The Poor Man's Marketing Stack: How to Hack Marketing Automation

There are over 2,000 marketing technology companies today.

Each one doing something a bit different, filling some unique yet critical need.

That means on a daily basis, marketers might choose from 100 different software programs to fulfill relatively basic tasks.

That inspired somebody, somewhere, to misappropriate the word 'stack' from the development world to describe how a particular company might be aligning all their pieces of a marketing and sales pie.

The result often becomes a head-bangingly frustrating process where you're piecing together several to deliver a single campaign.

Sure, you could opt for an all-in-one solution like HubSpot. But it's also F&*#@*G expensive.

What if you don't have that kind of loot?

Here's how you can use even the most basic, inexpensive or free pieces of software to replicate sophisticated marketing automation and business process hacks.

How to Eliminate Bottlenecks with App-Connecting Tools

Marketing automation, when implemented properly, has the power to increase leads by 451% and boost sales by 34%.

But… a shockingly high 85% of B2B marketers admit to not using it correctly.

The secret 'inbound marketing lie' that no-one wants to admit is how F-ing time consuming this stuff is.

Not to mention, if you don't have the right tool setup, it's nearly impossible to pull off.

HubSpot is amazing. I'm a super happy partner and advocate. It makes marketing automation relatively easy to implement at scale. But most can't (or won't) fork over the ~$10k a year. That's completely understandable.

When I started consulting, there was no way my clients or I could afford it either. (Although there is a compelling argument for making your money back relatively quickly if you're using any all-in-one, database driven tool properly.)

That led to an endless search for tools that played well natively. Existing integrations between key pieces of software, like hooking up Gravity Forms with MailChimp, can make your life 10X easier.

But it's difficult to construct an entire marketing funnel with only tools with native integrations. And it's not realistic, as other departments or teams within your organization will probably have their own tools that need to work seamlessly with yours.

Fortunately, tools like Zapier and IFTTT (If This Then That) began popping up to help solve this problem.

They're pretty basic once you get the hang of it. Simply connect two applications, create a 'trigger' (the thing that starts this process in motion) and an 'action' (what happens when the trigger is, well, triggered).

For example, Gravity Forms (an excellent WordPress plugin) can then automatically send new form submissions to your favorite CRM like Contactually – even though there's not native integration between these two applications.

Best of all, with a little ingenuity, you can use them to re-create a marketing stack and begin automating your marketing.

We're going to walk through examples in a minute, but first the theory.

Get Started by Outlining Your Marketing Funnel Steps

In an ideal world, strangers find out who you are and develop interest and trust in your brand before agreeing to become a customer.

Digital marketing 101 talks about creating a seamless customer experience by creating tactics that align with each stage of the buyer's journey:

• Awareness: A stranger becomes aware of some problem in their life.


• Information: They begin looking for ways to help solve said problem.


• Evaluation: Recognizing a need, they begin actively searching for a solution between different alternatives.


• Decision: They make the conscious decision to move forward with the alternative that best meets their criteria.

Sophisticated tools can help you hit all of these points without ever switching around. But that's gonna be tough with inexpensive software that typically specializes in one small area or another.

So instead, the goal is to recreate what these other platforms can do, moving people logically from one step to the next when they're ready. Ideally, in the most automated and simplistic fashion possible.

The goal is to recreate what HubSpot and other sophisticated (read: expensive) marketing automation software does, for a fraction of the price.

Sounds nice in theory, right?

But practically, how would that look?

• Awareness: A new lead converts on a landing page, getting added to your email marketing software.


• Information: As the lead begins searching for more information on your site and interacting with other resources, they should be added and removed from other automated marketing sequences to continue nurturing.


• Evaluation: Once the lead begins getting serious about considering you as a solution, they need to be updated in your CRM system as such and qualified (if appropriate).


• Purchase: If they decide to move forward with you, things need to be paid, they need to become a customer or client, and their project or account needs to be set-up immediately.

The important thing to note here isn't the tools themselves, but your process or workflow. Once that's defined, you can figure out which tools might be best to slot in each category. For example, even the free Google Contacts might be a good CRM choice (and it integrates easily with Zapier).

Enough small talk though.

