5 Ways to Become a Better Headline Writer

Article headlines make the Internet go round.

Ask any marketer, any writer, any reader, anyone. They’ll tell you: Article headlines are super important.

How important, really, are headlines? Experience, data, and history all point to the fact that headlines are the single most important component of an article, bar none. You’ve heard the statistics repeated ad nauseum — 80% read the headline, 20% read the article, ten seconds to gain someone’s attention, and all the other scary and data-driven statistics.

Source

Recognize this? I thought so.

You know all this. More relevant to you is your own experience with headlines. Why are you even reading this paragraph right now, at this point in the space/time continuum of your mortal existence?

You were beckoned by the headline, formula-driven and hackneyed as it was, right?

Even though we’re Buzzfed up, Upworthyized, Viralnovaed, and Clickholed out of our minds, we can’t shake off this all-important reality: Headlines are freaking important.

In fact, the word “important” isn’t strong enough.

I’ve summed up the X ways that are guaranteed to turn you into a better headline writer. No matter who you are, what language you speak, or your final grade in composition class, you can develop white-hot skills in headline creation. Starting now.

Once you reach this level of awesome, you’ll reap the rewards in traffic, audience, readership, engagement, conversions, and, hey, even feeling really good about yourself.

1. Know Your Audience

I hate to lead off with a boring one, but it’s critical. You have to know your audience.

Let me give you an example to explain what I mean.

Look at this headline: “Neuropeptide Y—a novel brain peptide with structural similarities to peptide YY and pancreatic polypeptide.”

Is that not magnetic? Did it not capture your attention in two seconds? Will you not read the entirety of the article with rapt attention and owl-like eyes?

You might find this headline uncontrollably entrancing if you are a peptide researcher, are a neurobiologist, are K. Tatemoto, or have a side hustle researching pancreatic peptides.

This headline might just be the most electrifying headline in the whole world. Why? Because it could be exactly what some people are interested in. A good headline is relevant to the audience.

Get it? Okay, now, here’s another example: “He Thought He Just Found A Regular Fish, But When He Looked Closer, He Couldn’t Believe It.”

Is that appealing? Absolutely. It has a wider appeal than polypeptides, which is cool, because ViralNova isn’t concerned about targeting a narrow slice of the human population. They are concerned with getting as many eyeballs on their content as possible. Who wouldn’t want to find out about a guy who couldn’t believe it when he thought he just found a regular fish?

What is the difference between the peptide headline and the mind-blowing fish headline?

Audience.

It all comes down to audience. The Nature Science Journal has identified the audience that they want to attract (scientists), and ViralNova has identified the audience that they want to attract (warm bodies with a proclivity for clicking).

The right headline is only the right headline for the right audience. (Yes, I used the word “right” three times in that sentence, and I’m not apologizing.)

So, what’s the takeaway for you who desire to be a better headline writer?

Know your audience.

Once you figure it out who your audience is, really and deeply, and discover what they want, you can create the best headline for them. A good headline is only as good as it is relevant to your audience.

2. Practice

You only get better at something by doing it. A lot.

Improvement gurus call it deliberate practice or DP. Why is Kobe Bryant so good at basketball? How did Misty Copeland become a star ballerina?

Talent is overrated. Practice is everything. It’s no different with writing headlines. You’ve got to do it again, and again, and again, and again to the power of 100.

Sims Wyeth, an Inc. contributor explains, “to get better at almost anything” you have to practice. That practice, deliberate practice to be precise, “consists of endless repetition and excruciating boredom.”

Did you get that? Endless repetition. Excruciating boredom. Getting better at headline writing is an attractive destination, but the path to get there is agonizing. You’re not going to love it. You’re going to loathe it.

Coschedule recommends writing at least 25 headlines per topic/article in order to come up with the best one. After you come up with 25, you eliminate over half, narrow it down to the best five, and poll your friends on the best of the survivors.

25 headlines is a lot of headlines. But it’s not just the number that is important. It’s the practice that goes into writing headline after headline after headline.

Practicing writing headlines produces perfect headlines.

3. Follow Patterns

I’m skeptical of formula-driven headlines. How many “things you didn’t know,” and “7 ways” (oops), and “you’re doing it wrong” articles can a single human being take in during a single lifetime?

But here’s the thing. Headline formulas and patterns become formulas and patterns because of their proven past success. Even though you’ve already read eighteen “how-to” articles and nine list posts today, you’ll probably give in and read another six or so before 5pm.

For example, Brian Clark of Copyblogger wrote an article a while back called “10 Sure-Fire Headline Formulas That Work.” His headline? It worked.

And his formulas? Heck, they work, too!

One of the reasons why they work is because they are psychologically appealing (more on that later) and audience specific.

Let me show you one of Clark’s formulas as an example.

Formula: Here is a Method That is Helping [blank] to [blank]

The title here is ready to be tailored to a specific audience. Here are Clark’s three examples with my description of the intended audience.

