both men and women (especially in regards to user habits), and the value of finding the right people to ramp up your company’s growth.
01:34 – Based in Austin, they are opening offices in Dallas and Houston; The League was recently launched in Miami, Atlanta and Philly
01:48 – Looking to expand their dating app to LA, San Francisco and New York
02:25 – Finding your perfect match
02:25 – Users are required to put in their Facebook accounts as well as their LinkedIn which results in a more curated environment
03:00 – Users are matched by considering a variety of factors such as earnings, educational institutions, fields and social graphs
03:31 – It aims to curate users that are ambitious, intellectual and looking for a relationship
03:40 – Just started generating revenue by offering paid memberships
04:04 – The waitlist for The League has ballooned to over 500,000
04:56 – Does not compete with Raya, a dating app targeting wannabe celebrities; at The League, they are targeting more professionally oriented people
05:23 – Appeals to intellectuals such as writers, bankers and journalists
05:54 – Matchmaking: an outdated concept
05:54 – Not uncommon for matchmakers to charge as much as $60,000
06:18 – Matchmaking is an ancient concept and dating apps will replace them over time
07:58 – With the emergence of smartphones and improving technology, people can select their date from a wider pool; chances of finding a good match increases
09:10 – The League wants to be known as a dating app and not as a marriage platform
09:29 – Sends congratulatory gifts on the birthday of league babies
09:44 – Folks in their early 20’s are just looking to date and figure out what they want
10:02 – In spite of giving only 3 to 5 matches, conversion rate is really high
11:10 – Analyzing membership structure and revenues at The League
11:10 – It monetizes impatient people who value their time and are actively looking for a perfect match
12:02 – Annual membership is $180 which works out to be $15 per month
12:47 – Unlike other dating websites which try to monetize the men, revenues at “The League” are split equally between men and women
13:02 – User behaviors have improved after switching to a paid model
14:00 – Marketing strategy
14:00 – Relies on referrals for marketing
14:16 – Uses Hustle Con as a platform to meet potential users and spread the word before launching the app
15:12 – Raised $2.8 million so far
15:18 – A successful match leads to two people leaving and many more joining the app
16:18 – In spite of Tinder being one of the top four Apps used by millennials, fundraising is not easy
17:18 – It’s a lean organization with every person wearing multiple hats
17:31 – They want to use the latest, cutting edge technology to solve people’s problems
19:00 – Aiming to retain non-singles even after they’ve found a match
19:51 – What is the one big struggle you faced while growing “The League”? – Getting the right people on board
21:17 – Entrepreneurs’ Organization managed to increase their revenues from $3 million a year to $22 million a year in a space of just 2 years by hiring great people
21:45 – Monetization has enabled Amanda to hire some great people which has placed The League on the path for fast growth
22:33 – What is one big thing, positive or negative that has impacted your business in a big way in the past one year? – Amanda moved her office to a live/work house and now lives in a studio on the top of her office
25:24 – What’s one new tool that you’ve added in the last year that’s added a lot of value, like Evernote? – Mode Analytics – It is super easy. You can hook it onto any database and put SQL in it
26:39 – What’s one must-read book do you recommend? –Shoe Dog – The story of Phil Knight starting Nike right out of business school
28:20 – Connect with Amanda on her website or Facebook
Hey everyone, today I share the mic with Mike Dudas, co-founder and CRO of Button, a company that helps retailers realize the power of mobile by allowing seamless interconnected services to complement relevant products.
Tune in to hear how Mike has leaned on a unique combination of sound business and dumb luck to create a habitual winner, what the team did to growButton 10X in 1 year and drive tens of millions in revenue within 3 years,how a fortunate change in Uber’s business model allowed Button to succeed early on, and the process they go through to find, court and hire the right people.