Let's take a look at each stage of this funnel to see how you can use Zapier to recreate steps that typically only expensive marketing automation platforms deliver.

Awareness: Landing Page to Email Marketing

Rule #1 of Permission Marketing (which pre-dated Inbound Marketing by, oh, like a decade) is to get somebody to give you their info in exchange for something of value, allowing you to continue following up with that person over time.

This can be old school, like an email address. Or new school, like their Snapchat… um, err… I have no idea what these kids call it.

In any event, the process is the same.

We already spoke about Gravity Forms, which can be used to power basic eBook forms to collect submissions.

But how about something a little more complex, like a webinar?

Zapier integrates easily with GoToWebinar, allowing you to capture new registrations (and even new attendees).

This is perfect if you'd like to add these new registrations to an email list.

Even better, is if you create an automated workflow in for a specific email list for the upcoming webinar. That way, you can continually send out new messages to the contact to make sure that they attend the event (thereby boosting your Attendance Rate).

MailChimp is perfect for this. The pricing is very affordable, especially considering the beautiful templates, ease-of-use, and pretty decent automation options. Plus, that damn Chimp is so cute.

Simply select the upcoming webinar, add the new registration to a specific list in MailChimp, and you're done.

Easy peasy.

But… what happens if people DO (or DON'T) show up? What happens if they DO (or DON'T) take you up on that customary end-of-webinar call-to-action?

You gotta update their status.

Information: Email Marketing Updates

Let's say that you're getting clever now, and that you'd like to create two different sets of messages based on if people did or didn't attend your webinar.

Obviously, getting this right is important because if somebody receives the wrong email it could damage your credibility.

There are a few ways to do this, but the most straightforward is to simply create two additional lists in your email marketing service – one for those who do show up, and one for those who don't.

THEN, you'll want to unsubscribe people from the initial list (like the original webinar registration one) and add them to one of the new lists you created based on their actions.

Most basic email marketing services don't have this feature already. However you can create a simple Zap to take care of it for you.

Another example where this comes in handy is if you offer a free trial or demo.

In that case, you don't want a new lead (or even customer) to continue receiving promotional messages. Fortunately this same simple little hack, creating different lists for different segments of people, being unsubscribed automatically when they join a new list, can take care of a lot of the headache.

Evaluation: New Lead to CRM to Qualify (or Disqualify)

So far you've been nurturing this new lead with a few different campaigns or tactics. Everything's gone well so far and they're ready to get serious.

For product or software companies this is straightforward and easy: they download the discount or join the free trial and either purchase (or not).

However it's a little more complicated for service companies.

How do you know if the lead is any good? You can't just agree to speak with everyone nutjob who fills out your form (and there will be plenty, believe me).

You can start by filtering your results, setting up qualifying questions in your forms to make sure that you're tailoring your follow-up process accordingly.

For example, you can set-up different zaps between products based on how people answer a specific question.

Now you can begin segmenting the people who ARE interested in your services, with the tire kickers who are primarily interested in wasting your time.

But you still have no idea if they're even a good lead or not.

To be on the safe side, let's automatically send an email to someone in your company to qualify each new prospect who's interested in your services.

Simple! Just use Gmail based on the form filtered submission you just set-up. You can even pre-craft the message, pulling in form data, along with helpful links for the person who's helping you to know exactly how you want them to be qualified (delegation FTW!).

You can send this email to an assistant, employee, or whomever, and at the same time create a new project management task to make sure they'll see it immediately as it comes in (along with a due date to make sure each lead is followed up with ASAP).

With a few simple steps and some foresight, you've just set-up and delegated the first few steps of your sales process.

Congrats!

But you're still not quite done yet. What happens when those people decide to pay you money?

Decision: New Client to Point of Sale and Project Management

Again, product or software transactions are insanely straightforward.

When someone wants to become a customer, they whip out a credit card and it takes a few seconds. Then you can update your email or contact lists accordingly with the previous tips.

However what if this is a larger transaction?

First, you can automatically create a new Freshbooks invoice when someone fills out an appropriate form. You can even have someone fill this out internally while on the phone with a new client-in-waiting.

Freshbooks already integrates with both Stripe and PayPal (along with a few others), so you can even take this a step further by automating all of the tasks related to onboarding new clients too.

