The Social Media Manipulation of the PPC Success Metric

As I am shaking my head in disbelief, I have to ask the question. Why is the online marketing industry becoming so clouded by pushing clicks/traffic as a success metric, while accepting the fact that actual conversions are now categorized as an “elite” metric? Has Social Media created a new landscape for PPC where basic metrics such as clicks are now being labeled as interactions and we are now forced to downplay standard conversions? Should we consider Conversions as a “BONUS” if those clicks led to actual revenue?

Here are some thoughts on how this movement might have evolved (not on it’s own)

The Clouding of Analytics:

When we add all of the online advertising targeting options these days (mobile, display, social media, traditional PPC, etc..) we are forced to rely on accurate Analytics and Attribution at a granular level. We need to connect the dots of all sources and identify (1)what worked, (2)what didn’t worked (3)why didn’t work and (4)what to try next. Furthermore, with all of this data-mining going on, we still need to focus on the biggest metric of all: $$$ Revenue $$$.

Kool-aid Case Studies:

Case Studies have always been the best propaganda tool put out by the advertising platforms in order to stimulate interest and convince advertisers to start spending Ad dollars with them. In some instances, there are obvious benefits of using these platforms (if used correctly). However, one must remember that no one is going to put out a Case Study that shows a “bad experience” and that often times, these documents manipulate the data in their favor. See my previous article “10 mistakes Startup Companies should avoid in PPC Marketing”

Lifetime Value Over-Exaggeration:

There has been this “soft, fuzzy” Aura that all interactions within Social Media platforms will eventually lead to a customer later in the cycle. Unfortunately, this “fuzziness” has made its way into PPC and advertisers must realize (or remember) that PPC is a little more hardcore than that. PPC Marketing is a game of Money not so much long-term investment. Honestly, the client/advertiser has two (2) basic questions.

How much did I Spend? + How much did I Make?

In Conclusion:

All online advertisers need to realize that Social Media (even though cool and popular) is not the same as PPC Marketing. PPC is a different monster and it’s very deceptive for Google to have performance  metrics such as “Interactions” and “Interaction Rates” as options in their reporting columns, when all they are, are traditional clicks. Bottomline: Google is using Social Media interactions as a way to convince advertisers to continue to spend more money with them.

21 Marketing Experts Share the Top Reasons Why You Should Talk to Your Customers

How often do you talk to your customers?

If you’re like most of us, probably not as often as you should.

One of the biggest mistakes I see marketers make is not talking to customers, asking them questions, and listening to what they have to say on a regular basis.

You can learn all sorts of important things by talking to them, for example:

• The pain-points and frustrations they experience on the day-to-day
• The exact language they use to describe those problems
• Questions and objections they have about your product

And once you get their feedback you can use it to market your product better, create useful and relevant content for your audience, and write copy that makes them feel like you’re reading their mind.

But at the end of the day, all these tactics revolve around one thing: giving them a better experience.

When we deliver amazing experiences to our customers, they spend more time with us, buy more from us (hopefully), and tell their friends about us.

Plus, who doesn’t want to make the world a little bit better by delivering great experiences?

Of course, I’m not the only one who thinks you need to be talking to your customers. I reached out to 19 smart and successful marketers and asked them:

“What’s the most important thing marketers can learn from talking to their customers?”

Said differently: “If I never talk to my customers or get their feedback, what am I losing out on?”

Here’s what they had to say:

1. The hesitations and questions customers had before buying or signing up

Peep Laja — Founder of ConversionXL

You get to learn two very important things (among other stuff): the hesitations and questions they had before buying/signing up, and what matters to them about the product.

The first bit helps you understand the friction in the buying process—so you can tweak the website copy and offer accordingly.

The second bit helps you figure out how your customers use the product, and what matters to them when they’re shopping for it.

This again helps you improve the way you sell, and improve the product / offer itself.

2. Where to find and reach your best prospects

Rand Fishkin — Founder of Moz

As a marketer, you need to know where your best customers are—what they read, who they follow, what events they attend, how they consume content, etc.

That’s what I’d urge every inbound marketer to talk to their customers about, so they can effectively reach more people like them.

3. How to improve the onboarding experience or delivery process of your product

Pat Flynn — Founder of Smart Passive Income

Besides the obvious (what they like and dislike about your product), I think one of the most important conversations you can have with a customer is what could have been done to improve the onboarding experience or delivery process of your product.

That ‘first touch’ with your product is incredibly important and that first impression can often determine one’s overall general feeling about a product. This will help with getting reviews and testimonials, retention rate, and obtaining more repeat customers down the road.

4. The exact language your prospects use to describe their problem

Brian Dean — Founder of Backlinko

The #1 thing is the language that they use. Sure, you can learn about your customers’ thoughts, fears, wants and desires by chatting with them over a cup of Starbucks.

But if you don’t know how to speak their language, they’re never going to hand you a single dollar.

For example, I ask all of my new email subscribers, “What’s the #1 thing you’re struggling with?” And to date I’ve received stacks of replies (over 25,000 to be exact).

These replies are solid gold for my business. I used to say thing like “It’s frustrating not to get traffic.” But I noticed a lot of my subscribers referred to their sites as “ghost towns.”

So today I’ll say something like: “I know it’s frustrating to feel like your site is a ghost town.” That copy resonates with them significantly more than text that I pulled out of thin air.

Bottom line: Don’t just study what your customers say, but how they say it. Their words=priceless marketing intel.

5. Why your customers do the things they do

Brian Balfour — VP of Growth at Hubspot, Writer at CoElevate

True growth insights come from blending three things together. The what, the why, and your intuition. It’s impossible to understand those three things, especially the “why,” if you don’t talk to customers.

Why did sign up but not activate? Why did they visit your invite page but not invite a friend? Why did they decide to churn?

Why is one of the most powerful questions in growth, and the only way you answer it is talking to customers.