01:00 – Button helps retailers realize the power of mobile by allowing seamlessly interconnected services to complement relevant products
01:22 – Mike has been working in the technology industry for 10 years now
01:33 – Started with Medianet Technologies, a startup based in New York City. He spent another 3 and a half years at Google and worked at Braintree/Venmo for a couple of years before starting Button in 2014
01:53 – Shifted his focus from media and ad technology to commerce and payments
02:05 – Got a chance to work on Google Wallet which helped him make the transition to commerce and payments
02:38 – Button has a fantastic team consisting of ex-Google and ex-Facebook employees
03:23 – Works with retailers and merchants to acquire new mobile app users from a number of publisher sources
03:40 – Hard to find cost-effective options to acquire new users outside of Google and Facebook. Button is attempting to address this market gap
04:10 – Mike shares the important numbers around Button
04:15 – Button has more than 50 people
04:21 – Have raised $34 million on the back of a strong revenue story
04:30 – Revenues have increased 10x in the past one year
05:03 – Looked at pain points for consumers and builders for mobile commerce businesses, and discovered that the affiliate channel on desktop was totally nonexistent. Button is attempting to bridge this gap between advertising and commerce
06:52 – “Button” permits product integration on the publisher page and is incredibly effective in driving traffic to another merchant website
09:21 – Merchant pays for the lead driven by the publisher. It can be a flat fee or a percentage of the transaction
10:03 – Large scale shopping and loyalty apps are using “Buttons” in a big way. Metasearch sites like Skyscanner are also using “Buttons” to streamline the payment process and increase conversion rates
11:30 –What is the one thing that is working really well for you in terms of customer acquisition? – Referrals and an experienced sales team
13:11 – You will have to answer 3 questions when you are selling: Why should I do this, why should I do this with you, and why should I do this now?
13:44 – Difficult to convince clients to invest in “Buttons” since most companies are resource constrained on the mobile side
14:25 – Secure money and secure advisory roles from people who believe in your business
15:14 – Really challenging to find the right people — Using your referrals and partner recommendations is a great way to facilitate this
17:12 – Take a casual approach to courting talent and investors
18:14 – A great internal recruiting team does intensive outreach and negates the need for using outside recruiting agencies
19:53 – What’s the one big struggle you faced while growing Button? – Initially Button tried to sell the concept of coalition loyalty. But they found that retention via loyalty was not a top priority for companies in hyper-growth mode. They faced a difficult time till 2014 Q3.
21:40 – Uber opened up their API which enabled adding an Uber button to other websites. Eventually other companies opened up their API’s and the need arose to have a company like Button handle this business function in a dedicated manner
23:10 – What’s one new tool that you’ve added in the last year that’s added a lot of value to you? – Slack: Enables Mike to be in constant contact with teammates, peers and customers
24:54 – What’s one must-read book you recommend to everyone?
24:57 – The PayPal Wars: Battles with eBay, the Media, the Mafia, and the Rest of Planet Earth – “Reading about how incredible people in technology like Peter Thiel, Elon Musk, Keith Rabois, Reid Hoffman and so many others were working together and battling this behemoth eBay and creating a trust based new payment economy”
25:47 – Chaos Monkeys: Obscene Fortune and Random Failure in Silicon Valley – “About growing your business in Silicon Valley over the five years”
25:58 – Shoe Dog: A Memoir by the Creator of Nike – “My favorite recent business book and a must read for everyone”
26:24 – Connect with Mike on Twitter
27:44 – Check out Growth Everywhere for a ton of additional resources
27:50 – Subscribe to our podcast and get access to value packed content
3 Key Points:
Secure money and secure advisory roles from people who believe in your business.
It is really challenging to find the right people — Using your referrals and partner recommendations is a great way to facilitate this.
You will have to answer 3 questions when you are selling: Why should I do this, why should I do this with you, and why should I do this now?
Let’s talk about micro-retargeting. You already know about retargeting: when you visit a website, you’re going to get ads that follow you around the ‘net.
What Is Retargeting?
Let’s say you visit Zappos briefly and then everywhere you go on the web, you’re faced with random ads. They don’t really know what your intention is because you’ve only visited a homepage, right? They send you generic ads. Which you’re probably not as likely to convert on.
But let’s say you visit Zappos, go to the men’s shoe section, pick out the Nike Metcon 3 and then you add it to your cart. Guess what? You’ve shown a lot more intention, you’ve spent a lot more time on it, and you’re a lot more deliberate. You’re going to be served ads that are very different from the generic ones.
Let’s say these big companies have a million people that visit their site per day. Only a very small number are going to take a specific action and therefore have that kind of message tailored towards them. But the more personalized that experience is, the higher the conversion rates will be.
Micro-retargeting is retargeting people based on the section of your site that they visited, how long they stayed, and things like that. It’s behavioral, but it’s also temporal. You can do it with Facebook. You can target people based on the number of pages they visited or how long they stayed (e.g., top 5% of your traffic).