Here is a Method That is Helping Homeowners Save Hundreds on Insurance
Audience: Homeowners who want to save money

Here is a Method That is Helping Children Learn to Read Sooner
Audience: Parents and child educators

Here is a Method That is Helping Bloggers Write Better Post Titles
Audience: You

The formula-driven technique is only as effective as the titles are relevant to the audience. Go back to point number one and read it again if you’re not entirely clear on this concept.

If all else fails and you simply cannot come up with a good headline, use a formula. They’re like training wheels. The more you write, the better you’ll get. And then you can branch out on your own.

4. Split Test

Split testing is the key to unlocking the potential of your website. I test everything. Images, kerning, headlines, post length, social media frequency, load time, navigation changes — everything.

Why? Because split testing produces improvements.

If you aren’t split testing your headlines, you’re missing out on a major source of knowledge. The better you know how your headlines perform, the greater ability you possess to produce killer headlines.

Let’s say you produce a headline for an article, publish the article, and it gets shared and liked. Good. But what if you had written a different headline? Would it have gotten more shares and more likes? You won’t know unless you test.

In a study released by Unbounce, one website tested three headlines, leading them to discover the winning headline with a 41% boost in conversions.

Another single headline change produced a 68% higher CTR.

Sources for both images

Testing is a scientifically sound and rigorous method of determining the actual best headlines. By running these tests and uncovering the comparative success of your headlines, you can’t help but get better.

A less scientific way to test your headlines is with simple polls. When you come up with a series of headlines, send them to your colleagues and let them vote on which one they think is best. Although it’s not quite as sophisticated as running a split test, you’ll still be able to learn what best resonates with people.

By polling and testing, you overcome one of the greatest roadblocks to writing effective headlines: Your own flawed assumptions. Assumptions are like a rut. You get stuck in it, don’t know you’re in it, and your conversions and clickthroughs are dying as a result.

Kick yourself out of the rut with a little good old-fashioned testing, and you’ll race lightyears ahead in your headline creation skill.

5. Study Human Psychology

This final point sounds a bit weird, but it’s incredibly effective.

Human psychology is the study of the mind — how it works, how it is motivated, how it processes information, etc. By unlocking a few common thinking methods, cognitive biases, and tendencies, you will be able to learn powerful ways of writing headlines that people deeply crave on an elemental level.

For example, are you aware of the self-reference effect? According to the self-reference effect, the human mind interprets events and experiences in a different way if the information is related somehow to themselves. Memory works better when the information being remembered is related to the self.

When this mental effect is applied to headline creation, it lets us know that we need to relate the headlines to the audience. More specifically, the self-reference effect informs us that using the word “you” or equivalents in a headline may improve the memorability and attractiveness of a particular headline.

There’s no reason why issues like the self-reference effect should be locked away in volumes of peer-reviewed cognitive neuroscience medical journals. You should be using such knowledge to enhance your own article titles.

Conclusion

Becoming a better headline writer is the good life. When you can unleash great headlines with skill and ease, everything in online marketing gets better. Conversions. Engagement. Clickthroughs. Shares. Traffic.

It’s all there.

“Getting better,” however, isn’t an accident. It requires intentional and sometimes mind-numbing effort. Remember the whole “endless repetition and excruciating boredom” bit? Yeah, it’s going to feel like that sometimes.

Don’t stop. Success is in the offing. Let’s go make headlines that turn heads.

How have you improved your ability to write great headlines?

About the Author: Neil Patel is a lifelong evangelist of Kissmetrics and blogs at Quick Sprout.

Is Your Winning Variation Actually Leading to More Cancellations? How to Use Data to Find Out

Imagine this: you just found a huge win on an A/B test. Your variation doubled signups over the original. So you launch your variant to 100% of visitors. Pop the cork! Here come the signups.

Fast forward six months, and you have a surge in cancellations. Your customer support team can’t figure it out, and there have been no major changes in your product. You are left puzzled and frustrated.

Then you realize something. For the past six months, people have been signing up through the variant. Could this be the cause of the cancellations? If you use Kissmetrics, you can get the answer.

Identifying Whether a Variant Led to More Cancellations

Using Kissmetrics, you can find out if an A/B test that initially delivered more signups ultimately led to more cancellations. It doesn’t matter if the test was six months ago. You can still go back retroactively and see how the test performed and whether the variation brought more cancellations. Here’s how we do it.

The Funnel Report

A funnel report is used to track how many people move from one step of your website to the next. Marketers traditionally use a funnel report to see where visitors are dropping off in their path to purchase.

But we can use the Kissmetrics Funnel Report for other purposes, too. One of them is to see which test variation led to more cancellations. To do this, we’ll create a funnel for just two steps – signed up and cancellation. When you use Kissmetrics, you may name your events a little differently, but if you’re a SaaS company, you’ll need to know when people sign up and when they cancel.