6. What they’d actually pay for

Neville Medhora — Founder of Kopywriting Kourse

The biggest thing you can learn from talking to your customers is what they’d actually PAY for.

Almost all the time you can tell what people will whip out a wallet for if you keep prodding. Their eyes will light up on certain things, or they’ll just flat out tell you what they need.

What’s the biggest pain the in A$$ for you to do….and would you pay over $100 for it?

7. What the majority your customers actually want

Noah Kagan — Founder of Appsumo and SumoMe

The most important thing they can learn? It’s interesting because many of the times it’s not what people say.

Only 1 out of 10 customers complain or really give a compliment so you have to go out of your way to the 9 people to see what the majority of your customers actually want.

8. Why they came to your website, what’s preventing them from converting, and what will keep them coming back

Dmitry Dragilev — Growth Hacker at Criminally Prolific

Plain and simple if you don’t talk to your customers you’re losing out on:

1. Finding out why your customers came to your website
2. What is preventing them from accomplishing the task you want them accomplish on your website.
3. What can keep them coming back to your website and referring other people to your website

9. What kind of products people want

Nir Eyal — Author of Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products

Getting user feedback is the first step to building products people want.

(Note: In his book, Nir points out that while getting user feedback is the first step, “The fundamentals of consumer psychology can help you build the right products not only by understanding what users tell you they want, but by what they’re unable to articulate.”)

10. What your their real needs actually are

Chris Guillebeau — Founder of The Art of Non-Conformity

Without talking to customers, you can only assume what their real needs are—and you know what happens when you assume.

Talking to customers also opens up a whole new set of possibilities for relationship.

11. Find out their biggest pains and struggles

Joanna Wiebe — Founder of Copyhackers

Struggling moments! Only your customers can tell you the actual parts of their workflow and/or day-to-day lives that your solution can (or does) make better.

Once you talk to them, you quickly find out their biggest pains and struggles, and you can then use that brilliant voice-of-customer data to:

Write copy that sounds like you’re reading your prospects’ minds and
Improve your product or service.

(You can also come up with new product ideas—that’s especially useful if you can move fast on your products, like info marketers can.)

Result? More money.

12. The difference between what you think they want and what they actually want

Paul Graham — Co-founder of Y Combinator

The most important thing you can learn from talking to customers is how what they actually want differs from what you think they want.

(Note: Paul goes into more detail in this essay. He said, “They’ll like you even better when you improve in response to their comments, because customers are used to companies ignoring them. If you’re the rare exception—a company that actually listens—you’ll generate fanatical loyalty. You won’t need to advertise, because your users will do it for you.”)

13. Whether or not you’re building the right solution for them

Alex Turnbull — Founder of Groove

The single most important thing you can learn from talking to your customers—and there’s a ton—is whether or not you’re building the right solution for them.

The biggest mistake we made was not doing enough customer development during the building of our prototype, and we spent 6 months and $50,000 building a product that nobody wanted, a mistake that took us over a year (and yes, a lot of conversations with customers) to recover from.

14. How to improve your operations and reduce churn

Jay Baer — Founder of Convince and Convert

Without customer feedback you are literally flying blind. This is especially true for unhappy customers. 95% of dissatisfied customers never mention it, they just fade away forever. This robs you of the insights you could use to improve your operations and reduce churn.

15. Understand and solve their everyday problems

Laura Roeder — Founder of Edgar

People aren’t interested in all the bells and whistles of what you offer so much as whether or not it solves their everyday problems.

The more you talk to your customers, the better you can understand those problems, so you can improve yourself with a clear goal in mind rather than just blindly tinkering and hoping for the best!

16. Understand the needs of your different segments across the entire customer lifecycle

Laurie Kuhn — Head of Strategic Solutions at UserTesting

Increasingly, marketers are acting as the customer experience evangelists for the brand and product/service. Talking to customers helps marketers validate and/or learn the needs of different segments across the entire customer lifecycle.

From there, marketers can drive change and rally an organization by bringing the customer voice to life, helping to break down internal silos that have historically lead to fragmented customer experiences.

17. Build something your potential customers will truly love

Corbett Barr — Co-founder of Fizzle

Unless you’re a mind reader, the best way to ensure you build something your potential customers will truly love is to talk to them directly.

(Note: Corbett dives deeper into the topic of customer feedback in this article. He said, “On The Fizzle Show, we often recommend talking with customers frequently, through both in-depth one-on-one interviews, responsive and frequent email conversations, and through surveys.

Each approach has different benefits. Interviews are great for really getting to know one customer’s perspective, problems, and how your solution fits in. Surveys are great for finding out how well you’re doing across the board.”)

18. Learn the words they use to describe the success they’re having with your product

Oli Gardner — Co-founder of Unbounce

Marketers and business owners often have an over-glorified version of one’s value proposition in their minds, based on internal knowledge and language.

By talking to your customers, you can learn the words they use to describe the success they are having with your product.

A brilliant exercise that you can do to leverage this is to ask a few of your customers to write your homepage headline for you. Fascinating to see your value proposition *actually* written in the voice of the customer.

19. Discover their joys, challenges, problems, and curiosities

Kevan Lee — Content Crafter at Buffer

Talking to customers helps you see the world through their perspective—their joys, their challenges, their problems and curiosities that you can help solve with your content and products.

20. Knowing exactly what they’re struggling with

Bryan Harris — Founder of Videofruit

Most important thing = Being on the frontline and knowing EXACTLY what they are struggling with.

Using their exact words and questions in your marketing copy and sales pages is one of the smartest things you can do.

Then make sure your product actually solves their problems.

21. Understand who truly considers your product a “must have”

Sean Ellis — Founder of Qualaroo and GrowthHackers

The most important thing startup marketers can learn from talking to their customers is understanding who truly considers the product a “must have” and why it is a “must have.”