For Single Grain, anytime someone visits our services pages three times or more, I’m going to re-target them and I’m going to try to get them to come over to our site, go to our case studies page and then fill out a free consultation form.
Yesterday we spent five dollars and got two free consultations. Each free consultation was at about $2.50. Now for us when it comes to free consultations, we’re willing to pay $317 for a free consultation. So far, our CPA is $319.50. But if landing a client gives us $10,000–$100,000 in return, that’s well worth the cost.
Now what I’m missing is the ability to re-target people who have watched, let’s say, 10 seconds of these live videos. I’m doing these live videos, but I’m going to make audiences off of them as well, and it’s really cheap to make these audiences. For Facebook Lives on Sundays, we’re paying about one cent per view for three-second views. For 10-second views we’re paying three cents per views. These views are on autoplay and will stop some people in their tracks. I haven’t even added captions to them (I probably should!).
So I re-target these people and see what happens with them. These are people who have engaged with me, with my brand. A lot of this stuff is hard to measure (ROI-wise), but when I look at my YouTube comments and see, “Thank you so much for your help. I’m really grateful for everything,” I know that these videos are actually working.
Be Patient—Don’t Monetize Immediately
One of my other podcasts, Marketing School, is going to reach 589,000 downloads this month, but we’re not even thinking about how to monetize right now. We just want to build up the brand. We want to get it to a million or 1.5 million downloads, because we know that as long as we continue to create and spread goodwill, good things are going to happen for us.
Same thing with Growth Everywhere. I’ve been doing this for 3-5 years. It’s just goodwill. I didn’t really start to do anything with it monetization-wise until two years in. Being patient, and learning to delay your gratification, is key to building up these big brands. It never happens overnight.
I want to talk to you about the power of webinars and how doing this can change your life.
Webinars have been great for us at Single Grain in terms of lead generation. Last year alone, whenever we did live webinars we actually generated really good leads — we’re talking two companies that had pretty hefty budgets and two other public companies. It gets your name out there and generates good will as well.
This particular webinar also led to a speaking opportunity in Brazil.
A webinar is the perfect qualification and conversion vehicle.
Why? Because a lot of webinar attendees will have read some of your content already. They know who you are. Then you’re going to give them 45 minutes to an hour of additional FREE content. They’re going to love you for that. In fact, they’re going to feel like they know you.
It’s like when I listen to podcasts. The more I listen to people, the more that I feel like I trust them, and the more that I feel like I understand their personality. Sometimes I haven’t met a podcaster in person and then when I meet them at a conference for the first time it actually feels like I’ve known them for a long time.
The purpose of a webinar is for you to keep providing tactical and strategic advice for the attendees. That’s why they’re giving you an hour of their time, and you have to respect that. By all means share personal success or failure stories, but always include actionable tips and tricks as well. Keep it engaging, highly informational, really valuable, and then close with some selling and then a short Q&A.
For example, we did live webinars every single week for 12 weeks (with plans to continue doing them). Once we had a good feeling about the webinar, let’s say after three or four times, our plan was to convert them into more Evergreen webinars.
It’s easy to execute and it integrates well with our e-mail list and Facebook ads. Once the webinar is working out well, we’ll use a tool like EverWebinar and basically mimic a live webinar sequence where you can register first.
This gives attendees a sense of urgency. This is incredibly important—if people think that they can get it at any time on demand, your attendance rate is going to drop significantly.
Typically, conversion rates can be anywhere from 5–10% depending on how much value you offer and how persuasive and likable you are.
Sometimes it might be less, if you’re selling a really high-ticket offer. You’ve got to know your numbers like the back of your hand when you’re doing these webinars. Don’t just go into them blindly.
I also highly recommend picking up the book DotComSecrets. Russell says if he had to make money for his family last minute, he would do a webinar.
Think about it. As you read this blog post, I’m building goodwill with you. I’m “talking” (writing) to you, but you’ll be done reading this in a couple minutes. But when I teach you for 45 minutes to an hour, it’s like I’m speaking to you at a conference. You start to trust me more (or you might hate me).
Either way, webinars are the perfect qualifying tool for marketers.