Here’s how our funnel looks:

During our selected time range, we had 11,794 signups. Of those 11,794, nearly 9,300 canceled. To see how each variant performed, we’ll have to segment our traffic. “Segment” is a fancy, analytical way of saying “group.” So if you came to our site and saw the variant, you’d be put in the variant group/segment.

Here’s the funnel, segmented by the A/B test:

We can ignore “None.” These are people who were not in the A/B Test. They didn’t see the variant or the original.

Underneath “None” are our A/B test pages. We have our variant and the original. The variant page generated 125 signups, while the original delivered 111 signups. Also, the variant delivered a much smaller percentage of cancellations.

Before we can say the variant is a winner, we’ll need to make sure this data is statistically significant. We can use the A/B test significance calculator to get this data. Here’s how it looks:

On the right, we see that this data is statistically significant. We can move forward with full confidence knowing that the variant page is the real winner. Customers who saw this page will be less likely to cancel later on down the road.

A Word of Caution

While this data is valuable, it’s important to be careful with the conclusions you reach.

While the original/variant page did lead to more cancellations and it is statistically significant, can we be 100% no-doubt-about-it absolutely sure that this is the reason more people canceled? No, we cannot. Correlation is not causation. It could just be happenstance that those shown the original/variant page canceled at a higher rate than those shown the variant/original – and the original/variant page should not be blamed.

This also doesn’t mean the data is worthless. Perhaps the original/variant page made a promise that the product couldn’t live up to. Or maybe the original/variant page attracted the wrong audience. To find this out, we can collect data from our canceled customers and see if we find trends. If not, it may just be coincidence.

We can find the canceled customers in Kissmetrics. Here’s how:

We’ll click to view the people in the “Subscription canceled” step and view the people in the variant segment. From there, we’ll get our list of people, and we can contact them to learn why they canceled.

Track Tests with the A/B Test Report

Kissmetrics has a report that tracks your A/B tests. It’s called the A/B Test Report, and it has some unique features.

This report does not create tests for you. You can still use Optimizely, VWO, Unbounce, etc. for that. It does track the test, report the results, and import the data into your Kissmetrics account. There are a few additional benefits of using this report:

• The statistical significance calculator is built in. You’ll see the amount of data that came in, and the Report will draw a conclusion for you (e.g., variant beat original). Its calculator will ensure the results are statistically significant, which can reduce the odds of false positives.
• You can see how an A/B Test impacts any part of your funnel. Want to see how a homepage headline test impacts signups? No problem, just set “signups” as your conversion event. You aren’t limited to testing only to the next conversion step.

Here’s how the report looks:

You’ll get multiple metrics for each variant, and even be able to see every person in each variant.

Click here to watch a video demo of the A/B Test Report.

Get the Whole Picture with Kissmetrics

It would be impossible to get this kind of data if you weren’t using a tool like Kissmetrics.

A benefit to using a people-tracking platform like Kissmetrics is that each visitor to your site is recorded as what they are – a person, not a session. This makes your data accurate.

If you’re running an A/B test, each person gets tagged with the pages they saw, and you’ll be able to go back and see which pages/steps they went through, as we just did. With Kissmetrics, you can see the entire customer journey, from when the prospect first visited (and which variant they saw) to the customer’s most recent action. As long as you have the tracking in place, you can get the important data you need.

To see how Kissmetrics can benefit your marketing, signup for a personal demo today. To get right into it, you can signup for a 14-day Kissmetrics trial.

About the Author: Zach Bulygo (Twitter) is a Content Writer for Kissmetrics.

4 Simple Reasons Your Blog Still Isn’t Getting Traffic

Here’s the number one complaint after starting a new blog: Why aren’t we getting traffic?!

I’ve heard this complaint once. I’ve heard it a million times. Eager blog writers get burned out, discouraged, and quit. The decline is simple: They start a blog. The traffic does not materialize. The blog fizzles and dies.

The why-am-I-not-getting traffic question basically sums up the entire industry of SEO, so that doesn’t provide much of a focus for a helpful article. Instead, I want to focus on one angle.

This is my angle: Why isn’t my new blog getting any traffic?

New blogs are the ones at the greatest risk for vanishing in a puff. Without a sturdy understanding of the blog basics, a business’s content marketing may get derailed.

Let’s set a few things straight for the record

In the interest of setting expectations, let’s deal with a few common misconceptions. Having a long-lasting blog doesn’t just require just the teeth-gritting endurance of writing something every day. To have an enduring blog, you need to understand a few principles.

Just because you have a blog doesn’t automatically mean you’re going to get traffic.

Blog does not equal traffic.

Here’s what a lot of people think will happen after they launch a blog:

Source

Unfortunately, that’s not always the case.

In reality, there may be no increase in traffic or a gradual increase in traffic.

You don’t simply need traffic. You need the right kind of traffic.

And what if you do get traffic? Life is good, right?

Yeah, sort of. But what’s the point of having a blog? Is it really just traffic?

I’d argue that the answer is no. Most of the time, a business starts a blog in order to serve a higher purpose — marketing, brand visibility, more clients, higher conversions, etc. A blog does not exist for the sole purpose of publishing more content. The web doesn’t need more content.