For example, let's create a new Dropbox folder for each client when a successful first payment is made.

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Pretty helpful. But let's keep going.

Let's also create a new TEMPLATED project in your favorite project management tool (like Asana in this case).

Just like we did earlier with the email message to qualify a new lead, you can select a pre-built template for the new client to get everything set-up in seconds (rather than hours).

Best of all, there's no shortage of tips or tricks here. If you take notes during your Kick-Off Call with Evernote, a task can immediately be created in your PM tool to make sure these notes are added to the client's project accordingly.

A Time-Saving Caveat

Tools like Zapier or IFTTT open up a brand new world of possibilities.

It's super interesting and you can geek out on this stuff for HOURS if you're not careful.

Just think about all of the possibilities you can accomplish if even the most basic software options like Gravity Forms and MailChimp can do this stuff.

But don't start with the tools.

Instead, start with the process. What exactly are you trying to accomplish? How should people move seamlessly through your own marketing funnel?

Begin by setting up the basic stuff and testing as you go. Once you've got the process down, it's easy to dive into the details and begin customizing each little aspect.

For example, just start by automating how each new lead is followed up with. Then you can get clever with implementing different marketing campaigns that funnel down to this step.

Not only with this approach save you tons of time on the front-end, but you'll drastically increase your odds of this system delivering better results too.

About the Author: Brad Smith is a founding partner at Codeless Interactive, a digital agency specializing in creating personalized customer experiences. Brad's blog also features more marketing thoughts, opinions and the occasional insight.

5 Tips on How to Build a Successful PPC Marketing Consulting Business

When thinking about starting your own business there are many things that you need to consider and choosing online tools are often one of the last things to consider. However, I have learned over the years that software that contains the latest “bells and whistles” will not make you a better marketer. In fact, in many instances, success is based on fundamental principles of Strategy, Execution, Analysis, Storytelling and most importantly Expectations. In this post, I will talk about some of the important tools, methodologies and overall client management needed to grow a successful consulting business.

 

#1 Harness Past Client Experiences

Leveraging past client experiences is a huge advantage when starting your own company. This is especially true during the on-boarding process where the client would be inclined to feel more comfortable with someone who is already familiar with their particular industry. Not only would it be easier for Strategy, but also for Storytelling and ongoing Optimization.

 

#2 The Power of Referrals

One of the biggest influences in starting your own business is not a big advertising budget, but testimonials and referrals from past clients or colleagues. Prospected clients will trust “word of mouth” over any form of advertising. A good referral is like gold in your pocket. The key to this continued success however, is frankly keeping up the good work.

 

#3 Transparency is King

If there is one thing I have learned over the years, clients are often weary of hiring a new agencies/consultants because they have been burned in the past by lackluster agencies. These bad experiences range from (1) “too good to be true” expectations (2) Inaccurate Ad dollar allocation (3) Poor reporting and analysis. If you want to be successful, I would recommend the following:

• The client owns their advertising platforms (No Agency client catch-all account)


• Avoid Agency Markups. (Don't try and make extra money, it will burn you eventually)


• Be Honest about “Wins” and “Losses” (Don't hide the losers to make yourself look better)

 

#4 Build the Perfect PPC Marketing Toolbox

There are many weapons of choice in PPC Marketing, but try and stay focused not only on budget but also what you need to on-board and keep a client happy. Here are some 3rd party companies that I highly recommend in order to stay competitive and keep your clients happy.

 

• 
  

  PPC Reporting Software

  
  
  
  
  • Back in the early days, reporting on PPC Performance was like “pulling your hair out”. You spent more time trying to get the data into excel than actually working on improving the clients campaigns. My #1 choice for reporting is Acquisio. Their platform collects all the crucial data from your campaigns, then helps you quickly and easily analyze it so that you can act and react in the most effective and practical ways. Read more about the Acquisio Report Center
  
  
  
  

 

• 
  

  PPC Competitive Software

  
  
  
  
  • As one of my most important tools to acquire new clients, SpyFu has allowed me to research new industries as well as identify new strategies that the client didn't even know were possible. PPC Competitive Analysis plays a significant role in the development of not only PPC Strategies, but also:
    