Hey everyone, in today’s episode I share the mic with Yuri Elkaim, a nutrition, fitness, and fat loss expert, as well as a New York Times bestselling author who makes fit and healthy simple again with clear, science-backed advice.
In this interview we talk about how Yuri took his business from $6K to multiple 7 figures in revenue,the secret to getting 50% opt-in rates for some of his content (which is unheard of in the blogging world!), and how spending more time building customer relationships drives conversions way up.
18:18 – Yuri has a marketing person that takes care of their Facebook ads
19:23 – It’s not about how little you spend to acquire leads, it’s about how much you are able to spend
19:56 – Yuri uses Google Docs for his business
20:30 – Trello is used for their VAs
20:41 – Their funnels are either with LeadPages, ClickFunnels, or custom built on WordPress
20:54 – Google Analytics is used for split testing
21:13 – What’s one big struggle you faced while growing your business? “The biggest struggle was not knowing what to do initially and taking advice from everybody”
22:06 – Yuri shares the whole notion of “Ready, Fire, Aim”
Hey everybody, today we have Irv Shapiro, CEO of DialogTech which helps companies drive sales through calls.
In today’s interview we’ll be talking about how DialogTech raised over $60 million in funding and has well over 5,000 customers, why the leads with the highest conversion rates are from phone calls, and how they acquired their first 100 customers and built highly qualified links at the same time by using PR services.
[5:34] – The pricing is similar to an old phone bill, flat fee, then additional fees, and they also have annual and monthly contracts
[6:13] – $60 million invested, 152 employees, 5,000 customers – every month they provide analytics on 40-50 million minutes of phone calls – they target mid-west style of growth
[6:59] – Being cash responsible, they are in a position that when the market tips, they will have the resources to double or triple down on growth
[8:44] – They would rather be a tortoise and grow responsibly than grow fast and burn out
[9:05] – iPhone full-function web browser opened up new way for brands to engage – a slow but steady progression with ads moving from desktop to mobile – tipping point, now more is spent on mobile
[10:30] – When a consumer visits your site from a mobile phone and taps on a telephone number, they fall into a black hole because no tool (like Marketo, DoubleClick, HubSpot and Google Universal) knows about the phone call—except Google AdWords call extensions. Most businesses aren’t tracking these calls.
[11:49] – Considered purchases need to be tracked the same way that web conversions are – exclude call tracking and you’ll miss half your conversions
[15:00] – Phone calls communicate a sense of urgency
[15:17] Phone numbers front and center – route the number to the right person to take the call – optimized ad spend around ads that drive calls – increase calls and conversions
[16:18] – First 100 customers – primary advertising public relations and press releases – SEO and PPC to juice SEO – PRWeb
[17:43] – Hundreds of dollars spent each month on beginning PR – today marketing team and full-time PR person
[18:11] – Building enterprise presence – 1 to 1 marketing techniques – prospect or personality based – list similar to current customers – find like companies – marketer puts together personalized content relevant to the target
[19:35] – 411 technique – share 4 pieces of content before ask soft ask download a white paper or attend webinar, hard ask – talk to sales person
[21:44] – Universal struggle is hiring great people – accept as business grows you will hire people smarter than you – blueprint for the characteristics of hires consistency – smarter than average – emotional intelligence and street smarts – willing to work hard – ambitious – hire people that are referrals
Hey everyone, today our guest is Tim Matthews, the Head of Marketing at Incapsula, which is a cloud-based application delivery platform that accelerates and secures websites of any kind. He is also the author of The Professional Marketer and The SaaS Marketing Handbook.
Today we’ll be talking about how Incapsula doubles their business every year, why their number one customer acquisition method is SEO and quality content, how changing two words resulted in a 280% increase in conversions, and how to get good conversion rates from influencer reviews about your product.
[4:21] – They also charge per site and have bandwidth tiers
[4:42] – They sell to everybody, but serving different buyers poses problems. They have freemium and self service plans, then they have a sales team for the enterprise plans.
[5:42] – Number one customer acquisition is SEO and quality content, people want to know how to prevent attacks and make their sites faster. They also spend money on CRO – conversion rate optimization – they use optimizely
[7:02] – Start Free Trial call to action was changed to Get Quote and it was more effective for enterprise customers. Changing these two words resulted in a 280% increase. You are never done with testing results.