With this information you’ll know who to target as future customers and which benefits to highlight.

And if no one considers your product a must have, then you should be focused on changing the product rather than growing.

What do you think?

What do you think? What’s the most important thing marketers can learn from talking to their customers? If we never talk to our customers, what are we losing out on? Please share your thoughts and comments below.

P.S. Huge thanks to all the amazing people who contributed to this article! Please share if you think it was useful!

About the Author: Spencer is a Content Marketer at UserTesting — a platform that gives marketers on-demand access to users in their target audience who deliver audio, video, and written feedback on websites and apps in less than one hour. You can follow him on Twitter at @slanoue.

The Simple A/B Test That Increased Our Product Adoption by 16.5% and Blog Conversion by 9.2%

Imagine you are shopping for an upcoming vacation. You walk into a department store, you have no idea where to go and start looking around for anything you need.

Now imagine a store associate comes up to you right as this moment and asks, “Can I help you find anything?” You tell her you’re just browsing and she mentions, “Well, we just marked down a lot of our most popular sunglasses.” How did they know? You lost your sunglasses two weeks ago and have been meaning to replace them ever since.

That friendly reminder about sunglasses is similar to what an Engagement is, our latest conversion rate optimization tool for websites and apps. Websites and apps don’t have in-person customer service like this, and that’s where a tool like Engage comes into play. Read on and we’ll tell you how we used it at Kissmetrics for a successful product launch and increased conversion on our blog.

For New Product Launches

In June of this year, we launched a new product called Engage, which allows you to set up smart onsite interactions to a segment of your audience with a personalized message–in order to guide them into conversion.

And while very exciting, it was also a bit challenging to introduce a new product that was very different from our core product, Analyze. Even though we had promoted the new product at the time of the launch, there was still a segment of our users who didn’t know what Engage is or why they should use it.

Because the product is so new, we wanted to see if we could increase adoption of Engage by using Engage. Basically it’s an Engagement about Engage–so meta, right?

We set up an Engagement within the app and served it 50% of users who logged into Kissmetrics as an A/B test. It fired immediately upon loading the page.

The Engagement linked to the setup wizard where they can select their design, audience, and message. We served the Engagement for one month, and here’s what happened:

We ran the test with our own A/B Test Report. Here are the results:

The variation with the Engagement received a conversion rate 16.57% higher than the control!

This was one of the most effective and easiest way to drive adoption for the product. The user is already in the app, so it’s easier to guide them to the Engagement setup because we’re not disrupting what they’re doing. Our other option besides an Engagement would be to send an email, but it would have taken much longer to write, design, and send the email than it would be to create an in-app notification.

And this isn’t just for product launches. If you have just written an eBook or want to promote your best content, you can use an Engagement to guide them in the right direction.

For Growing Our Blog Email List

While our blog already has a fairly large email list, we wanted to see what effect launching an Engagement on our blog would have for our conversions.

We set up an Engagement to new visitors who have visited the top 50 high traffic pages on our blog. It shows up when you scroll ¼ the way down the page. We’ve included it on this page – you’ve probably seen it by now.

When you click it, it takes you to the blog newsletter signup landing page.

Not surprisingly, we saw a 9.2% increase in subscribers per day on average in just one week from 6/29/15-7/6/15. We compared this to the daily average during 1/1/15-5/29/15.

If we had used a pop-up instead, the numbers might have looked different. We wanted to start off testing out this bumper because it caught our visitors’ attention in a polite way. We’re not exactly sure yet if our visitors find pop-ups to be annoying or not, so the nudge Engagement was a great first test.

Nudge Your Users Towards Adoption and Conversions With a Friendly Reminder

The truth is, not all of your visitors will get to your CTA and subscribe, even if they love your content. And not all of your customers open and read your emails about your product launches or newly released. The best and easiest way to guide your audience into conversion (and to cut conversion time in half) is to simply remind them what to do and how to do it–just like friendly sales associates in the store.

Want to see more about Engage? Just click the Play button below.

Interested in using Engage on your site? Request a personal demo.

The Power of Persuasion: Utilizing Brain Science to Get Users to Act

Making fact-based, data-driven design decisions (say that five times fast!) is the mantra of Google, and who better to emulate than the Big Kahuna itself, right? That being said, utilizing data for web design isn’t always as easy as it sounds. But did you know there’s a heap of scientific research from the brainiacs at academic powerhouses, such as Stanford, Princeton and Harvard and the like that can help you persuade people to buy your product? I know… it sounds heavy, but let me make it easy. Just read on.

Here you’ll find three ways to design utilizing brain science data that will persuade your users to act. I’ve found word-of-mouth consumer research studies, marketing studies on fluent and disfluent typography, and cost transparency research that can all be applied to your next web design project. My hope is that this will help guide you in the right direction, one smartypants design decision at a time.

The Science & UX Behind Reviews

What does PTSD research, persuasive design and writing online reviews all have in common? Well, not much… except for one little connection that I learned of after talking with Dr. Sarah Moore, a prestigious consumer researcher hailing from the University of Alberta, Canada.

When Moore and her research group looked at past clinical psychology research on how journaling helps alleviate PTSD symptoms, they noticed that journaling helped some sufferers experience amazing, curative results, while others still suffered. Moore explained to me that the difference is people who wrote using what researchers call explaining language, (whereupon they sought to understand and evaluate their traumatic event), recovered better—but when they ruminate and re-lived the experience via journaling, they tended to get worse or stay the same.

How people feel after they write reviews that are positive or negative great affects the way the view the experience and describe it in future word-of-mouth situations.

Using this knowledge to power her own study, Moore looked at how people felt during and after writing positive or negative reviews. She determined that writing positive reviews using explaining language, words like “I feel because ABC,” or “I think this because XYZ,” made the reviewer feel less positive about the experience. Conversely, writing negative reviews made storytellers feel less negative when using the same explaining language.