    
    
    • Seasonality Trends of competitors
    
    
    • Monthly Budgets
    
    
    • Keyword Expansion
    
    
    • Emerging Competitors
    
    
    • SEO Rank improvements
    
    
    
    
  
  
  
  

 

• 
  

  Extended Online Presence

  
  
  
  
  • Yes, I know “it's a no brainer” especially in 2015, but you need to have visibility in order to “fish where the fish are” beyond just a company website. Here are some of the most obvious platforms where visibility is a must:
    
    
    
    • Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Blog/RSS, Press Releases, Business Directories, Industry Directories
    
    
    
    
  
  
  
  

 

•  Building Your Brand
  
  
  
  • One of the easiest ways to build your brand is using one of the mostly widely used and oldest form of digital communication. Email. You may have forgotten, but Emails are a strong branding tool that cannot be forgotten. However, Email Signature Services like “WiseStamp.com” can push your branding to the next level.
    
    
    
    • “Our passion is to bridge this gap by building a strong platform with a variety of Email Apps that on one hand lets users make a better use of their daily emails – adding a whole new level of functionality and interaction – and on the other hand enables publishers (social services and brands) to distribute their content and engage users in one of the biggest online markets – email.”
    
    
    
    
  
  
  
  

 

#5 Adapting to the Ever-Changing Digital Space

In the 16+ years that I have been involved in online marketing, it's amazing to visualize the evolution of how and where people are finding what they want online. From Yahoo to Google, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter…. it's a vast array of platforms that “cry out” to advertisers and we as marketers need to embrace and leverage every opportunity we can for our clients. In order for overall client success, we must never be stubborn to trying something new.

 

In Conclusion

When it comes to starting your own PPC Marketing Consulting Business, it's important to leverage your strengths, learn from past client experiences and above all else be transparent. Remember that keeping your clients happy often leads to more referrals. Consider yourself a startup and find ways to drive visibility to your brand without breaking the bank.

Which Lead Generation Tactics Get the Best Results?

When it comes to lead generation, quality matters over quantity. But by the same token, people don't like being sold to and they resent the notion that they're simply “numbers in a database somewhere”. With that in mind, Ascend2 conducted research on the most effective tactics for both lead generation and lead nurturing. What they found out may surprise you.

Which Strategies Were Most Effective?

Email marketing is still king of the hill when it comes to lead generation effectiveness

It may come as no surprise, but for sheer ease of implementation and effectiveness of results, nothing beats good, old-fashioned email marketing. Websites and landing pages are close behind, with content marketing making noticeable gains. It's also worth noting that the survey shows email marketing as one of the easiest tactics to implement.

Email marketing is one of the easiest tactics to launch

But notice the relative difficulty of other measures such as content marketing. Sure, it gets decent results, but at what cost? Effectiveness and difficulty are tied. Keep in mind, email marketing has been around much longer, and therefore we've had much more time to experiment and learn how to interact with prospects. Huge strides are being made in creating new tools that make content marketing more relevant and personable, but we're still in the collective crawling stages with it.

And while we're on that topic, take a look at testing and optimization. Low effectiveness, relatively high difficulty. Surprised? Don't be. That's because testing and optimization isn't a lead generation strategy in and of itself – it's something you do with the other strategies.

So now we know that email marketing is both one of the best converting and most cost effective measures – what next? Before you load up and catapult a bunch of messages to your prospects' inboxes, remember that you need to nurture the leads you've gotten into your funnel at this point. Fortunately, Ascend2 also looked at the most promising lead nurturing strategies and what trends were getting the kinds of results their teams had hoped for.

Lead Nurturing Goals

When asked the question about the most important objectives of a lead nurturing campaign, the answers were varied. Most responded as you might imagine – to increase conversion rates or open up more sales opportunities.

Right behind these two responses was a surprising answer thrown into the mix – “lead qualification”. This idea namely revolves around ensuring that a lead is best poised to make a decision and convert. This means understanding the difference between “interest” and “intent” – many people are interested in something, but far fewer have an active intent at that point to purchase. As of yet, there are no tools which can seamlessly predict this kind of action, although there are many ways to go through the process. No matter what, it's still a heavy burden on the sales team to discern who's ready to act and who's just a well-meaning enthusiast.