[7:58] – 50,000 uniques will help with good quality test results, or just test longer, constantly track longer
[8:34] – Weekly meetings on tests and make calls and refine what does and doesn’t work, and actually code it into the site
[9:05] – They also have metrics and goals, a cadence and a team to manage CRO and you have to watch the results
[9:32] – Quality content – something that the buyer would actually want to read, talk to buyers and ask them what type of content they would like to read
[11:07] – They need content constantly so they need a content manager – plus the best writers possible
[13:29] – You get what you pay for in content marketing and you need an editor to make the story better – you need to have a sense of the reader and customer – what do these people read and want to read – content marketing manager can’t write all of the content
[15:27] – Managing Editor – $75,000 and $150,000 a year. Give them a raise and they will come inhouse
[16:08] – Affiliate program – Influencers to write about and recommend your product, good conversion rates from reviews and writing about the product – pay site to publish in a way that converts
[19:55] – Get out of your comfort zone more often, challenge yourself on a more regular basis, try a new tactic even if is risky, try something new
Something I don’t see talked about very often is how much a company should pay per lead. If you are a well-funded startup, you can afford to lose some money per acquisition as you figure out the best model that works for you, but if you’re bootstrapped, you don’t have that luxury.
If you’re in the latter category, this post is for you.
For Lead Generation
To start, let’s assume that you sell custom-designed logos online with a website that gets 10,000 visitors a month.
For the sake of simplicity, let’s say your customer lifetime value is $1,000.
Then let’s say you convert 1% of your 10,000 visitors into e-mail subscribers per month. That’s 100 e-mail leads.
Then let’s say of those 100 e-mail leads, 15% are qualified. So 15 qualified leads.
Of the 15 qualified leads, maybe you’ll close 20% of them. That means you’ll close 3 per month.
Here’s how much you can pay per e-mail subscriber:
$1,000 x 1% x 15% x 20% = $.30
Each of your e-mails is worth $.30. Ideally you would give yourself some margin and aim to pay $.05 to $.10 per e-mail lead.
David Skok recommends keeping customer acquisition cost (CAC) at least 3x less than customer lifetime value (CLTV):
Not too sure about your numbers? Add some more margin by making your CAC 6x to account for additional variables.
This is why it’s important to continue to look at your funnel metrics the whole way and figure out what you can optimize because every percentage point matters.
Now you’re probably wondering, how in the world can I get e-mail leads for $.05 to $.10? Great question.
While it’s very tough to get leads in that range in today’s world, it’s still possible to get close by running contests or even renting e-mail lists. And yes, renting e-mail lists still works (depending on the niche that you’re in).
Like anything else in marketing, your offer has to be compelling and your targeting has to be precise.
But that’s the hard way.
The easier way would be to optimize what you currently already have instead of trying to bang your head against the wall on something foreign. Most startups suck at optimizing what is already working and instead try to add additional custom acquisition channels without first 10x/100xing what they have.
Let’s organize the funnel metrics again (based on what we described above):
CLTV (customer lifetime value) = $1,000
10,000 visitors a month
1% e-mail conversion rate = 100 e-mail leads per month
15% qualified leads = 15 qualified leads per month
20% close rate = 3 closed deals per month (10,000 x 1% x 15% x 20%)
Worth of an e-mail lead = $1,000 x 1% x 15% x 20% = $.30
Target e-mail CPA/CAC (cost per acquisition/customer acquisition cost) = $.05 to $.10
First, we’ll see if we can do some conversion rate optimization on the site and in our e-mail sequence:
CLTV = $1,000
10,000 visitors a month
3% e-mail conversion rate = 300 e-mail leads per month
20% qualified leads = 60 qualified leads per month
20% close rate = 12 closed deals per month (10,000 x 3% x 20% x 20%)
Worth of an e-mail lead = $1,000 x 3% x 20% x 20% = $1.20
Target e-mail CPA/CAC (cost per acquisition/customer acquisition cost) = $.20 to $.40
Just by making a few quick changes in our funnel, we’ve increased our worth of an e-mail by 4x and as a result, we can now pay 4x more per e-mail. That’s A LOT more manageable.
But ‘manageable’ isn’t good enough. We want more.
Price is something to generally revisit because you’re constantly improving your product/service. It makes sense to think about increasing your pricing every quarter due to increased demand, overhead, and other variables.