Moore explained this phenom with her own experience as a child watching “Jurassic Park” with her sister. “We were terrified of that movie,” she said chuckling, “But then someone explained to us that all those ‘bone-crushing’ special effect sounds were actually created by breaking ice cream cones in toilet bowls and we weren’t really scared anymore. It unpacked the fears for us and made us less afraid.”

Her results are interesting, but you may be wondering, what are the implications for UX design? When businesses use reviews to build awareness, or use testimonials to create positive social proof, there may be a better way to design the review experience guided by her research.

Using Moore’s research as a guidepost, it could be suggested that making reviews available only via desktop could be viable, but what about the effects of negative reviewing on the fly? Those folks seem to self-soothe by ranting, so perhaps let them have their say. So maybe it’s about changing the design.

What if your review platform served up only canned questions with a rating scale of 1-10? This might alleviate the positive reviewer’s apathy while still allowing the negative reviewers a space to vent and forgive-and-forget.

Changing the paradigm so that people can easily offer a rating will help you maintain social proof without sacrificing the possible post-review apathy that Moore’s study highlights. After all, you want a positive reviewer to remain positive, so although a testimonial on your site is dandy, it’s not worth as much as a heart-felt referral to one of their colleagues. The more positive reviewers unpack their emotions about the experience and explain it thoroughly, the more they feel less attached to the positive emotions they had, and they may even lose sight of their love for your brand, or products, Moore explained.

Another creative approach is to solicit fact-based customer feedback or testimonials. Storytelling may well be the ultimate weapon, but it works best in certain areas of a strategy. So, let’s not inadvertently shoot ourselves in the foot by asking “why,” “how come,” and the like.

Moore concluded in her final study that using explaining language makes reviewers “less likely to retell their experience in the future,” so with that in mind, use your design and copy wisely to make sure the happy campers and the not-so-happy ones walk away thinking and feeling more positively about your business, regardless of the emotions behind their sentiments.

Typography & Background: dO YoU knOW wHAT i WanT?

What is it about Facebook’s Status Update Form that makes people just spill their guts? I mean, you only have to look, here, or here, or here, for some really juicy stuff.

In 2009, Adam Alter, a marketing-focused researcher, best-selling author and professor at NYU decided to study this phenomenon. What he uncovered was quite interesting: “Cognitive fluency encourages self-disclosure.” To put it in layman’s terms: Using easy-to-read typography and contrasting elements persuades users to freely disclose some really embarrassing tidbits. These UI decisions can be made simply, and potentially have a huge impact.

The simplicity of Facebook’s Status Update Form is, according to research, a winning way to encourage users to freely disclose their deepest, darkest thoughts.

Thanks to Alter’s research findings, we can now see the connection between typography and its effects of readability on user’s behavior.

Alter’s work suggests:

• Simplistic, serif typefaces — which are fluent—encourage people to disclose more information.
• Script-y, fancy typefaces — which are deemed disfluent (hard to read)—encourage people to disclose less personal information.
• Black text on a white background, versus the opposite, has the same effect as fluent typefaces—more disclosure.

The overarching results of these studies “suggested that people are less willing to disclose potentially damaging information about themselves when they experience disfluency,” Alter explained in the study’s introduction. “One likely explanation for this effect,” he went on to note, “is that people tend to experience diminished confidence and greater vigilance when they experience disfluency, which might temper their willingness to disclose self-incriminating attributes.”

The goal then, of all their work combined, was to show that there’s a distinct connection between how you present content and how it engages or disengages users. The implications of this for designers, product managers, and marketers is quite exciting! Let’s say you are soliciting your customers for their personal information—you want their name, address, email address, age, family size, maybe even their banking information. Using these insights to design your form could improve conversion rates.

Alter and his team of researchers found a website that was about to make a simple UI change, which would bolster their research because it was an organic, naturalistic setting for the study. The site was called Grouphug.com and the powers-that-be at Grouphug agreed to allow Alter to study their UI change, which was really quite small. All they were going to do was update their black background color to a white background color. And guess what? Confessors tended to disclose more embarrassing information on the white background than on the black, hard-to-see background.

Or, another use case could be surveying your customers or potential customers. Designing the right survey could be the key to garnering the type of unbridled criticism or praise that your company is seeking. For instance, Typeform uses a minimalist layout and design plus the ol’ black-fluent-font-on-a-white-background formula, too. The ease of which users can see, understand and visualize “the ask,” the more willing they are to give up the goods, so to speak.

Persuade with Pricing Transparency

Harvard Business School (HBS) is ripe with data on consumer research and pricing studies are a hot topic as of late. Bhavya Mohan, a doctoral marketing student, alongside HBS assistant professors, Ryan Buell and Leslie John, researched the phenomenon of pricing transparency in their recent paper, “Lifting the Veil: The Benefits of Cost Transparency.”. The results showed that “when a company selling T-shirts, for example, itemizes what it spends on cotton, cutting, sewing, dyeing, finishing, and transporting each shirt, consumers become more attracted to the brand and more likely to purchase.” In addition, the researchers also noted that whether or not the customer was brand spankin’ new or a longtime brand advocate, using cost transparency surfaced positive buying motivations.

Consumer’s apparently feel so positively about cost transparency because they consider it an “intimate disclosure.” In fact, they discovered that businesses can actually charge quite a lot above the actual cost of production before consumers start getting ticked off.

Dr. Buell interviewed with Working Knowledge, a news organization at HBS dedicated to showcasing their employees’ work and explained this phenom, “We wanted to understand when cost transparency would be harmful,” Buell said. “With a T-shirt that cost $6.50 to produce, it seemed reasonable to us that cost transparency would be helpful [in motivating buyers] if the price of the shirt was $10. But even at $35, we still saw an advantage to revealing the cost of production, which is interesting because the markup was five times the cost.”