So when it comes to nurturing leads, which strategy came out on top? Here again, email marketing:

But what, specifically is it about email that people respond to? As it turns out, the best effects on lead nurturing come from creating relevant content:

But notice the other points below these – points which have far fewer reported success rates:

• Campaign personalization


• Targeting by persona


• Targeting by stage in the decision-making process

These are all the very things that email marketing excels at! You can use your CRM data to segment leads based on the persona they most closely match, as well as what stage they're in when it comes to making a decision. You can personalize your campaign with all the relevant details in the world, but prospects still won't bite.

The Crossroads of Relevance and Relate-ability

So far, marketing has tried to create the appearance of relevance in campaigns. We try to do this by personalizing emails to give the prospect more of a sense of “me-to-you” communication. We try to align them with personas like theirs in an attempt to get inside their minds and find out what motivates them to purchase. We look at how close they might be to making a decision and we market accordingly.

The fact is, marketers are both swift and smart in using technology to automate much of their follow-up and nurturing tasks. The problem however is that people know it. They know you're just filling in blanks in a software program or trying to put them into neat boxes based on a few scraps of information that you've gleaned from them.

Of course that begs the question, “How are we supposed to create relevant content when people won't tell us anything about themselves?” They will – you simply have to ask. When was the last time you connected with a prospect and really meant it when you said, “how can we help you?” We're so conditioned to answer that we're “just looking” for fear of being sold to.

Creating Better Communication

Maybe the better question is, “what's challenging or frustrating you? What can I help solve for you?” If a prospect knows that you can relate to them personally, they'll be much more open to sharing with you. And while it's not currently possible to write content that appeals to everyone at every moment, it is possible to open up communication and get suggestions for new content, while acknowledging the source.

The bottom line whether you're looking to attract more leads or help grow the leads you have is shifting your approach from pure sales and marketing to problem solving. Email is a prospect's open invitation to get as close to them as you possibly can. It's something they can access anytime, anywhere. And it's the best shot you're going to have at learning about their unique issue and demonstrating precisely how your product or service solves it. Not in a high-pressure, hype-filled way, but in a friendly, open, personal way.

We have all the right tools and processes – we just need to add in the human factor.

What are your thoughts on using email marketing for lead generation and nurturing? Have you found in your own experience that other tactics work better? Do you think we should spend less time automating and more time communicating? Share your thoughts and perspectives with us in the comments below.

About the Author: Sherice Jacob helps business owners improve website design and increase conversion rates through compelling copywriting, user-friendly design and smart analytics analysis. Learn more at iElectrify.com and download your free web copy tune-up and conversion checklist today! Follow @sherice on Twitter, LinkedIn or Google+ for more articles like this!

Which Matters More: Traffic or Testing?

In recent years, there has been a shift in attention from traffic to testing.

It makes sense, it's becoming increasingly hard to win at online marketing. In many ways, it seems like the easiest way to get more out of your traffic is by improving site performance.

As exciting as the idea of conversion rate optimization is, though, the question remains:

Which affects your marketing campaign success more-traffic quality or site quality?

It's an important question to consider. For most marketers, time and resources are limited, which means you need to spend the majority of your time in the areas that produce the best results.

So, if you have to choose between refining your traffic and perfecting your site, which optimization will give you the best bang for your buck?

Running the Numbers

To evaluate how testing and traffic affect your marketing success, let's run a quick hypothetical.

Traffic

In this scenario, let's suppose that you are running paid search ads for your business. You've got a decent site/landing pages and-on average-you pay $4 per click.

Recently, you spent $20,000 on a new campaign that produced 5,000 clicks.

That's a lot of traffic, right?

Unfortunately, there's a problem. Most of that traffic isn't actually interested in what you're selling.

As it turns out, the average paid search account wastes 76% of it's budget on search terms that never convert. In other words, 76% of paid search ad spend goes towards the wrong traffic.

For you, that means you spent about $15,000 on clicks that have no chance of converting.

Ouch.

They may have accidentally clicked on your ad…or they thought you were selling something different than you actually sell. Maybe you were simply bidding on the wrong keywords.