Let’s continue to build off our previous example of conversion rate optimization success. This time, we’ll be doubling our prices because business is great and we feel that we were undercharging in the past:
CLTV = $2,000
10,000 visitors a month
3% e-mail conversion rate = 300 e-mail leads per month
20% qualified leads = 60 qualified leads per month
20% close rate = 12 closed deals per month(10,000 x 3% x 20% x 20%)
Worth of an e-mail lead = $2,000x 3% x 20% x 20% = $2.40
Target e-mail CPA/CAC (cost per acquisition/customer acquisition cost) = $.40 to $.80
We have even more wiggle room now that we have adjusted CLTV. If we can just make other minor tweaks to get our conversion rates higher and perhaps bump the price up a little more, we’ll be able to get more aggressive with our advertising initiatives.
Here are 15 things you can do to increase your numbers in your funnel:
Increase the price – As discussed above, increasing the price is naturally going to provide more room in terms of customer acquisition costs. Check out our podcast interview (with show notes!) with the CEO of Price Intelligently on how to think about increasing prices.
Increase conversion rates – Use a tool like Google Experiments, Optimizely or Visual Website Optimizer to increase conversion rates across your funnel. Here are a few things you can do:
Add content upgrades to each blog post –Content upgrades are downloadable bonuses for readers. If someone is reading a great post on SEO, an example would be including a downloadable SEO checklist within the post. To access the checklist, the reader would provide their e-mail address. For us, we’ve sometimes seen our conversion rates jump from 2% to 20% on a post (10x increase!). The more relevant a content upgrade is to the content that someone is reading, the higher the conversion rate. Here’s an example of a content upgrade:
Add testimonials – Voices.com reported a 400% boost in conversion rate after doing this. HubSpot curated some strong examples of testimonial pages here.
Add live chat – Abt Electronics reported that adding live chat added 20% in sales. You can try Zoipm or Olark.
Use a single page checkout – The Vancouver 2010 Olympic store increased its conversion rates by an impressive 21.8% just by switching from a multi-step checkout to a single-page checkout.
Add a pop-up – Yes, pop-ups still convert really well today. Tough to argue with the numbers:
SEO/content marketing
Don’t just create content, create resource guides – Qualaroo does a good job of creating a guide on ‘What is Conversion Rate Optimization’. If you search Google for ‘conversion rate optimization’, you’ll find that they are #1. The page is a comprehensive resource complete with 12 chapters and a downloadable PDF. Google wants to serve the best results and those that deliver get rewarded.
Create 10x content – Did you know that the average content length of the top 3 results in Google is around 2,000 words? Brian Dean from Backlinko did a study on over 1 million SEO results and found that to be the case. This means that content marketing is now table stakes. If you want to win at the long game with content marketing, it’s time to focus on creating in-depth content that provides utility. But it can’t just be fluffy longform content; it has to add VALUE. For inspiration, here are 21 examples of 10x content marketing.
Bonus: Neil Patel has a great guide called the ‘Definitive Guide to Conversion Rate Optimization’ that you can get here.
Tools – You can use a tool like Hello Bar or SumoMe to collect more e-mails.
Paid advertising – When it comes to paid advertising, it’s all about putting the right offer in front of the right target audience. Figuring out the targeting is up to you, but following are some ideas on where you can drive traffic to. From there, you can see what converts best and continue to double down on that.
Drive traffic directly to content – If you’ve invested a good amount of your time producing content, it’s worth your while to promote it. In fact, Derek Halpern says 80% of your time should be spent on promoting content. If your content is compelling and has a content upgrade, you’ll naturally get the engagement you want (social shares, e-mail subscribers, etc.). Icing on the cake is the ability to retarget these individuals after they’ve visited your site. Here are some platforms that might work for content promotion:
Facebook Ads
Gmail Ads
Outbrain/Taboola
Twitter
LinkedIn
Webinars – Driving traffic to webinars is a great way to not only get leads, but to convert them as well. If someone has invested one hour of their time with you, they’ve started to build a relationship. And if you’ve given them one hour of knowledge, it’s much easier to ask for the sale. Once you’ve perfected your webinar, you can start to run automated webinars.
Lead magnets – If you’ve invested in creating case studies, e-books or white papers, you can use a tool like LeadPages to create landing pages so that people can download the resource after entering in their e-mail. For us, this has converted as high as 50%.