A blog exists for conversions, revenue, information, etc. Traffic is simply an indication that your blog may be achieving its real goals.

Gaining traffic is not a good thing unless your blog is also achieving its other purposes. What if you’re getting traffic from all the wrong sources? That traffic is not going to convert, and your blog becomes essentially useless.

Did you know? The Kissmetrics Funnel Report allows you to segment your traffic so you can see where your highest converting traffic is coming from. For more info, check out our blog post or sign up for Kissmetrics today!

Instead of frenetically grasping for traffic, you need to be pursuing the right kind of traffic. What is “the right kind of traffic”? Look for it in point two below.

Maybe a blog isn’t the best strategy for you.

I’m writing this as a die-hard content marketer. I get content marketing. I do content marketing. Heck, I helped write the most extensive and detailed guide of advanced content marketing techniques that exists today.

In spite of this, I’m willing to admit that content marketing may not be the solution to your woes.

Every business is different. Most of the time, content marketing works. That’s why more than 90% of B2Bs and B2Cs use content marketing as part of their overall strategy.

The lingering 10% who don’t utilize content marketing may be doing so intentionally and strategically. There are plenty of other ways to do marketing, and even to do so effectively. Some of the businesses that are doing content marketing might be wasting their time and resources.

I didn’t write this article to help you diagnose your business’s particular situation. I’m simply raising the question. Is content marketing really the best strategy for you?

You have to decide.

Now, let’s dive into a few of the specifics. Remember, we’re asking the question, why isn’t my new blog getting any traffic?

Here are the answers.

1. You Aren’t Sharing it Socially

Issue: Social Signals and Visibility

We’re in the era of the social web.

The social web refers to the fact that the Internet is a place of social interaction and collaboration. As proof, consider this: 74% of all American adults use a social networking site.

Source

When people “go online,” they are likely to do several things — research, email, etc. — but increasingly all these activities are integrated socially.

For example, someone doesn’t simply read an article. They share it, comment on it, tweet it, etc.

It naturally follows that an online strategy devoid of social sharing is missing out on the vast and viral potential of the social web.

Solution: Promote your content

Writing content is only half of content marketing.

The other half is spreading that content. Don’t expect the traffic to come flooding in after you click “publish.” Publish your content, and then promote it.

Here are some tips:

• Add sharing buttons to your blog article.
• Share content at the peak times for your audience’s social activity.
• Share your article on Twitter with images.
• Share content multiple times on every social site.
• Keep up with your content as it circulates on social, and be sure to participate in the conversation.
• Encourage blog authors, contributors, and team members to use their existing social networks to share the article.

2. You Aren’t Focusing on Any One Keyword or Subject

Issue: Keyword Optimization

Much of SEO is fairly common knowledge by this point. Most people are at least aware of keywords, and title tags, and have at least a vague idea of how it all works together.

But in spite of the widespread knowledge, it can be hard to strategically apply it to one’s own blog.

Keyword optimization is one such shortcoming.

Often, a blog writer starts by assembling an editorial calendar, which is basically a list of blog articles with dates. She may select these article titles based on the fact that they are interesting or perceived to be relevant to the target audience.

Solution: Research and target long tail keywords

This approach described above is misguided. Content marketing should not start with articles. It should start with research.

• Understand your marketing persona.
• Understand what they are searching for.
• Understand the intent behind their queries.
• Understand the keywords that would gain traffic from these queries.

At this point, you can come up with a list of longtail keywords.

From the list of keywords, you can develop a list of articles. Using the list of articles, you can create your editorial calendar.

Each article should use the selected longtail keyword in the 1) page title, 2) article title, and 3) one or two times in the article itself. Be sure not to stuff the article with the selected keyword.

3. It’s Boring as Heck

Issue: User Experience

I’m convinced that user experience is the sine qua non of Internet marketing. It trumps all other marketing techniques, and stands as the supreme methodology for gaining and retaining customers.

Obviously, user experience is an extremely broad subject. It effectively encompasses nearly every other aspect of digital marketing — from conversion optimization to search engine optimization.

Content marketing falls within the broad realm of user experience. When a user goes to visit your blog and read your content, what is he experiencing? Does it satisfy his needs? Does it answer his questions? Is it easy to read? Does it match his expectations?

One of the reasons why user experience in content marketing is such an issue is because Google says it is.

According to the document, the Quality Rating Guide, Google rates content based on expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness. Human raters review selected content on the blog in order to refine and streamline the algorithmic formulae behind content quality grading.

Low quality content gets downgraded. High quality content gets upgraded.

Only high quality content will get the ranking improvement that will produce higher traffic levels.

Solution: Improve quality

This is why the quality of your content matters. I’ll point out a few of the issues that are considered low quality — i.e., boring.