Thanks to all those irrelevant clicks, only 1,250 of your 5,000 site visitors are actually potential customers.

So, in terms of your relevant traffic, here's what your ad spend really paid for:

Hm, that's not nearly as exciting. You might be paying $4 per click, but you're actually paying $16 per relevant click.

But still, that's nothing a little testing can't take care of, right?

Testing

Now, as a best practice sort of marketer, you ran an A/B test on all of that traffic.

Unfortunately, what you didn't realize was that you weren't testing 5,000 visitors. Remember, only 25% of your traffic is actually interested enough to potentially convert.

As a result, you thought you were testing this:

When in reality, you were testing this:

That's unfortunate, but you've still got enough traffic to run an effective test.

During your test, you get 100 conversions in your control (variant A in your A/B test) and 120 conversions from your variant (variant B).

Sweet! Clearly, your interested traffic responded much better (20% better, to be precise) to your variant.

At $5 per click, you just dropped your cost-per-conversion from $25 to $20.83. The results are statistically significant, so that's a win, right?

But wait, before you start throwing confetti, remember, you didn't pay for 1,250 relevant clicks.

You paid for 5,000 clicks.

Here's what your test population actually looks like:

All of a sudden, your results don't seem nearly as exciting:

Your test is still a success. Your conversion rate went up by 20%. However, all the “wrong” traffic you paid for has diluted your conversion rates to 4% and 4.8%.

And here's the real problem-your shiny, new, optimized cost-per-conversion is $83.33.

$83.33?

But wait a minute, when we were only looking at relevant traffic, the cost-per-conversion for your control was only $25!

That means your “optimized” cost-per-conversion is over 3x what you would have paid if you were only paying for the right traffic-even without testing.

Sure, your test helped reduce your cost-per-conversion, but you can't fix your traffic by testing your website.

What Happens When You Stop Paying for the Wrong Traffic?

So, if you can't test your way out of the wrong traffic, what if you stopped paying for those irrelevant clicks?

Well, over the years, we've used this tactic countless times for clients.

Here's what happens:

 

As you can see, as you waste less money on the wrong traffic, your cost-per-conversion drops…exponentially.

For this particular client, reducing their wasted ad spend from 91% to 68% cut their cost-per-conversion from $160 to $39.

And it happened in a matter of weeks.

Now, don't get me wrong. I'm a big believer in the power of testing. However, every successful test starts with the right traffic.

And the Winner Is?

So, traffic or testing…where should you be focusing your efforts?

To be honest, it really depends on where your campaigns are at. If your online marketing is putting the right traffic on your site, a great testing strategy can help you squeeze every last conversion out of your clicks.

However, if you're like most business, you're probably wasting most of your budget on the wrong traffic. In this case, dialing in your marketing campaigns will deliver the biggest and fastest results.

Here are 3 things to start with:

1. Define your audience. Who is the “right” audience? What are their pain points? Do your ads speak to the right pain points?


2. Review your targeting. Does your targeting match your audience profile? Are you targeting the right demographics?


3. Use your analytics. Are your clicks producing conversions and sales? Which marketing channels are producing the best results? Do your results justify your spend?

Once your marketing is primarily driving the right traffic to your site, you can then use testing to really optimize your campaign performance.

And, since you'll be testing the right traffic, your results will be truly meaningful to your business.

Conclusion

Obviously, in a perfect world, you would have the time and resources to work on both traffic and testing. In the real world, though, sometimes you have to prioritize.

Having used both testing and traffic optimization for years to improve marketing performance, I'm definitely a big fan of both. However, testing works best when you are optimizing for the right traffic.

So, if you can only pick one, it makes the most sense to tighten up your traffic…and then start testing.

Traffic or testing-which would you pick? Where do you spend your time and why?

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.

3 Landing Page Mistakes Sabotaging Your ROI

Headlines are critically important.

They're one of the easiest things to change, and yet they have one of the biggest impacts on whether your landing pages gets read (or converts).

But here's the problem.

They can't do it all on their own. And there's a few things that need to happen properly BEFORE people even get a chance to read your headline.

Otherwise, people aren't even clicking to your page in the first place.