What he noted during the research is that the markup could go quite high and consumers still didn’t care, as long as the pricing transparency was there. Surprising, in one of their studies checks-and-balances, they finally informed people in one condition that regardless of the transparency, they were indeed being price gouged. Then, and only then, did the pricing strategy fall apart. Folks needed to be told point-blank that it was a rip-off before they questioned the cost of the goods. Pretty amazing, huh?

To enforce their findings, as we noted, the researchers did look to the “real world” to study retailers that were actually using price transparency as a marketing strategy. Both Everlane and HonestBy augment this strategy. In an interview with Forbes, the CEO of Everlane, Michael Preysman, said of his pricing strategy:

“Before founding Everlane, I worked in venture capital. During my time there, I learned a lot about the astronomical markups in fashion. I really couldn’t understand why a shirt that cost $7 to make was selling at stores for $50 and up. We realized people had no idea of these markups and saw that there was a real need to educate consumers. At that moment, we decided to incorporate pricing and factory transparency with every product we make.”

Bloomberg reported on this pricing phenomenon, noting that, although Everlane sold only T-shirts back in 2011 when it launched, it now sells other types of clothing and boasts sales of about 30K tees, topping off at about $30 apiece. So clearly the transparency strategy isn’t slowing Everlane down.

Other companies are following suit, such as Zady and OfAKind, who show consumers how it was made via the production process to provide transparency in the manner in which it was crafted.

This also helps consumers understand the indirect cost and that cost may be higher because the product wasn’t produced in a “sweatshop” -esque environment.

In this instance, using the power of storytelling to convey the pricing strategy is useful if you have a competitive edge that you would like to remain private, or perhaps is also useful if you have so many manufacturers to account for that creating a transparent price may be too tricky to execute, the study showed. No matter your logic behind your technique, being honest and transparent with consumers seems to always provide big wins, as long as you’re being honest.

Are You Convinced?

Using scientific data and brain research studies to support design decisions isn’t cut-and-dry. But many of these techniques offer high yield for those willing to apply these findings to their business. For example, in one of the experiments on pricing transparency, the researchers noted that there was a 44 percent increase in sales for products with transparent pricing as opposed to not.

Alter’s font research showed up to 20-40 percent increases in disclosure when using content designed fluently.

Lastly, with Moore’s research on word-of-mouth, we can see significant indicators for how and why you encourage or showcase reviews of your products or services. This isn’t brain surgery, it’s brain science. Don’t be afraid to get your neurons a little wet!

About the Author: Lauren Ventura has been researching persuasion, reasoning and its effects on users, customers and everyone else since her graduate school days. Way back then, in her Rhetoric program, she learned the basics—Socrates, Plato and Aristotle—and the not-so-basics—the Toulmin Model. She’s found that there’s not much difference between user experience and those old Greeks—it’s all about convincing the right people with the right strategies in the right place. She currently works at a UX design agency, DigitalTelepathy, as their in-house copywriter. Follow her on Twitter @DoItWriteNow.

10 Ways to Improve Your Marketing by Tapping the Power of the Phone Call

If you’re making decisions about your website and using data to optimize your marketing, you need to think about the visitors who call you and convert over the phone. In an increasingly mobile world, customers are more likely than ever before to be visiting your website on mobile then dialing your business to get more information or make a purchase. Even though digital channels drive engagement online, people still want to talk.

As a marketer, you probably understand that these calls are valuable — inbound calls have high conversion rates and provide a treasure trove of information about your customers. But how do you drive more calls that lead to sales? How are you attributing conversions that happen over the phone?

Here are 10 ways to address this blind spot by tapping into the gold mine of insights from phone conversations:

1. Define Lead Quality

Identify the characteristics of qualified versus unqualified leads to improve marketing and sales performance. For instance, by identifying key phrases like “place an order” or “credit card number” versus “customer support” and “account number.”

2. Optimize Your Campaigns

Track what happens on your calls to understand which marketing programs lead to calls that convert to revenue. Increase spend on those campaigns and minimize spend on campaigns that drive low-converting calls.

3. Finesse Your Messaging

Check which products or promotions callers are mentioning on the phone, and make sure your messaging aligns with your their goals and pain points. For example, if customers keep bringing up a specific product, you know it’s time to highlight it on your website.

4. Monitor the Competitive Landscape

See which competitors are mentioned most often to arm your sales teams with the right messaging. If your customers keep mentioning the same competitor, you may need to find new ways of differentiating yourself.

5. Build Better Buyer Personas

Understand the language your key buyer personas use, what products interest them and which marketing campaigns they prefer. These insights will bring life to your buyer personas so your sales and marketing teams know exactly who they’re talking to.

6. Test Your Sales Scripts

Marketers are always updating their content and conducting A/B tests to figure out what works best. Do the same with your sales scripts: test two of them and see which words and phrases result in more sales, and identify the specific messages that contributes to sales won or lost.

7. Identify Effective Search Terms

How many of your PPC keywords truly resonate with your audience? By tracking keywords that relate to your product or service during customer conversations, you can create PPC campaigns based on proven buyer pain points and eliminate the guessing game.

8. Analyze Legit Leads Only

When analyzing calls, it’s important to know which are legitimate leads and which would have been best left unanswered. For instance, if another company has a similar name but sells an entirely different product, you can scan for those keywords and differentiate between quality prospects and people who dialed the wrong number.

9. Improve the Customer Experience

Understanding the needs and motivations of your callers helps you better understand the best way to set up your voice prompts and routing to provide the best possible caller experience. Understand what happened on the call to automatically trigger a specialized lead nurturing track.