• It’s all about you. Content marketing should not be exclusively about your business, your products, your awesome sauce, and your employees. It should be about subjects that are relevant in the industry. For a great example of B2B content marketing for a company not tooting it’s own horn, check out TopTal’s blog.
• No images. If your blog doesn’t have some sort of visual engagement like pictures, graphs, charts, or videos, it’s boring. Sorry.
• Not relevant. If you are producing articles that aren’t relevant to your target audience, you lose. No one cares about content that doesn’t answer a question, solve a problem, or meet a need. For example, on the Kissmetrics blog we aren’t going to write any articles about parenting. Would it get traffic? Probably, but it doesn’t target our audience. And it would alienate our readers.

What happens when you commit these content marketing mistakes?

Your bounce rate rises, your dwell time drops, your clickthrough rate sinks. Google measures these metrics and reduces your site’s rank accordingly.

Read up on what Google views as quality content. It’ll only take 2 minutes to read, and you’ll have a good set of guidelines to follow. You can also read up on what Bing views as quality content.

The better your quality, the better your traffic.

4. Your Blog Design is Horrible

Issue: User Experience

Another user experience issue is blog design. Why does it matter? The way your blog looks, feels, and functions affects how users engage with your blog.

If the design is awful, then your users will not engage with the blog.

Solution

Based on my research and analysis, here are the ingredients of a great blog design:

• Your website should be responsive. If your website is not mobile optimized, it won’t be featured in mobile search results. Use this tool to see if Google views you as mobile-friendly.
• Feature blog snippets on your main blog page. Snippets are brief excerpts of a main article that people can skim through at a glance.
• Make your main content prominent. Place it on the left side, where users are most likely to look first.
• Use scrolling social buttons to encourage social sharing at any point in the article.
• Use an 11px font or larger for the body text.
• Use a 17-25px headline font.
• Use a sans serif font.
• Use a light colored background with dark colored text.
• Use headers and short paragraphs to break up the content.
• Use plenty of images.
• Use headers, bullet points, short paragraphs, and easy vocabulary.
• Include the name and possibly a brief bio of the author.
• Provide a CTA for users to subscribe to the blog.

Improving your blog’s design can dramatically improve your blog’s quality, readability, and traffic.

Conclusion

If you want your blog to not die, you may need to make some improvements. The reasons your blog may not be getting any traffic are pretty simple. Thankfully, the solutions are relatively simple, too.

Keep in mind that traffic may be slow in coming. Content marketing isn’t a sprint; it’s a marathon. If traffic doesn’t spike overnight, don’t be dismayed.

Be patient. Give it a few months; things will improve. If not, read this article again.

What’s your experience with blog traffic, and the reasons for growth or decline?

About the Author: Neil Patel is a lifelong evangelist of Kissmetrics and blogs at Quick Sprout.

Stories are Told, Not Programmed: 3 Keys to Marketing Your SaaS Product to Human Beings

SaaS companies are quite literally changing the face of business. Seemingly every day new tech-driven solutions are challenging the status quo of the ways business communicate and share information.

While new developments in technology are obviously crucial to progress in any industry, what some SaaS companies fail to do is remember the single most crucial shared characteristic of their audience: they’re human.

Not capitalizing on the imagination of your audience is like trying to fix your printer by having a conversation with it. It simply isn’t what works. If we don’t try to talk to computers with human language, why do we try and do the opposite?

No matter what the industry, the way to create messages that resonate with people is through stories. Here’s three simple ways you can take your SaaS marketing strategies and bring your story to life:

1. Simplify

Keeping things simple may sound simple, but too often SaaS companies get in their own way and try to throw too much at their audience when marketing their product. If nothing else, simplicity is everything. As humans, we crave it. And perhaps the only thing smaller than our tolerance for complexity is our fleeting attention spans. The most effective language around SaaS products are the ones that waste no time in explaining exactly how it benefits a user.

Take 1Password for example: it’s a computer software that protects a variety of important log-ins and passwords from hackers or thieves. While 1Password is composed of an intricate security vault system, they simply speak to what the consumer truly cares about: safety.

1Password is advertised as simple, convenient security, which loosely translated, means peace of mind.

Dropbox’s branding similarly embodies this tactic – their leading message on their homepage reads: Good things happen when your stuff lives here. Much like 1Password, they focus on a simplified benefit of the product.

It’s conversational. The incredible complexity and technology behind Dropbox has been boiled down to the most basic and straightforward conclusions that could possibly be drawn, thus appealing on an emotional level to the humans who use it.

2. Metaphors + Parallels

This would be a technique perhaps best used during investor presentation or initial product demo to simply explain what it is your product or service is all about. Even when speaking to a tech-savvy audience (which isn’t always the case), we encourage our clients to draw parallels and metaphors to help explain their product’s problem, solution, technology etc. By bringing complex information back into ideas and concepts that anyone can understand, you can eliminate gaping question marks very quickly.

For example, say you’re pitching your SaaS platform that helps unify and monetize data sets and algorithms in the climate research space. Rather than diving head first into the back end framework and development strategy, consider stepping back and explaining the fundamental problem using a concept anyone can understand.