Here are three of the most common landing page mistakes and how you can fix them.

Mistake #1. Yawn-Worthy Offers

The elements on your landing page are important. They have a direct impact on conversions.

But what's compelling people to even visit that landing page in the first place?

Another basic free trial, or boring free consultation?

Not likely.

Wordstream analyzed $3 billion in advertising spend to understand what separated the top performers – those cranking out 10%+ conversion rates – from everyone else struggling with an average 1-2% (or less).

It wasn't because they used green buttons instead of an orange ones.

Instead, it was because they all used a “massively differentiated offer”.

Their initial value proposition was so unique, so interesting, that the same old free trial or consultation couldn't keep up.

What's an example?

How about this unexpectedly awesome one from hardware store Lowes:

They provide a complete lawn care maintenance plan with a few clicks of your finger.

By entering only the most basic information, you get customized results for your lawn type and climate in order to maintain a beautiful looking year-round with minimal hassle.

This is a perfect example of a “massively differentiated offer”, because it provides extreme utility (or usefulness) to a customer by solving a pain point in an unexpected but enjoyable way.

Let's be honest: nobody cares about hardware store tools. (Except depressing old suburban white dudes.)

Lowe's understands this intimately. So instead, they sell the solution – like a yard in this case, or a hole that you'll use to hang your family's picture – and not the tools themselves.

PayScale is another one of my favorite examples because on the face of it, their business isn't very sexy (they provide salary profile database and software). Yet that doesn't hold them back from pumping out tons of interesting interactive content pieces.

One example includes a guide to compensation plans; a beautifully designed walkthrough that informs while also somehow managing to entertain with a light, casual, friendly tone.

Two very different examples so far, but they share a lot in common. Specifically, they're both:

• Useful: Alleviating customer problems with a quick and simple guide or tool.


• Timeless: The offer isn't tied to an expiration date, or trending topic that will die out.


• Mass appeal: Both offers are insanely easy to promote. In other words, people actually care.

Marketing agency IMPACT has created another excellent example with their inbound marketing ROI calculator.

People reading this blog already know all about inbound marketing. However compared to the real world (you know, like the other 95% of the world's population that doesn't work in software or marketing), MOST people have no idea what it is (or why it's beneficial).

That's why IMPACT's ROI calculator is so powerful. It instantly distills the primary benefits of all that content work down to few important numbers.

Pricing with Confidence says the key to getting the price you want, is to sell value through its quantitative benefits. That means showing a positive change in conversions, traffic and potential sales, which should outweigh the costs of your services.

A final example comes from my agency's client, United Material Handling. On the face of it, they're another 'boring', unspectacular case.

However what they did already have in store was an internal system that scanned every single piece of equipment arriving and leaving their location. That means they knew what they had on hand.

On-hand product availability is one of the primary purchasing motivations for their clients. So we wanted to give that visibility to customers, too.

Directly from their website, customers can now search a real-time inventory system to get an idea of (1) if they have their product sizing, (2) if it's in stock, and (3) what a cost estimate might look like – based on quality.

The common thread throughout all of these examples is to:

1. Identify what makes the company truly unique. What do you have that no one else does? Whether that's data, creative resources, technology, or whatever.


2. How can you package that in an interactive way that enhances the experience and usefulness. For example, using data to create beautiful infographics like PayScale does is a much better use than just expecting people to wade through endless Excel workbooks.

An interesting offer, while the first step towards giving people a reason to care, is just the beginning.

The next mistake is another that's all-too-common, yet rarely talked about.

And that's a shame, considering it's one of the primary reasons 74% of people leave your website within five seconds.

Mistake #2. Sluggish Page Loading Times

It doesn't matter how good your headline is, if people don't stick around long enough to read it.

People equate page loads with usability in most cases.

And they're right. But it affects much more than just people's opinions.

It's one of the primary reasons people leave your website, with an estimated 50% leaving if it's not up within only three seconds.

It negatively affects conversions. Meaning lost revenue.

And it negatively affects SEO. Meaning less visibility.

The first step is always acceptance.

If you're relatively tech-savvy, you can pull up Pingdom to get a complete reading of your site.