Copywriting – Take a look at all the e-mail copy in your autoresponder sequence. Does it seem compelling to you? Does it make you want to convert? If the answer is not a resounding ‘hell yeah!’, then you have work to do. Chances are that you’re not a very good copywriter and that’s fine because you have better things to do. But it’s still your responsibility to find someone who can create copy that converts. It’d also be helpful for you to understand how copywriting can increase your conversion rates. Take a look at this epic post by Joanna Wiebe on copywriting formulas for some inspiration.
Social Media: Create better images – Better images drive higher clickthrough rates (CTR) and will ultimately lead to increased referral traffic. This is low-hanging fruit that just requires a simple process to nail down.
Add a customer success team – If you want to increase retention rates, a customer success team will help ensure that the customer stays happy. Remember, a happy customer sticks around for longer which means higher CLTV!
It’s VERY important to know your conversion numbers at each step of the funnel. When you have these numbers buttoned up, all you need to do is tweak and test each step of the funnel until you have a well-oiled machine. Using an Excel Spreadsheet or Google Spreadsheet will suffice for tracking, but be sure to track your numbers on a daily basis.
From there, it all becomes a simple game of driving the numbers to a satisfactory level at each stage of the funnel and then pouring gasoline onto the fire.
What are some smart ways you know of to increase numbers in your funnel? Let us know in the comments below!
What if I said you could still find targeted clicks for under $0.15 in AdWords today?
Clicks that converted at a low cost per acquisition?
With click-through rates up to 20%?
Sounds pretty unbelievable right? Take a look at this:
This is Google’s Gmail Sponsored Promotions. They brought it back recently and our team has been testing it out with AWESOME results.
Here’s an example of what it looks like inside of Gmail:
As you can see in the table above, the CPA numbers we’re getting are as low as $6.52! Our target cost per acquisition (CPA) is around $80, so that’s up to a 87.74% decrease in CPA!
Some of you are probably thinking, “Well, the numbers look good but the conversion volume and conversion rates seem low.”
Let’s talk about conversion rates first:
The image above shows conversion rates (CVR) of 0.25% and 1.27%—not super sexy numbers but it’s important to know that display ads don’t typically convert as well as targeted ads. You’re in a good spot as long as you have low cost per click (CPC) and high click volume.
Now let’s talk about conversion volume:
‘Display Impression Share’ means the number of impressions you’ve received out of the total estimated number of impressions you are eligible to receive. For these targets, it looks like there’s still room to grow. The best thing about Gmail promoted ads? There’s an abundance of targeting options to help scale your campaign.
In this post, you’re going to learn how to set up Gmail Sponsored Promotions for long-term success.
1. How To Create A Gmail Promoted Ad
First, log into your AdWords account and go into any Campaign that you have. Then select the ‘Ads’ tab, click on ‘+Ad,’ and select ‘Ad Gallery’:
After that, select ‘Gmail Ads’:
From there, you have four different ad options to choose from. For the sake of simplicity, let’s go with the ‘Gmail single promotion template’:
To show you just how easy it is, here’s an example of an ad I just created:
Expanded form:
2. How To Create the Ad
There are three sections to fill out to get rolling—but don’t worry, it’s easy!
In the first section, you’ll fill out the following:
Ad name – What you want to call your ad. This is for internal use only. An example would be ‘Single Grain Enterprise Marketing Ad 1/1/2018′.
Display URL – The URL that will be shown to the viewer (not necessarily the final URL).
Landing Page – The final URL that will be shown to the viewer. As a reminder, don’t forget to add UTM tags for tracking purposes here.
Here’s what it looks like:
In the second section, you’ll fill out the following:
Logo – This is the logo viewers will see in the collapsed (smaller) ad. The recommended size is a 144px x 144px square image. Don’t have a logo? You can use Canva or Pablo to make a nice image quickly.
Advertiser – The name of your company (or you if you’re advertising your own brand).
Subject – This is your headline. Make sure you write a magnetic headline to get people to click!
Description – A short description of your offer.
Here’s what it looks like:
In the third section, you’ll fill out the following:
Image – A larger image to be used in your expanded (larger) ad. Upload a 300px x (200-500px) file.
Headline – Same as above – make sure you write a magnetic headline!
Content – Your enticing offer.