Lead with a story about farmland. It may sound farfetched, but it works. Say things like:

Imagine you wake up tomorrow and decide to become a farmer. You buy 200 acres of land to grow a combination of corn, beans. wheat, etc. You plant thousands and thousands of seeds in fertile ground and wait for mother nature to play it’s part. Only it never does. Your seeds have been planted by they lay dormant without a little help from mother nature.

Now imagine the farmer on the plot of next to you has the exact opposite problem. His land has been flooded with rain and the sun is shining, only there’s just one problem. He has no seeds. Both farms have incredible potential to grow useful crops, yet they both don’t have access to the things they need on their own.

Well that’s exactly the problem that exists in the world of climate science analytics today. Vital data and the analytical models they depend on have been and it’s why we created ForeCastle (fictional – not a bad name though, right??)

Paint a picture in your audience’s mind and not only will you win their attention immediately, but you’ll dispel any confusion about exactly what it is your product is all about.

3. Tell People What You Believe

Everything we do as people – from the toothpaste we buy to the car we drive – everything is governed by what we believe. Beliefs polarize, galvanize and inspire us into action. The best marketers are the ones who take advantage of this reality and build bold communication strategies that tell the world what they stand for.

Take one of the hottest communication platform SaaS companies in Slack for example: Their tag simply reads “Be less busy”. With three simple words, Slack is telling you that they understand the crazy workload you have to endure and that they believe something can be done about it. They tell you that they believe a fundamental flaw exists in the way businesses are run. While claiming that businesses should address their communication issues is certainly nothing new, claiming that they have a platform that could “end email” separates Slack from both competitors and potential customers who believe that email has become a sacred cow of the business world.

For Saas companies that similarly serve as networks, such as LinkedIn, this step is exceptionally important because those beliefs are what attract users. As a business oriented social networking site, LinkedIn believes that individuals should be in control of their professional identity and should have the opportunity to engage with likeminded, professional individuals. Therefore, those users who believe that a professional networking site is beneficial will use it, thus perpetuating the belief and creating a community of humans who feel the same way.

By using this belief as the foundation for the way they talk about their services, they’ve allowed us to connect with them in a way that’s as aspirational as it is human.

It’s easy to get caught up in the tech-first approach to marketing SaaS companies when that technology lives so close to the core of what your company is. But humans don’t respond to bone dry data like we do to stories and ideas. It may seem counterintuitive but the reality is – storytelling is one of the simplest and scientifically proven methods for connecting with people. With just a few strategies – you can capitalize on the most fundamental characteristic of your audience no matter who they are – they’re good old fashioned blood pumping human beings

About the Author: Maxx Parcell is the lead Content Writer and Developer at SquarePlanet in Chicago, IL. His job is to help our clients tell their story more effectively. Including anything from sales pitches to full brand message strategy, we work to help people improve the way they communicate and connect with people. We do things a bit differently. We believe in being pirates. For more information about exactly what that means and to read our own blog, please visit SquarePlanet.com.

How to Optimize Your Site for Every Stage of the Buying Cycle

If you’ve been in marketing for a while, you’ll eventually discover a harsh reality.

You can’t force people to buy from you.

No matter how sexy your site or how awesome your conversion methods, you can’t automatically turn an unwilling customer into an eager spender.

Why not? It’s explained by something called the customer buying cycle. To understand the buying cycle to its fullest, you must also understand your customers. You can find out why they didn’t buy, what might make them buy, and why they might come back to buy in the future.

My goal in this article is to show you how you can optimize your site for every stage of the customer buying cycle. Even though you can’t make a customer buy, you can at least know how your site can meet the specific need that the customer has at any given point in the buying cycle.

What is the Buying Cycle?

The buying cycle is the process that every customer goes through when they purchase an item.

It looks like this:

It’s described as a cycle, because it tends to be repetitive. You can also look at it as a linear process.

There are hundreds of versions of the cycle. The specific cycle depends in large part on the specific product that you are selling.

The broad truths to keep in mind regarding the buying cycle are as follows:

• Every customer goes through some process of consideration, realization, and conversion.
• The customer can only be in one spot of the cycle at a time, for any one need.
• The success level that you achieve when marketing to that customer depends on where he or she is in the buying cycle.

And that’s where we come back to the harsh truth: About only 3% of the people who visit your site are going to buy your product. In fact, you’re generally doing well if you can get more than 3%.

What’s happening with the other 97%?

They’re leaving, choosing not to buy, going away.

Anyone who didn’t convert is at some other phase in the buying cycle. They might not ever convert. They might convert someday.

You need a marketing strategy that is actively targeting the vast percentage of your website visitors. I’m not talking about individual conversion methods here. I’m talking about broad content tactics that move any visitor closer to a conversion — to the next best phase in the buying cycle.

Your goal is, of course, more conversions. But to think of it more broadly, your goal is simply to move the customer to the next phase in the buying cycle.