If you're less so, Google also provides an excellent, easy to use option that will give you a breakdown of speed issues holding you back (along with a few simple tips to fix each one).

Many times you'll experience poor page loading due to bad code. 'Bloated code' full of extra (or simply bad) stuff can require significantly more resources.

In any case, fire your developer.

Just kidding. In fact, it might not be their fault. Remember that awesome slider (sarcasm) you and the other department heads LOVED. They're notoriously terrible for usability, conversions, and you guessed it – speed.

Image Source

One of the most common speed issues we see deals with images.

They're too big. There's too many of them. Their file size is 3GB each even though it's only being used for a 150x150px box.

In theory, you should crop and scale each and every single photo for the exact space it's going to fit on your website. But at the very least, you should also compress them with a tool like Compressio.io or a WordPress plugin like WP Smush.

(Don't even get me started on video. Just use Wistia already.)

Last but definitely not least, get off Bluehost. Seriously. It sucks.

No matter what all those hippy self-help bloggers try to tell you. (It ain't a surprise that they also pay out $5 million to affiliates in a year.)

The best optimized website on a terrible server will still be slow. Which means saving a few bucks on cheap hosting will almost definitely cost you more in the long run due to lost search visibility or lost sales.

Especially if you're running on WordPress, which while awesome, still needs some tweaks. If you aren't a server admin black belt, just let someone else manage it like Pagely or WPengine.

Mistake #3. Cluttered, Confusing Design

50 milliseconds.

That's the time it takes for a Lamborghini Aventador to switch gears (fun fact!).

It's also the time it takes for people to form a first impression of your website, leading to them staying or bouncing.

The bulk of that split-second decision is decided on, you guessed it, your design (a whopping 94% of the time).

The key to providing a happy first experience in those first few critical moments is to not make people think. Each landing page should be clean, simple, and clearly organized to help visitors immediately understand where everything else and how to navigate around.

Start with the experts to get those creative juices flowing. Go check out Unbounce's landing page templates to get some basic layout inspirations for how yours should look.

For example, here's a random one that follows this clean and simple approach.

There's no navigation listed to distract users from navigating to additional pages. There's only one primary CTA button that's big and bold. There's also a simple, clean services section to help support whatever the page is about.

Another place to get ideas is Themeforest's landing page section. Look up the best sellers in the last 12 months to see the cream of the crop.

For example, under their RGen landing page product is this event page:

Again you see some good design principles in action. The CTA form has a different colored background to help draw your eye line. There's a big, bold headline section with a countdown timer underneath to create urgency. And there's a logo section at the bottom where you could add credibility-boosting partners, or highlight sponsors of the event.

The important thing to note here is that they've expertly used the colors and layout to give you a visual hierarchy of where your attention should go first: (1) CTA first, (2) then headline with countdown before (3) finally the logos on the bottom.

Designers who excel at print, even big-budget ad campaigns or magazines, are average web designers at best.

The reason being? The web is an interactive medium, where design = function, not art.

Here's another example from the aforementioned United Material Handling, this time with an emphasis on how design tells the user what to do next.

Breadcrumbs help visitors figure out how they got here (in other words, where in the website's organization they're at currently). The product option dropdowns feature different shading that's more subtle than the CTA's. And even though there are two CTA's with the same color, the size, style and placement help you tell which is the primary and which is the secondary.

If website visitors make up their minds about your site within 50 milliseconds of landing on page, they literally don't even have time to think, analyze, or hunt for information. Because if it takes much longer than that, they're gone.

Conclusion

The individual elements on a landing page can influence conversions.

But A/B testing the color of a button is irrelevant if visitors aren't even getting to your page or leaving after just a few fractions of a second.

You need a differentiated offer to compel people to click in the first place. Your page loading times need to be instant so people stick around. And your overall page layout needs to be cleanly organized so that visitors immediately know what they're supposed to do.

Fix those things first, making sure that you're getting visitors coming in droves and sticking around long enough to read what's on each page, before obsessing too much over your headlines, hero images, or CTAs.

About the Author: Brad Smith is a founding partner at Codeless Interactive, a digital agency specializing in creating personalized customer experiences. Brad's blog also features more marketing thoughts, opinions and the occasional insight.