10. Prove Marketing ROI

Calls are marketers’ biggest blind spot when it comes to attribution. Get credit for conversations that happen over the phone in near real time rather than weeks or months down the road. If you know what customers say during an inbound call, you can determine which resulted in a purchase or follow-up action. A big part of this is conversation intelligence, technology that scans inbound customer calls for keywords and phrases so you can spot patterns

Improve Your Marketing By Learning From Actual Conversations

Making data-driven marketing decisions involves connecting the dots between all customer interactions, across both online and offline channels. Rather than guessing what happens during conversations with your customers and making decisions based on incomplete data, you can truly optimize your marketing by capturing insights from inbound phone calls.

About the Author: Kyle Christensen is a SaaS veteran, having spent over 15 years working in enterprise software. Before Invoca, he was a VP of Marketing at Responsys, a leader cloud platform for cross-channel digital marketing, where he launched the company’s mobile product line. He has also served in senior strategic product marketing and management roles at Zuora and at Salesforce.com. He holds an MBA from the Haas School of Business at UC Berkeley and a BS in Engineering from the University of Pennsylvania.

10 Reasons Your Latest CRO Campaign Failed (And What to Do About It)

A news article pops up in your Feedly account proclaiming that conversion rate optimization (CRO) is the “be all, end all” for online business success these days.

Excited, you pop over to Google Analytics’ Content Experiments tool and launch your first A/B test, confident that the changes you’ve made are going to result in major bottom-line gains for your website. You wait…

And you wait…

And you wait some more.

Finally, the test is done, and the results are… inconclusive. You don’t have a statistically significant winner, and you don’t have any appreciable lift to show for your efforts. What gives? Should you give up on CRO altogether?

Of course not. Your failure to drive measurable results could come down to one of the following easily fixable reasons for CRO campaign failure:

Mistake #1 – You Don’t Know What You’re Testing For

I can’t tell you how many times I’ve seen marketers get excited about the potential CRO and testing have to improve a site’s bottom line.

So what do they do?

They go out, find an article titled “The 10 Split Tests You Have to Run (Unless You’re a Total Loser)” and put the first suggestion on the list into practice.

I suppose that’s better than doing absolutely nothing. But it’s not going to generate much in the way of worthwhile data for you.

Suppose you run a small wealth management firm. The lifeblood of your business is the referrals you generate through your website’s lead capture form. Now, what happens if that first split test you decide to try involves adding images of faces to your homepage to reduce bounce rate.

Is reducing your homepage bounce rate a bad thing? No.

But is it doing much to impact your business’s bottom line? The answer, again, is no.

That’s why it’s so important to know what you’re testing for. By taking the time to understand the different types of CRO campaigns and split tests you can run – in addition to matching these strategies to your business model – you’ll increase the likelihood of your future efforts actually moving the needle for your company.

Mistake #2 – You Don’t Have Enough Traffic for Testing

That said, even if your goals and campaign objectives are in alignment, you still might not be ready for testing. If your website traffic is low, generating statistically significant results becomes much more complicated.

To understand why, imagine that you’ve asked ten of your friends to choose between your control page and the Web Page A variation you’ve created. Would you be confident that the results of your poll would hold true in the world at large? Would you be more confident if you had polled ten thousand people to start?

The larger sample size you have, the better you’ll be able to identify trends with confidence – and that’s where more traffic comes in handy.

Of course, all is not lost if your traffic resembles a steady stream more than a raging river. As the image below, published by the VWO blog demonstrates, sites with less traffic can still get conclusive results – if they’re willing to wait longer for their results:

Source

Mistake #3 – You’re Optimizing For Traffic Before Conversions

Now, having said that, you might be thinking that I’d encourage webmasters with low traffic to run out and get more visitors before launching their CRO campaigns. But as you’ll see, there are issues there as well.

Before you start with any true CRO effort, your conversion funnel should be relatively well-established. Think about it… Would you prefer to have a website that converts 10 out of every 100 visitors, or one that converts 10 out of every 10,000 visitors?

In the second example, you’ve got more traffic, but that’s not necessarily a good thing because your conversion rate is so low that those extra visitors aren’t helping you make more money. Fixing your conversion funnel before you throw traffic at your site will ensure you get the maximum value out of the visitors you do acquire.

Mistake #4 – You Set Up Your Tests Incorrectly

In an interview with Content Verve, Craig Sullivan of Optimise or Die shared how an unexpected test results taught him the importance of making sure his tests were set up correctly.

The test – which involved significantly different A and B variations – was showing no real difference in performance between the two creatives. With changes that massive, Sullivan knew that there must be something in the code affecting the tests results. In the end, it turned out that a coding error meant that visitors were being exposed to both variations – the test never remembered which versions they’d seen previously.

In Sullivan’s words:

“When it comes to split testing, the most dangerous mistakes are the ones you don’t realise you’re making.”

Mistake #5 – You Blindly Followed CRO Best Practices

A lot of people think that they can circumvent the split testing process entirely by just applying the CRO wisdom other publishers have discovered from their campaigns.

The problem with this line of thinking is that there’s no “one size fits all” set of recommendations that’s going to apply equally well to all websites. Angus Lynch shows how damaging this failure can be in a blog post for Rooster.

Lynch profiles Compare Courses, an Australian education website, which mistakenly follows the advice to move all of their calls-to-action “above the fold.” Here’s what the original page looked like:

And here’s the variation:

Source for both images

Even with the addition of testimonials and social proof, the test page saw a 53.87% decrease in “Send Enquiry” conversions.

If that doesn’t make clear how important it is to base your tests off your own performance goals and data, I don’t know what else will!

Mistake #6 – You’re Focused on The Wrong Metrics

I hinted at this earlier with my example of the wealth management firm, but the idea of tracking the right metrics deserves special mention here.

Ideally, if you’re running split tests, you’re doing so because you want to achieve something. You aren’t just testing for the fun of it – so what kinds of results do you want to see at the end of your campaign?