Call-to-action button – Your final opportunity to get people to click on your ad. Make it count. If you need ideas, here are some great CTA examples from HubSpot.
Call-to-action button URL – The final URL that the user will land on.
Header (optional) – Add a header image that spans across your ad (630px x 50-200px).
When you’re satisfied, click on the ‘Select an ad group’ button right next to the ‘Save’ button at the top to pick the ad group in which you want the ad to be placed.
3. Important Settings
Here are the initial settings I like to go with when starting a Gmail advertising campaign. Keep in mind that your mileage will vary.
First, click on ‘Settings > All Settings’.
The key settings:
Type – This is the type of campaign you have running. I go with ‘Display Network only – Drive action’ because I want the campaign to be focused and I care about driving specific results.
Delivery method (advanced) – This is a section that you’ll need to click on to expand. When I’m first starting out, I like going with ‘Accelerated’ so I can collect as much data as quickly as possible. If your budget is limited, go with ‘Standard’.
Frequency capping – Generally I like to limit the amount of times I show my ads to a viewer, but in this case I have no cap because my engagement has held the same.
Ad rotation – I start with ‘Rotate evenly: Show ads more evenly for at least 90 days, then optimize’ so I that I can give one of my two competing ads a real chance to stand out against the other.
4. How To Break Up Your Ad Groups
One of the most effective ways to maximize your AdWords campaign is to break your ad groups up into single keyword ad groups. What does that mean exactly? Unbounce wrote a great guide on ‘how to do AdWords right’ that I highly recommend checking out before proceeding further.
In a nutshell, each of your ad groups will have only ONE target to go after.
For example, if you were Adidas and wanted to go after people opening up e-mails from Nike, you would target Nike.com in one ad group and customize the ad towards Nike.com e-mail viewers.
To set up targeting, click on ‘Display Network’ and go to ‘Display Keywords’:
Then for each ad group, enter in one website you’d like to target. It could be a competitor, an organization, a blog or whatever your imagination comes up with. For example, if I wanted to run Adidas ads, here are a few different categories I could go after:
Direct competitors – Nike, Puma, Sketchers, Under Armour
Organizations – Yoga groups, hiking groups, running groups
Popular magazines/websites – competitor.com, menshealth.com
Indirect competitors – Lululemon, Gaiam
5. How To Find Targeting Ideas
Google Display Planner – This is a free tool that you can use to find placement ideas for popular websites, apps, videos, keywords, and more. Simply log into your AdWords account and click on ‘Tools > Display Planner’ and you’ll have access.
In the example below, I typed in www.nike.com as my landing page and clicked on the ‘Placements’ tab to find ideas for popular sites that I’ve never even heard of:
Jump in there and play around, and you’re sure to find a gold nugget or two!
Facebook Audience Insights – This is another free tool that you can find in your Facebook account. You can parlay the data that you got from Google Display Planner to glean more insight. Chances are if the properties are popular on both Google and Facebook, it’s golden.
Go to your Facebook advertising account and click on ‘Tools > Audience Insights’.
In the following image, I take a look at people who are interested in Copyblogger, Moz, and Unbounce. In particular, I’m interested in finding pages that are relevant to those three interests. I can then place them into separate Gmail Ad Groups.
Here’s how to get started with Audience Insights:
Similar Web – Similar Web displays such insights as audience breakdown, traffic trends and engagement, related mobile apps and similar sites. For the sake of this post, we’re interested more in similar sites and mobile apps. All you need to do is go to Similar Web and type in the site you’d like to analyze:
Take a look at:
Similar Sites
Similar Mobile Apps
The entire category that you’re looking at
The aforementioned three free methods should be more than enough to get you started.
Bonus: Using Gmail Ads for Content Promotion
More content marketers have been using Facebook advertising to supercharge their content marketing efforts.
Gmail ads are another way to add on to your content marketing efforts. Your mileage may vary, but at $0.10 a click, it’s definitely worth testing if you’re already putting significant effort into content marketing.
If you’re doing content marketing and haven’t been using paid advertising to help amplify your efforts, you’re missing out. For an intro on this, Digital Marketer has a great write-up here.
Conclusion
Now’s the time to give Gmail Ads a shot if you haven’t tried it yet. It might just be the next great growth channel for your business!
Have you had any success with Gmail Ads? Let us know in the comments below!