Let’s talk about how to do that.

Phase 1: Conception: The Customer Realizes a Need

Customer Question: What is my need?

In this phase, the customer is trying to figure out what exactly they need. They have no focused questions yet, only a vague awareness that they have a need.

Your Marketing Move: Describe the problem

Before opening up your marketing methods, make sure you understand all you can about your customers’ needs. Some businesses may perform a “customer needs analysis” to try to hone in on the problem.

Your content marketing is one of the best places to focus your strategy. At this phase in the buying cycle, customers want information (i.e., “informational query”).

To gain traffic from these informational queries, construct a content marketing approach that focuses on problems and solutions. Some of the best blogs in the business are all about problems and solutions that the target audience needs.

Buffer, for example, publishes outstanding long form content focused on the types of solutions that their prospective customers need.

For example, Buffer recently published an article on Pinterest marketing mistakes. They know that their target audience is trying to figure out how to optimize their Pinterest social strategy. Since Buffer’s product is all about social sharing, they’ve got the kind of content that is going to attract the problem-centric queries that their audience is using.

The article starts with a problem, focuses on a solution, and leaves the customer with actionable steps to improve their Pinterest strategy.

Plus, as always, they include a CTA at the end of their blog post:

Most content marketers are challenged by trying to figure out what kind of content will engage their prospects.

If you filter your content marketing approach through the matrix of “needs and problems,” then you’ll have plenty of fodder for content.

Prospective customers will find you, engage with your content, and move on to phase 2.

Phase 2: Comparison: The Customer Explores Options for Meeting this Need

Customer Question: What is the best way to meet this need?

At this point, you’re not the only player in the game. The customer is scoping out alternative prospects. Other businesses know about content marketing, and how best to attract the solution-seeking customer.

The queries are still informational and solution-focused. Now that they know their problem, they are moving towards a solution.

Your Marketing Move: Options for Meeting the Need

Content is still going to play the lead role in your marketing approach for this phase of the buying cycle.

The same content that attract the prospects’ information queries in the first phase is going to be the same content that drives them to the consideration phase. Not only should your articles be problem-centric, but they should be solution-focused.

Make sure you’re trying to solve the issue beneath the issue. For example, your customer may be buying a bed, but what they want is a good night’s sleep.

Market to the core need of the customer, not just the specific widget they’re in the market for.

Phase 3: Consideration: The customer narrows down options, and makes a judgment about the best one

Customer Question: Which solution is the best for me?

Each of the three phases of the customer buying cycle so far have been fluid. A customer may move rapidly through each one, and your marketing move is pretty much the same — create solution-focused content.

Here is where the consideration process gets deeper. You’re dealing now with an informed customer. She knows the marketing, understands price points, is aware of the brands who can solve the problem, and realizes what she needs to do next.

You can finally forget about solutions. The customer is way beyond that phase.

Now, your customer wants to hear about features.

Your Marketing Move: Explain the features and benefits of your product

This is, by far, the biggest phase in the buying cycle. At this point, the customer is actively engaged on your site, interacting with your content, downloading your PDFs, and viewing your pricing. At this point, you can pull out all the optimization stops, unleash all the methods, and do everything in your power to get the customer to convert.

The questions that the customer is asking at this point have deepened and become more specific. She has answered the big what question, now she needs to answer other questions:

• How does this feature integrate with…?
• What are the terms on the guarantee?
• How easy is it for me to get in touch with support?
• Can I return the item?
• Is the team friendly, professional, competent?
• What are the shipping costs?
• What are the delivery times?
• How much storage space do I get?
• What if I don’t like it?
• Is there a warranty?

Your website’s evergreen and product pages are now the focus content. You’ve managed to earn organic traffic from the customer’s queries. Now, you need to earn their respect through comprehensive, detailed, powerful, and compelling descriptions, content, and information that is specific to your product.

I’m not merely referring to the way in which you create compelling and SEO-friendly ecommerce pages. I’m referring broadly to the way that you shape content on your site to explain everything possible about your content.

• Create content about each feature.
• Create content about your support.
• Create content about your warranty.
• Create content about your technical specifications.
• Create content about all the details of the product.

The more content, the better. The customer is actively seeking more information, more distinguishing features, more characteristics, and more aspects of the product.

If you have more information than the competition, then you possess a remarkable advantage. You will be able to nudge the customer out of phase 3, and into phase 4 — conversion.

Phase 4: Conversion: The customer buys the chosen option

Customer Question: How do I buy this product?

The customer is ready. Your problem-centric, solution-focused, feature-driven content has pushed them to this culminating point.

They are ready to buy.

Your Marketing Move: Engage in conversion optimization

This is the spear tip of conversion optimization — getting customers to convert on a purchase. Before, you may have optimized your blog’s CTAs, adjusted headlines, and performed the kind of tweaking necessary to boost conversion rates.