Keep in mind also that “conversions” doesn’t just mean sales. Our sample wealth management firm was tracking lead generation form completions, but your campaign might be based around:

• Social shares
• Email newsletter subscriptions
• Video views
• PDF downloads
• Contact form completions
• …Or any number of other target actions

There’s no “right” type of conversion to track. What’s important is that you actually make an effort to track metrics, and that the metrics you choose to track are those that matter most to your business’s operations.

Mistake #7 – You Stop Your Tests Too Soon

Peep Laja, writing for ConversionXL, demonstrates why sample size is so important:

The results above come from a split test performed by one of Laja’s clients, just days after the test’s launch. With just over 100 visitors per variation, it would seem that the winner was clear.

But despite the temptation to call test early, Laja persisted. Here’s what happened after each variation received more than 600 visitors:

Source for both images

In this instance, calling the test after 200 visitors would have resulted in an incorrect conclusion being drawn, potentially costing the client money.

For best results, Laja recommends waiting for roughly 100 conversions per variation (if not 200-400) and for the test to proclaim a winner with at least 95% confidence.

Mistake #8 – You Don’t Account for False Positives

Now, just to make things more complicated, consider that, even if you have enough conversions to declare a winner in your split test, you could be facing false positives if you’ve included too many variations in your test.

According to Isaac Rothstein of Infinite Conversions:

“A false positive is when a test result indicates that a condition is true when it is not, usually due to an assumption that has been made from the results. False positives typically occur when a high number of variations are tested.”

Imagine that you’re testing eight different versions of a single web page (Google’s a great example of this, having once tested 41 different shades of blue to see which option customers prefer). At the end of this exercise, can you really be sure that one of them is a conclusive winner? What if none of your variations are actually the right choice?

In all cases, watch out for assumptions about the data you’ve gathered. Test for different variations, but also test to be sure the conclusions you’ve drawn are based on fact, not opinion.

Mistake #9 – You’re Testing Small Tweaks Instead of Major Changes

Search Google for “split test ideas,” and you’ll come across endless lists recommending such simple tweaks as “change your button color” or “use action words in your headlines.”

And those things are great, don’t get me wrong.

But if your site needs major changes, these kinds of small, limited tests aren’t going to get you there.

Marketer extraordinaire Neil Patel is one advocate for making big changes before minor swaps, saying:

“The biggest conversion boosts are going to come from drastic changes. So if you really want to move your conversion rates, don’t focus on small changes. Instead, focus on drastic changes as they are the ones that boost your revenue.”

On his QuickSprout blog, Patel shares an example of how he put this principle into practice on his Crazy Egg website, where changing the homepage into a long sales letter led to huge wins. Only after this major change was complete did Patel go back and test individual calls-to-action, button colors and more.

Mistake #10 – Your Tests Aren’t Timed to Your Sales Cycles

In many retail environments, both online and offline, sales cycles are short, lasting as little as a few hours or a few days between the recognition of a need and the purchase decision.

But what if your company sells bigger-ticket items that come with longer sales funnels? What if your buyers are only making purchase decisions once every few years, making them less likely to take any conversion actions (including form completions, file downloads and more) in the interim?

Ultimately, the length of time your split tests run should be a function of your traffic and your conversion rates. However, if, after you’ve completed your test, you notice that the duration of your test is less than the length of your average sales cycle, consider that the data you’ve generated may not give you a complete pictures of the way your particular buyers interact with your website.

At the end of the day, CRO is a powerful tool for improving your website’s results, but it comes with a pretty significant learning curve. If your campaign results have been lackluster so far, one of the ten reasons described above could be to blame.

Don’t give up. Instead, look for ways to improve your testing and campaign protocols. With time and continual effort, split testing and other CRO techniques can be used to increase conversions and move the needle for your company.

Have you made any other CRO mistakes that deserve a spot on this list? If so, leave a comment below describing your experiences.

About the Author: Alex Bashinsky is the co-founder of Picreel, an online marketing software program that converts bounce traffic into revenue. He’s passionate about helping businesses improve their conversion rates and, in his down time, enjoys reading and playing the guitar. Get in touch with Alex at @abashinsky or check out Picreel.com.

Interactive Content is Where the Action Is Now

Internet. Interactive. The two were destined to collide.

The term “internet” came to be because it connected networks. The prefix “Inter” means “between.” It follows that “interactive” means “action between.” Or something like that.

The point is we were destined to interact online. We live for interaction and the Internet lives to give it to us.

Content marketers are getting “inter” it

The real measure of any form of marketing is action. In older and traditional channels, the actions we measured tended to include phone calls, faxes, coupon redemptions, sales meetings, and maybe sales. Remember “tip in” cards in trade magazines?

Today, with content marketing ruling the online space, marketers often measure more actions, and certainly, less meaningful ones: shares, clicks, even views. This is not to say content marketers don’t measure the more substantial actions. The good ones do.

The good ones also realize engagement is all-important. Building brand affinity leads to building the relationship that leads to building trust that leads to building sales that leads to building business. Got all that?

Enter interactive content. On the battlefield that is content marketing, reading, watching, listening to, or downloading something may be the equivalent to firing a shot, but getting a prospect emotionally involved via interaction is a hit.

“Engaging a target audience” is an important excerpt from Content Marketing Institute’s definition of content marketing. According to nearly every marketing research study, it’s also consistently proven to be amongst our toughest challenges.

Marketers succeed when their audience not only consumes content, but also enjoys and acts upon it. Understanding this principle, more and more content marketers are stepping-up their static content to create content customers can interact with.

“By its very nature, interactive content engages participants in an activity: answering questions, making choices, exploring scenarios. It’s a great way to capture attention right from the start. Individuals have to think and respond; they can’t just snooze through it.”

~ Scott Brinker, ion interactive, author of ChiefMartec.com, in a guest post on Copyblogger.

The forces behind interactive content

Your classic content marketer is adept at publishing a blog and other forms of one-way media. Creating interactive content is more work. It tends to demand more resources.