Now, you move it up to the final phase — optimizing buy CTAs, optimizing the pricing page, and streamlining the shopping cart. You don’t want anything to get in the way of a killer close

This is that point in the article in which I talk about the staggering cost of shopping cart abandonment. Just because a customer drops your widget into his cart doesn’t mean he’s going to buy it. In fact, nearly 7 out of every 10 customers who puts a product in their shopping cart are going to abandon said shopping cart. You’re going to feel frustrated.

As with any problem, there are solutions. Focus on regaining abandoned customers, but remember that they may still be flitting in and out of various stages in the buying cycle, so don’t completely lose your mind if you have high abandonment rates.

Phase 5: Continuation: The customer returns to this option when the need arises again

Customer Question: Should I buy this product again?

Marketing isn’t over when the customer buys. In fact, a new and heightened phase of marketing has just begun.

You have a customer, but you need to keep it that way.

Your Marketing Move: Kickass service and ongoing support

Conversion optimization is important. Killer content is important. Great products are important.

And it all stays that way for your existing customers, too. Notice, however, that the shift turns from content and conversion techniques to the customer service. If there is any aspect of your business that involves customer service, make improving it a priority.

Check out this chart that shows what the most important factors were in creating a satisfying customer experience.

Conclusion

The reality of marketing is that you can’t control every aspect of a customer’s experience. You’re limited.

The more that you’re aware of the customer buying cycle and how it affects your marketing approach, the better you’ll become at dominating every phase of the purchase.

Smart marketers know what they can do, and they do it to the max. Admit what you’re helpless to control, but take mastery over the things that you can.

How has your understanding of the customer buying cycle affected your marketing?

About the Author: Neil Patel is a lifelong evangelist of Kissmetrics and blogs at Quick Sprout.

How PagerDuty Used Analytics to Improve Their Trial Experience

Editor’s Note: This blog post was originally featured on Segment’s blog.

The Business Challenge

Even though we heard from customers that our service was easy to get started with, we knew there was room for improvement.

Occasionally users would finish their trials without seeing all of our features or miss an alert because they hadn’t set up the right notification rules. We wanted to help all of our customers reach success, and we also knew that better surfacing PagerDuty’s value would boost our trial-to-paid conversion rate. But we would first need to understand exactly what users were doing in our product, and where they were getting blocked.

We needed to establish a baseline understanding before making changes to onboarding:

1. How were our users moving throughout the app?
2. Did their paths match our expectations?
3. Did they match the onboarding flow we were trying to push them through?

When we weren’t sure how to answer these questions, we looked into analytics tools and narrowed it down to Kissmetrics and Mixpanel. We wanted to see both of these platforms in action, so we ran them against our live data and tried to use them to answer the questions above.

We were excited that to find a tool that would let us make a single tracking call and view the data, simultaneously, in multiple downstream tools. Segment made it easy to test both platforms at the same time, and with more departments looking at additional analytics tools, the prospect of easily adding future integrations also excited us.

How Kissmetrics Helped

Using Segment, we tracked every page in our web app and as many events as we could think of (excluding a few super-high-volume events such as incident triggering). Our UX, Product, and Product Marketing teams dove into both Kissmetrics and Mixpanel to evaluate how well each could answer our usage questions.

We found that we really liked the funnel handling in Kissmetrics, as well as the multiple methods for side-loading and backloading out-of-band data like sales touches.

After combing through the data, our UX team had a lot of ideas to develop a new onboarding flow. We mocked up several approaches, vetted them against both customers and people inside the company, and tried out the one that we thought would best communicate the value of PagerDuty and help customers get set up quickly.

Here’s a look of our onboarding flow before and after.

Old:

New:

Results

Using Kissmetrics, it was every easy to measure how the new design was working. Our core metrics was a cohorted analysis of “Trial Engagement,” an internal calculation for when an account hits a particular state that shows they’re doing well in their trial. We also used the funnel report to look at fall-off in each stage of the wizard.

We saw a 25% boost in the “engagement” metrics, measured using Kissmetrics’ weekly cohort reports— a huge success. Kissmetrics showed us that with the new wizard, new users were actively using the product earlier in their trial, and using more of the features in the product.

Plus, far fewer new users were ending up in “fail states,” such as being on-call without notification rules set up. What’s great about Kissmetrics is it tells us who is doing something, not just how many. So if we needed to reach out to active users who were ending up in these fail states, Kissmetrics would make this possible.

We learned a lot with our first foray into user analytics. If we were to do this all over again, we would have tracked far fewer events, only collect events that signaled a very important user behavior that contributed to our metrics for this project. When you track too many events, it gets noisy, and blocks you from accessing the full power of the different reports in Kissmetrics.

Going forward, we’re going to try running A/B tests trial experiences to get cleaner data about how our onboarding work is improving our trial users’ experience. With Kissmetrics in our arsenal, we’ll make better decisions on creating the ideal trial experience.

About the Author: David Shackelford is a product manager at PagerDuty, an operations performance platform that helps companies get powerful visibility, super reliable alerts, and faster incident resolution times.