Is it worth it?

Most content marketers that have hopped aboard the interactive train would answer yes. They may say they’ve realized greater results. They may also say it’s imperative. Here’s why:

• Noise—There’s simply too much content. And the only people that really care about content is content marketers. The customers don’t want content. They want answers. Or they want to have fun. Or both.
• The world’s gone mobile—Mobile users have come to expect interactivity. Apps are more engaging than web pages.
• Human nature—We simply want to interact. We learn best by doing. I once asked my kids, “What are your favorite lessons in school?” They said the ones where we do stuff and make things. Interactive content is the filed trip of content marketing.

A conversion study by Demand Metric indicates when examining “very effective” content, interactive blows away passive content for educating the buyer.

Fun and Games is Serious Business

Playbuzz is an Israeli-based company focused on enabling publishers to create and distribute a variety of playful interactive content types. Forbes described the company’s offering “The social content sensation of the year.”

Much like the ubiquitous BuzzFeed, the company’s magnetic force is fun, interactive activities, which clearly appeals to the connected generation. In a very short time, Playbuzz has garnered enormous attention and become a top 500 destination site in the U.S.

The company is making a business “play” by enabling marketers, for free, to create branded “storytelling formats for the digital age” and embed it anywhere.

Playbuzz is among the companies who are amending the “content is king” mantra to “interactive content is king,” touting its many engagement advantages.

Interactive content = persona optimization

Pardon my jargon. The point is interactive content provides marketers rich data they can use to learn more about their prospects and use the data to market more effectively. Scott Brinker offered the following examples:

• People rank themselves via assessments
• Quizzes indicate what participants do and don’t know
• Prospects identify specific parameters when using a calculator product configurator

In “Interactive Content & The Buyer’s Journey,” Oracle Marketing Cloud and SnapApp map interactive content’s place in three stages of the buyer’s journey.

• Awareness stage—A prospect in research mode is likely to engage in polls, self-assessments, and knowledge tests.
• Evaluation stage—When evaluating solutions a buyer will take to benchmark assessments, interactive white papers, and persona assessments.
• Decision stage—At the critical buying stage, ROI calculators, galleries, product pickers and surveys will help guide decision-making.

To illustrate these ideas, the eBook authors offered the example of a person planning a vacation.

• Awareness stage—What type of vacation do I want?
• Evaluation stage—Where should I go?
• Decision stage—Who should I book with?

What types of content are interactive?

Let’s look at some of the interactive content types, some of which are well known and blazing hot and a few others with a potentially strong upside.

Quizzes

Quizzes are amazingly popular and ultra-magnetic. While many focus on delivering a fun distraction, businesses often take them seriously aiming to use the format for educational purposes. Quiz results can be useful for recommending the most relevant subsequent content.

Unitrends, makers of a data backup appliances, drove traffic from Facebook to its website with a personality quiz to determine each participant’s backup and disaster recovery superhero persona. (See complete details on SnapApp)

Quiz: Can You Name These Southern City Skylines?

Ecommerce startup Country Outfitter has multiplied traffic to its site and engagement thanks to publishing fun quizzes with Playbuzz on their lifestyle website. Their quizzes have appeared on more than 100 different domains.

Assessments

Like quizzes, assessments also are often little pieces of brain candy such as personality tests. However, in a business context assessments can be meaningful marketing tools often used to help people identify a need, compare their company to benchmarks, or some other type of self-diagnosis.

Polls and surveys

Polls and surveys can take all different forms and fulfill a wide variety of needs for both the creator and user. The subject of the poll or survey gives users a glimpse into your areas of expertise.

Calculators

Calculators are about money, which for some reason appears to interest most people. Given the right strategy and creative execution, a calculator can say (or infer) something meaningful about your company’s mission.

Contests

Contests may be older than time, but continue to evolve online and across the social sphere. The potential to get creative with contests is infinite. Cool contests have proven to lure customers and inspire engagement. Generally, they require some form of application, so marketers can collect valuable customer data. And though it may be obvious, contests can generate authentic and engaging user-generated content.

Galleries

Visual marketing couldn’t be hotter, so some companies are using galleries to deliver stopping power and interaction. In addition to showcasing products, they can present portfolios, ideas, customer examples, event highlights, or anything you can “picture.”

Brackets

SnapApp claims “They [brackets] are a great way to settle ‘Best Of’ or ‘Worst Of’ debates, no matter what industry or field you are in.” They’re also a way to earn longer periods of engagement, drive repeat visitors and generate new content.

Heavy Construction Systems Specialists (HCSS) conducted a tournament in which customers submitted their most interesting projects. 117 projects were submitted and 292,000 votes increased website traffic by 800%.

Interactive white papers or eBooks

Interactive software company ion interactive suggests turning your white paper or eBook into an interactive user experience allowing readers to navigate as they wish.

Infographics

Infographics can be made interactive with embedded questions, flip tiles, flexible user paths, and more.

ion interactive showcases its own software for creating interactive infographics. A menu bar invites readers to navigate the content marketing stats as they wish.

What type of content marketer are you?

After researching interactive content and learning more about the magnetic power of quizzes and such, I couldn’t resist writing the subhead above. It begs to be a quiz. And as a content marketing vying for attention and engagement amongst the deafening noise, you’ll want to consider the question.

Interactive content offers an opportunity to differentiate your brand and engage your audience.

Special nod to SnapApp for “What is Interactive Content & Why It Works” and for providing examples of their customers’ interactive content.

About the Author: Barry Feldman operates Feldman Creative and provides clients content marketing strategies that rock and creative that rolls. Barry has recently been named a Top 40 Digital Strategist by Online Marketing Institute and one of 25 Social Media Marketing Experts You Need to Know by LinkedIn. Visit Feldman Creative and his blog, The Point.